Before I’m accused of bait and switch by all the moms who have little boys crawling through their hair, I’ll answer the question of what we’re doing with Judah.  I’m really hesitant to do this for two reasons:

1)  We don’t exactly know what we’re doing.  We’re stepping out totally in faith that the Lord will meet us.

2)  The breakthrough for others will be the same as it is for us:  a breakthrough of the heart that leads to obedience to the Lord’s ultra-specific instructions for our family.  I am slow to share because I know that if anyone reads with a thought of forms or methodology (”How do we do this…how are you doing it?”), our story will just discourage and weigh them down, because of all the ways it won’t work for their family.  But God has perfect leadership for each family!  It may involve radical change, or it may be small to the eye but have incredible eternal impact.  He will show you, if in your hearts you breakthrough into purpose out of passivity.

We took Judah out of kindergarten at a wonderful Christian school.  Which reminds me, I need to take flowers to his outstanding teacher.  We really love her, and she loves Judah and Ariel.

We enrolled him in “Daddy school.”  So (this will bless those of you who know how trepidatious I have been about homeschooling) I am not fundamentally bearing the weight of his schooling.  OJ is.

So far, this has not involved any academics (insert sharp gasp of astonishment and fear here).

It has involved:

-first thing morning workout.  Immediate result:  instead of having to drag JD crying out of bed for school, he drags OJ out of bed.  ”It’s time for our workout!”

-tools and actual household needs and projects.  Repainted kitchen table, fixed chair, repaired baby gate, etc.  Immediate result:  a VERY happy mommy.  Oh, and Judah’s mind focused instead of frenetic.  He returns to being frenetic after a lot of video games or media.  He was always frenetic after school.

-joining Dad in his work, whatever it may be, whenever possible.  Judah does the garbage trip with Dad, the yard work, cleaning out the car.  He’s at a car dealership with him this morning.  Immediate result:  Many, but one is Judah is learning to approach things thinking “I can,” rather than the constant “I caaaaaaaaannnnnn’t, Mama, you do it for me…”  He’s becoming a help, rather than a drain.  We continue to be shocked at how much he can actually do, and how fast.  It’s like he was spending his energy before in a complicated ruse to convince us that he was inept.  He didn’t mean to, but that’s how a spirit of passivity works, y’all!  I’ll come back to that later in the blog series.

-acting as if Jesus, the Devil, and we as sons and daughters of God are REAL.  One thing that concerned us is the potential toxicity to authentic faith that can be posed by a Christian school, where our kids were pledging to flags with Bibles on them and scary things like that, rather than experiencing the power of the gospel.  That is not meant to criticize or condemn.  I don’t mind my kids going on a trip to a nursing home to cheer up the residents, but don’t tell them it a sharing of the GOSPEL, the most powerful message on earth.  It wasn’t; it was cute kids singing songs.  That mixture is poisonous, and it breeds a particular sort of unbelief.  Jesus is not the tooth fairy.

-discipline blitz.  This may be the biggest deal of all.  The little issues that were tolerable when he was out of the home every day and the rest of his day was kind of “filler” no longer could be back-burner.  They are forefront, and his innate battle with Dad for who’s in charge has come into sharp focus.  I have fought to maintain authority over my little leader of leaders successfully for years.  But in the last six months I felt a shift.  I was no longer very effective.  My “disciplines” were a joke to his tough little behind.  (You know how they tell us we “throw like a girl”?  Turns out I “spank like a girl,” too.  Judah was not so foolish as to tell me these things out right, but one time he actually laughed, then tried to cover it up.)   My voice no longer carried the weight it used to.  My control was rising up (totally ineffective attempts at authority that were out of desperation and anger), producing many moments in which I didn’t like him or me.

OJ is taking Prov. 29:17 very seriously:  ”Correct your son, and he will give you rest;

Yes, he will give delight to your soul. ”

Contrasted with Prov. 17: 21 and 25, which tells us that the father of a fool has no joy, that his son will be his grief and his ruin. OJ is being bold to let go of so much of what is considered “normal,” not for the sake of being weird, but because he knows we must be urgent about what the Lord calls urgent.  That is my husband:  least passive man I know.  I could write poetry about him for the rest of the blog, but that would just make him mad.  :)

Last thing:  on that shift in which my voice ceased to be enough to really move my son.  I don’t know for sure if that was an age and development deal, or just God’s timing for our family, but I know it’s real.  I remember a prayer time for a family with a ton of boys, older than ours.  The Lord showed a picture of the Mom with a steel-toed boot on.  He was speaking to her husband, saying that his passivity in disciplining and leading his sons was costing his beautiful wife her femininity.  You could see it on her lovely face:  the exhaustion, the anger, the hopelessness.  It is real.  It does take Dad.

Ok, back to the series.

No, actually, one more last thing.  I admit, I was pretty anxious deep down about this whole thing, especially Judah’s academics.  Then I received this message from a beloved someone who will remain nameless, and I was DEEPLY encouraged.

“We had this super, super awesome christian couple over tonight for coffee after the kids were in bed. They are in their 50’s and raised (and are still raising) 8 kids. Their youngest is now 12. Anyway, they had 4 of each gender. Several really awesome things were said during the conversation, but I will be brief with a point I hope will encourage you. I was peppering Sherri with all kinds of questions about how she runs her home and her life. She gave me some great insights.

“Sherri has homeschooled her kids with a hodgepodge of different curriculums, etc.  She was telling me that one of her sons who is now going to MEDICAL SCHOOL didn’t read until he was 9. No joke. She did the bare minimum with him when he was younger…a little phonics, a little math, etc., but then the rest of the time just let him loose in their huge backyard/woods area. He was so obsessed with moving and exploring and finding things. Then, when he got older her was SUPER engrossed in reading/etc., and she knew all along he was fine and obviously now he is doing really well and will hopefully be a doctor if med school goes well. Her other son helped her husband build their house and put in roofing when he was 6. He’s now 24 and can fix anything on a car you ask him to. He was not interested in school until about age 12, so she just did the bare minimum with him, too. Crazy.”

I am becoming convinced that we only have our own passivity to fear, and whatever we do for our sons (and daughter) on purpose (the Lord’s purpose) will bear fruit.  We are so IN PROCESS OVER HERE, THOUGH, SO WATCH FOR MANY CHANGES, MISTAKES, AND LESSONS LEARNED!!!

Bless you!

-

When OJ and I were dating, I moved to Tacoma, WA, to be near him.  I couldn’t find a job I liked, so I started a mobile paint touch-up business with the help of some old acquaintances of my dad’s.  They had just discovered their potential as a franchise, and were offering to get me off the ground for $2800.  I had no concept how incredible this opportunity was, but at least I had (barely) enough sense to take it.  Little did we know this small step would support our family for more than ten years, and generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

When OJ got out of the army shortly after our marriage, we again faced the job question.  “For lack of anything better,” he took over my business.  I was pregnant with our first child.  We had no idea, in the context of history, what it meant that a couple of twenty-somethings could just DO something like that, generate a comfortable lifestyle, buy their own home, acquire way too many vehicles, employ others, and own their own company free from the interference of government or corporate control…we were CLUELESS, despite our expensive college degrees.

We were SO clueless, that we actually despised our little business.  It sort of embarrassed us, and we perceived it always as a sort of “stop-gap” before we got to something REAL.  Why?  Because we were highly-educated Americans, a sort of “cream of the American crop,” if you will.  I had been a philosophy major and OJ had a computer science degree he had used as a Captain in the US Army.  Running around in paint-spotted clothes, working with used car managers who may or may not have gotten their GED’s, operating out of our car (NOW I realize:  ohmygoodness, the LOW overhead!), smelling fumes, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, WORKING WITH YOUR HANDS were not VALUES to us.  They were anti-values.  They were offensive and embarrassing.  I currently want to knock my head against the wall for how clueless we were.

It’s not like we were alone in our cluelessness.  We were part of a system.  I think of all the times that OJ tried to employ a young man who desperately needed a job, and he wouldn’t think of taking it, looking instead for that corporate opportunity.  Or he headed back to community college in search of whoknowswhat?  Or when we were trying to sell it and offered it below market value to friends who had families to support, only to have them be totally blind to the opportunity.  Again, tempted to knock my head against the wall.

But God was graciously opening our eyes to the values and paradigms that had completely deceived us, puffing us up with knowledge but leaving us, when it came to real life, somewhat stupid and useless.  How the system would take our gifting and capacity and ensure that we adhered to values which would squander them.  A value system that elevates knowledge and the mind, unaccountable to questions of usefulness or production; a value system run on passivity.

Note:  I am using story after story to highlight these issues in the natural world, particularly with men and boys.  I am always going to point to how these things are just pictures of what happens in the spiritual (REAL AND ETERNAL) world.

A while ago, we were seeking the Lord for how He would lead the men OJ was discipling, and He gave us a picture that turned out to be a template for what He would do with the men for the following year (or maybe years?).  In the picture the men were seated in a classroom.  At the front of the classroom was an instructor with a huge chalkboard on which he was writing notes on every aspect of gardening and farming.  Out the window, the men could see their plots of land:  fallow, scattered with rocks and stumps, and untended.  Every day, they would come take notes about farming and learn from books about farming, with no attention being given to their land.  The instructor couldn’t see the land outside.  He was a fountain of information, and was satisfied that he, at least, was active.  He was blind to the men’s turmoil and futility.

The picture was from El Roi, the God who Sees.  The God who sees His men and understands why they are in turmoil.  The God who would restore, would Father, would train His men to farm unto beautiful, abundant fruit, but who first had to address what was completely normal to them.  Religious systems in which information and revelation is confused for fruit, and the God’s purpose (the men themselves) is lost in the pleasant certainty of religious instruction.

Remember yesterday’s story of the Mr. Fix-it’s who never taught their sons to use a hammer?  “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on,” says Prov. 16:26.  For most of human history, the need to survive and acquire food would ensure that a) a man could not be totally passive, as the proverb implies, and b) he’d have to pass on at least those productive skills to his sons, or he’d have to feed them and theirs, too.  History has never seen the widespread wealth and indolence of this American moment in history, where when we talk about struggling to put food on the table, we mean because the flat-screen takes up so much room.  Our generation (about 30) perhaps was one of the first in which fathers could have genuinely felt that their skills were not useful to their sons.  Hopeful that they would be bankers and brokers instead of farmers and builders, they could have even meant well handing their sons’ development over to the education system.

This is a profound picture of the state of the church.  At some point, being a farmer or a soldier (analogies of the Christian life Paul uses in his epistles) became passé, and being a speaker to conferences, a missionary to the foreign, a bishop over the dioceses, a writer of books, a worship leader and numerous other positions that were more easily acquired and seemed more significant, became the thing.  A church historian could tell us when the strange idea called seminary was formed, after the fashion of the University.  Or when the word church ceased to refer to the the elect, and came to mean a ritual weekly gathering organized around a lecture.  There were better opportunities for those so inclined than the doggone dirty work of discipleship, of fathering, in which one man trains another in how to (in keeping with the analogy) farm unto beautiful fruit.  Why not let somebody else train the churches sons?  Oh, how very easy it is to teach God’s people what, once you’ve released the burden of whether or not they know HOW!!!

Well, now I’ve gone and done it.  :)  Next:  Malachi 4:6

One night sitting around the living room with our church, discussing these things, some inane plumbing problem manifested itself (a pipe that floods with water and sounds something like Niagara Falls in the sleeping baby’s room every ten minutes or so) and was noted by the group with annoyance.  Nobody knew how to fix it.  Then one of the men busted out, “We don’t even know how fix our own stupid houses, that’s so stinking LAME!!!”  Or something to that effect.

Another man began to share, “My dad can do ANYTHING.  He’s known for it–the whole town, all our relatives know that he can fix anything or build anything.  And I don’t know how to do ANYTHING.  He didn’t teach me ANYTHING.”  Several others affirmed similar stories around the room, a painful revelation.  It’s no common moment, to have men alive in discussion, being that honest about their hearts.  I was riveted.  Why would fathers who were exceptionally capable ignore passing their skills on to their sons?   In that moment of verbalization, it was apparent that it was such an ugly thing, like a kind of hatred.

If it had been a group of women, we would have FOR SURE needed to do the tissue box run.  But these were men.  They were trying to figure out what it meant through the numbness.  Not because they wanted to, but because they have sons now, and it’s urgent.  What did it mean that their fathers left their training to their sons’ schools and mothers, assuming whatever needed to take shape just…would?  How low, how very low, how very useless and insignificant a boy must be, if it’s not even worth his fathers time to explain what it is that he’s doing.  That is one message that went deep into these men’s hearts, a hateful, deceiving message that left them aimless and angry.

But even though the fathers mentioned above were skilled, their skills lacked purpose. What was their skill for? They might as well let somebody else train their sons.  There was no eternal why to their activity, so why take the time to teach their sons how?  THIS is the essence of passivity.  It’s abandonment and abdication in slow motion, over time and even decades, because the main thing, the raison d’etre, the purpose for that day, week, or decade was forgotten.  In real time, it just feels like boredom or distraction or busyness, but it laughs in the end, having stolen the best of life.  A man who worked for decades to support the family he forgot to father.

Hammers and nails are not the point.  The point is that Christian men are suffering from a lack of purpose and a lack of fathering:  the why and the how.  When you finally get down to brass tacks, many who are zealous are confused… “I know what NOT to do, but how DO I set my wife free and how DO I disciple my kids and how DO I lead other men and what DO I DO with my life that will matter in eternity?”

Christ-life is not a list of “do nots.”  It’s actually being taken over from the inside out by a God-sized To-Do list, found in Luke 4 and Isaiah 61.  Remember how Jesus said, “Zeal for His house consumes me,” and “My food is to do the will of my Father,” and then passed it on to us, saying that we would do greater works than the ones He had done?  Have you noticed that this Christ LIFE does not flow from a great list of what you DON’T do?  Just like no father ever taught his son to build a treehouse by telling him NOT to use the hammer on his own hands, NOT to throw the wood into the neighbor’s yard, or NOT to use the saw on the tree?  All those things may need to be said at some point if his son is young enough, but no treehouse would result from that instruction.  Nor would he stand there and describe the virtues of treehouses, how glorious they are or how ultimately desirable.  No one who had ever actually SEEN a treehouse would think the father was going to produce one that way.  Are you following me here?

But wait a minute…if the FATHER is chasing out demons, bringing light to the darkness, rescuing captives, opening the eyes of the blind, and planting transformed sinners as oaks of righteousness, if that’s our Father’s work, and the whole town and all the relatives know it, but He never taught us how to do it…If mainly what we can do is TALK about our Father’s work and hope it takes place at this Sunday’s service somehow, then how low, how very low and insignificant we must be to Him, if He’s not considered us fit to be trained in the family business?

And there, my friends, is the LIE that you will find at the root of passivity.

When you think “passivity,” don’t picture a couch potato.  That’s the most obvious form of it, but many extremely busy people are totally passive.  I know, because I was one of them.

Passivity is at it’s core a scheme to divorce people from purpose.  Yesterday I used the word “production;” the Bible uses the word “fruit.”  What we’re talking about is the effect that should follow a cause, the reward for the labor, the point to the speech, the closing of the sale.  Passivity is the vehicle that drives on the highway of our unbelief that God would be so good as to direct us to be fruitful, productive, purposeful, EFFECTIVE.  Or our unbelief that God would be so good as to create US in such a way that we could possibly be these things.  Passivity will let you be busy morning til night, as long as your activity is futile (especially in eternity).  If you suddenly get struck with a migraine and can’t read the rest of the blog, please meditate on that statement for a long time.  PASSIVITY WILL LET YOU DO ALL SORTS OF ACTIVITY, AS LONG AS IT IS FUTILE.

God didn’t create us this way, blind and numb to our purpose.  Remember that first command I mentioned in Gen. 1:28?  The command to be fruitful and multiply, subdue and take dominion?  Remember those millions of megawatts running through our sons?  Those megawatts are directly correlated to what they were created for, their purpose…they’re born wanting to subdue, take dominion, be fruitful (effective)…

Do you hear this all day, too, from your little guys?  ”MAMA!!!!!!!!!  LOOK AT THIS!!!!!!!!!!  I HAVE MY CAPE ON AND I CAN JUMP OFF YOUR BED ALL THE WAY TO CHAIR AND KNOCK THAT PILE OF BOOKS ON THE FLOOR!!!!!!!!!  MAMA, LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…”  Do you hear what he’s really saying about himself in his world?  Yes, my son!  You CAN!  You DO have power!  You ARE effective!  You DO have a place in the universe!  You CAN do what you set out to do!  You ARE a force!  These boys, they’re innately delighted by their own sense of purpose, and it fills them with joy.  They are not born passive.

But we’ve discovered that for most men (and women, but I’ll get to that later), this very sense of effectiveness, ability, strategy, and force is carefully trained OUT of them, rather than carefully developed as EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE CREATED FOR.  So by the time they’re men, they are marked by lack of confidence or misplaced confidence, anxiety, indecision, hesitation, confusion, and at an utter loss as to what they could do to be significant in their universe.  THIS IS PARTICULARLY TRUE OF CHRISTIAN, OR CHURCHED, MEN.  Where does that flying superhero go?

Picture this:  a man sits in his seat at church every Sunday for his whole life.  He files in, he hears sermons, he listens to announcements that give him some more attendance options, he sits with a few hundred other listeners and watches ONE person be active in front of a microphone.  Over the course of his life, he hears 200-300 sermons on how God made him for a purpose, that he has good works prepared before him, that he was made to rule and reign with Christ, and various other excellent purposeful topics.  His mind is packed with the what, but the how is completely left up to him to figure out.  He wants to obey God and is too devout to admit that he’s utterly bored, and mostly at a loss.  In spite of the great sermon topics, did this man learn to be effective or passive?

Picture this:  a boy starts with preschool, moves on to kindergarten, then to elementary school, then to high school.  If he did well, then he goes to college.  By this time, he knows that if he’s excelled then he will move on to:  tada!!!  The reward for excellence:  more school!  Every day his job is to sit still and intake, process assignments, and regurgitate information.  Opportunities to initiate or produce will be the rare exception.  The purpose of each year is not to be able to produce food, build houses, manage businesses, lead people, or steward land and resources.  The purpose of each year is to prepare him for the next year.  To begin to learn those productive specializations (an MBA, for instance), he first has to do 15 -20 years of generalized time, during which he has learned to respond and not initiate.  Did this boy learn to be bold and confident, or passive?  Did he learn that his days are a fleeting vapor, he is eternally significant, and EVERY DAY OF HIS LIFE IS CRUCIAL?  Or that it’s totally normal to be in an eternal cycle of preparing for someday and never hold your reward in your hands?

Picture this:  for his formative years, when he’s not at school, a boy is at home with his mom.  His father is at work.  Mom has a household to care for, kids  younger than him, and everybody’s survival depends on her ceaseless labor.  It’s her job to make sure their stuff doesn’t break (they need that coffee table…what are you DOING TO THE COFFEE TABLE, SON????), the house gets clean, meals are made again, again, and again, and that everyone is safe.  She cuddles and protects the baby, and does the same thing fifteen hundred times, be it diapers, or mac and cheese, or laundry.  Her role is not limited to the cyclical, but her nurturing nature inclines itself toward maintenance, safety, and beautifying.  She is a GREAT mom.  Most of her instruction to her son comes in the form of “Don’ts,” as his very nature, when confined, tends to conflict with what is core to her role.  She is often tired and her son pushes her right over the edge into exhaustion.  Was this son trained to subdue his world and take dominion, or that his manhood poses a subtle threat to everyone’s well-being?

Have you noticed what’s missing from my pictures?  It’s the one person who is actually equipped to bring a boy, a man, a SON into purpose.  IT’S HIS FATHER.

OJ and I are engaged in an all out battle in our home with passivity.  It began because of what I like to call The Energy Crisis. One cold garbly day I had had about as much as I could take of my little bumper cars and said (well, maybe “said” is the wrong word) to OJ:  ”Get these boys outside boys are not made to be inside boys are made to be outside IT’S JUST WRONG they have too much energy and I have NONE!!!!!!!”  It sounds funny, but it wasn’t at all.  It was profound.

Energy is for work, which is for production.  But my frustration was looming because of the astonishing futility I saw looming over my days…USING my energy to SUPPRESS their energy…all my work going to drain them of theirs.  The end product being negative production. Practically speaking, this meant five rooms messed for every one I manage to tidy, eight commands given for every one acted upon, twenty minutes to settle them in an activity that engages them for seven.  And endless cycle of sucking away my life, and theirs.  Why?  Because they’re bad?  Actually, our sons are carefully trained in obedience.  We’ve been playing that harp since they were born.  It wasn’t a behavioral crisis we were feeling.  It was the beginning of the earth shaking under our feet.

What are boys for? This question is one we’ve pondered carefully, as you can read here, but…how?

Judah was doing very well in school.  Very obedient, eager to learn, highly social, and a favorite of his excellent teacher.  But he was coming home STRESSED OUT.  His little body couldn’t stop.  Oral fixations developed and became out of control, and after carefully paying attention for five hours at school, he couldn’t look me in the eyes or hear five words in a row out of my mouth.  Every day I would have to devote a half hour or hour of my ENERGY to help him get control of his.  If I could not spare that half hour, he would run us all (including himself) ragged for the rest of the day.  Energy crisis.

He easily absorbed what he was learning at school.  Which is what school is for, right? But what was school teaching him that HE was FOR? Sure, in words he was being taught that his purpose was to obey and glorify God, etc.  But what was hours of sitting still and taking in information that he could not put his hands to really teaching our son that he was for?  Was it something like this?

“Good men waste their time in a well-behaved manner.  And then SOMEDAY they are SUDDENLY heroes and champions:  moving, shaking, leading, liberating, proclaiming, battling, defeating, shouting, rescuing, healing, freeing, etc.  But we’ll train you in that in your off-time.  Mainly, you need to learn how to use about 1/100th of your engine for most of your day, and disconnect your body from your mind (which we worship and serve, uh, I mean, which we use to worship and serve God).  We’ll give you some recess time to let off your (useless) energy.”

I am a mother of four, wife of a mighty man, discipler of women, writer, and trainer.  AND I get dressed every day and sometimes exercise.  Energy is no joke to me.  It’s a matter of life and death.  I have often cried in the night with a fussy little one, please let me sleep… Not just because I like sleep, but because if I have energy it means that kids will be loved, fed and trained, my husband will be encouraged, built up and sent from our home to do his mission in power, captives will be set free, the gospel will be preached, either at home or on the internet or SOMEWHERE, and on and on…  Energy is PRECIOUS to me.  So the revelation that our system (Judah was just in Kindergarten, so he was about to embark on 17-20 something academic years) was going to carefully train him to DUMP his energy so he could do what was REALLY valuable (tank on information) was like a dagger to the heart.

NO.  NO.  NO.

OJ and I looked at each other.  We disciple men.  We know how many are floundering under the most elementary bondages:  video games, pornography, sports addictions.  WE know how many families will suffer incredible loss because of these time/energy/passion toilets, if you will.  The attraction of the things themselves eventually fail to explain the addiction level.  What has convinced men to dump their lifeblood, their force, their manhood into utter waste, and be blind and numb to the incredible exploits they have within their reach through the gospel in their home, their marriage, their actual acquaintances?  How can they stand it?  How can they spend most of their lives in purposelessness  and then commit their force, strategic ability, energy, and masculine power to HOBBIES?

Could it be that men are FOR something?  For a god-like purpose (Gen. 1:28, the first command given to mankind)?  Could it be that my sons have million of megawatts flowing through their blood for something other than driving me to the end of my sanity?  Could it be that it’s NOT God’s plan that moms and teachers exhaust themselves suppressing masculine drive so that in twenty years wives can be begging those young man to rise back up?  Please talk to me, please help me, please take out the garbage, please be my champion, please lead me to the Cross, please train the children, please get off the computer…

“Could it be,” we said, “that the way we do things in our culture is a set up to destroy men?”

More to come.