GETTING KIDS READY FOR LIFE [W, 9-22-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Most of my life was spent with church people, but I also got to be part of other communities--theater, cancer, writing, folk music, higher education, social justice, coffee house, pickleball, and long distance running. In those other communities, I made some interesting friends who would never have showed up in church.

I especially enjoyed my running companions. Sweating and panting are great equalizers. In the running community, I wasn’t “the preacher,” someone to avoid because he might “judge” you. I was just another guy struggling to survive.

Dick and I lived in the same neighborhood, so often ended up in a group of three or four men who encountered one another on the streets as we started for the back roads and then ran together.

One day I mentioned that I had to quit early so I could go to daughter Katie’s cross-country meet. I said, rather proudly, I admit, that it had been difficult to manage, but in 12 years of having children in school, I had never missed a school event of either one of them—academics, band, drama, sports, etc. I knew that Dick’s daughter ran on the cross-country team, so I asked him if he were going to the meet, too.

He rather self-righteously, or so it seemed to me, pronounced that he had never seen his daughter in any school event. That was her world, not his, he said. She needed to learn how to negotiate in her world by herself.

The meaning was clear: he was a better parent than I, because he neglected his children. That’s the way I heard it, and it both angered and confused me.

It reminded me of the family one of my professors, David Belgum, told us about in Clinical Pastoral Education. It was during the Great Depression. A farm family in Minnesota. Like most farm families in those days, they went to town on Saturday night. The mother would line up the children—seven of them, if I remember the story correctly—before they left, and she would give one of them a nickel to spend in town. The nickel was totally random. It might go to the kid who slacked off on his chores. It might go to the same kid three weeks in a row. If anyone proclaimed that this was not fair, she told them, “Life isn’t fair. This is the way it’s going to be forever, so get used to it.”

I’m she sure she thought she was a good mother. I think my running colleague, Dick, thought he was a good father.

When I got home, showering and changing quickly to get to Katie’s cross-country meet, I worried about what Dick had said. Was I doing wrong by our girls, messing in their lives, thinking I was being a good father while actually setting them up for failure? I told Helen what Dick had said. She replied…

“You don’t get a kid ready for a famine by starving them.”

She’s always been the best theologian in the family.

John Robert McFarland