Hear, my children, the instruction of a father,
And give attention to know understanding;
For I give you good doctrine:
Do not forsake my law.
When I was my father’s son,
Tender and the only one in the sight of my mother,
He also taught me, and said to me:
“Let your heart retain my words;
Keep my commands, and live.
Proverbs 4:1-4 (NKJV).
Fathers are important.
This seems simple, yet in our current era of rebellion, where good is called evil, and evil called good, it is a controversial thing to say. The implications it carries, the weight of the realization that things are very wrong and that, in some ways, cannot ever be made right.
Some may immediately, in an egalitarian spirit, try to quip, even if only to themselves, that "mothers are important too." While that is true, this instinctual response is not a healthy one. It's the same response that gave us a generation with "participation trophies", because for the same reason that men and women must be equalized, so too must the winners and losers of an activity, lest the loss of self-esteem and the bursting of the solipsism bubble prove to be too painful for those involved.
Comparisons, distinctions, anything that creates a disparity is inherently evil.
And so even the truth that Fathers are important was sacrificed to these false gods.
We can see the impact of fatherlessness all around us, from broken relationships to drug use to addictions, all of these being unrefined expressions of what could have been healthy. Each is instead an untamed overgrowth of emotion, of volatility, of uncouth behavior which has never been properly disciplined.
An analogy I've used to contrast the role of the father and mother is this:
Mothers nurture, Fathers prune.
You see, it's not just enough to plant a garden and then just sit back and see what happens. Despite what your best attempts are, the different seeds you chose and the arrangement you placed them in, there is always competition in fertile soil and only that which sets down roots first or deepest can survive. Weeds can soon crowd, and even if not, when a plant does grow, the growth is not based on who planted, but the nature of the circumstance the plant experiences.
This is why the importance of a mother or a father can be discussed separately without needing to bolster the other at the same time, in large part because they're not doing the same thing, so when discussing only a particular set of behaviors or attributes, you will often only end up talking about one or the other anyway.
Another way of saying the same thing is that mothers set a course, determine a direction, and fathers ensure it's being followed and make necessary corrections. The skills required to do both are different, the awareness, the actions taken, they are different, and it's extremely difficult to do both at the same time, impossible if you deny that there even are a "both" that need to occur in the first place.
Specifically, in my youth there was a "theme" in parenting where the reduction of restriction was supposed to usher in a new era of enlightened children who were not hindered by limitations, who would explore and not be held back by any struggles. The lofty idea was that struggles prevented growth, so in order to really be expressed, growth could not be hindered in any way.
The reality is that the struggles refine us to who we really are, they provide the motivation and opportunity to grow, and they give us constructive feedback.
A plant can grow wild, but when pruned or trimmed correctly, the plant will change its behavior. Think about wine grapes on the hills of Italy. Some of those plants are very very old, yet in order to get them to produce the best fruit, you must counter-intuitively stress them. When on the border between life and death, when pruned of new growth, the plants will invest heavily in producing fruit that would be desirable to the wild animals who would eat the grapes and then spread the seed of the plant, helping ensure its survival, even if the specific plant itself dies.
Placed in fertile soil without any trimming, provided all the nutrients the plant could ever want?
The resulting fruit is bland, sparse, as instead of producing fruit the plant will instead just keep focusing on new growth, new vines, expansion of the plant.
This is the model of a child who grows up without a father. It's not that the mother does not try to direct, to correct, to put forth a law for their child to follow, but they are not equipped with the necessary skills to enforce that law, and the father is.
For the same reason that men are better suited to physically demanding work, that the mental resilience of man that allows them to face both the mundane and the terrifying and still retain their sanity to provide for their families, men are simply better suited to provide the corrective action in the lives of their children, and can make the sacrifices in the relationship between them and their children as are necessary for the better of the child's growth, maturity, and future outlook.
Solomon understands this, and will emphasize time and again in Proverbs that the lessons taught by a father are to be kept and cherished even when fathers are no longer around, that it's not just enough to heed the advice, but that actually living it out will show honor to your father and also lead toward life instead of destruction as well.
Bad fathers are not going to change overnight, nor can the damage they cause be fixed easily, but even worse then that is when good fathers are prevented from ever being good fathers at all. When our culture seeks "equality", it does not push bad fathers towards being good, but instead only seeks to make bad fathers out of them all, so as not to give any child the advantage of stability, of health. All are to be equally broken, miserable, and dependent.
Encourage fathers to be good ones, to embrace the difficulty in their task of guiding growth, of correcting the path that their children walk, of the value in them investing into the lives of their children. Because fathers are important, and those investments can pay dividends on into eternity.
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