I Love Country Music…

…this genre of music sings of things that are REAL!

(DISCLAIMER: Of course there are exceptions, but we can discuss exceptions later si quieren).

Country singers sing about family, about values, about faith, about love, about the process of living, about getting older, about friends…yes, they sing about beer and trucks and dogs, too…But they also sing about divorce, about love, about good times, about bad times (I sound like Dickens now), and sometimes just stupid stuff like sending your dog, Pete, to attack a chicken because said chicken has scratched one of the family members and you’d like to eat said chicken for dinner!  Yes, that happens as well!

I heard a song today that struck me in light of my previous post about “seasons.”  It’s by Craig Campbell and is called “Family Man.”  See video below…

If ONLY it were as easy as how many times 17 goes into 52!!!

I know, I know, if you’re going to talk about “family,” then babies and toddlers and yungins’ are the way to go…I get it…marketing is a wonderful thing.  But where are the songs about teen-agers?  Oh, there are a few, don’t get me wrong.  But who wants to sing about being a family man when being a family man involves letting your older children make mistakes, hang out with their friends, find their identity without their parents being in absolute control?

Anyone?  Bueller?

But in all honesty, I find it actually easier to deal with the philosophical ramifications of being a parent of an infant, toddler, or young child.  You are in control, they don’t know SQUAT, they are totally dependent upon you for pretty much everything…

Yes, that’s a tall order, but philosophically it’s easy peasy lemon squeezy…you have to get it done!

Raising teens is a bit different and involves you as the parent really changing with the times.  When I say “changing with the times” I don’t mean becoming some politically correct, morally relativistic post modernist spouting off ludicrous secularism…no, not at all!  What I mean is that your “job role” as a parent shifts.  Hopefully you’ve realized years before the teen years that your role SHOULD change!

But the teen and pre-teen years it becomes obvious that job roles should change.  As a baseball coach for many years I believe that as your children hit the teen years, your job as a parent becomes more of a coach.  Hopefully you had great coaches in your day…athletic coaches, dance coaches, music coaches, art coaches, chess coaches; coaches that demanded the best out of you and simultaneously expected the worse and were not surprised when you produced the latter.

Coaches know the talent within their players.  Parents of teens should be able to identify the talents of their teens.  Coaches can hone the strengths of their players such that it works well within the scheme of the system of the team as a whole.  Parents should be able to hone the strengths of their teens and give them opportunities to excel in their strengths under the auspices of parental, and other adult, guidance such that their strengths are used for the glory of God and the growing of the Kingdom for Christ.

This is tough for the parent…why?  Because…

• It involves letting go of control poco a poco!
• It involves allowing kids to fail.
• It involves allowing kids to make decisions that are stupid (but within constraints of safety, etc.)
• It involves attending your teen’s areas of strengths and researching THEIR areas of strengths as well, even if you’re not only WEAK in those areas, but maybe don’t have any sort of interest in them.
• It involves letting your teens grow up and be men (and women, for those of you with daughters)

That’s the toughest part, I believe.

So you become a coach.  You push kids to excel in their strengths.  You push kids to further develop their weaknesses.  You research areas of opportunity.  You coach them during practice, but let them play the games…sorry, I couldn’t think of how to say this in the game of life…but I see coaches all over that believe coaching happens during the game when in actuality it occurs beforehand…

As they get even older into the teen years, you help them research college opportunities if they are college bound.  But make sure that THEY do the work of applying.  They do the work of writing emails of introduction to the schools.  They do the work of answering phone calls and setting up Skype meetings with advisers and counselors.  They do even more research looking for colleges or job opportunities.  You become a cheerleader more and a coach less.

Now, my children are 17 and 13 years old, respectively, and as such I must draw on others to continue this discussion past the “season” where I currently reside.  So I shall draw upon my father, James E. Pilliod, to show how the seasons change and how the role of the parent changes as well.

During the college years, yes, you remain both coach and cheerleader, but the roles are reversing much.  The coaching must reduce a bit and the cheerleading must increase a bit.  Cheer them on.  Work with your adult children.  They ARE fully functioning adults!  Even if they are in the middle of college and turn 21 years old one weekend and get married the next weekend with 2 years of college left…….yes, they are still adults…I’m just saying.

And sometimes the coaching has to be pretty blatant when the obvious is so obvious to everybody…for example, the conversation Allison and I had with my parents before we got married.  It went down almost verbatim as such,

My mother:  “Mike, Allison.  Your father and I discussed it and we think the two of you should go ahead and get married.”

Alllison and I look at each other for a brief second and both respond with “Okay.”

That’s it.  That was the marriage proposal.  No youtube video with dancing Jews or sitting in the trunk of a car while people lip-sync their favorite song.  No fly-by with streamer asking for her hand.  None of that!  This is life.  This is how things work.  Marriage was so ingrained into my soul that it was a foregone conclusion in my thinking!  Marriage was so ingrained into the relationship between Allison and I that when the idea came up, there was no need for some attempt to convince either one of us.  We acquiesced to the foregone conclusion that we both wanted anyway.  {see below for the “dancing Jews” reference}

But I digress…back to how my father exemplifies changing seasons and changing roles for a parent.

My dad then became a confidant, while at the same time maintaining role of coach and cheerleader.

• He cheered when we decided to purchase a home
• He coached us as to how to look for one and what to look for given our finances, etc.
• He allowed me to confide in him any doubts, any pressures, any worries, any stupid ideas, any outlandish plans that I may have had
• And then he let me work through the issues on my own whilst maintaining cheering me on with coaching me.

‘Tis a serious juggling act to be a parent.  And I believe it’s a bigger juggling act the older your kids get.  It would be easy to NOT let your kids live their own life and just force-feed them what YOU want them to do, what you want them to be, how you want them to believe, grow them up to be what you wan them to be…

…it’s entirely different to raise God’s kids to be what God wants them to be.  I’m working on it.  I find this to be extremely difficult to do.  I find that I struggle in some areas with one of my teen boys and not the other.  I also find that I tend to forget, with increasing frequency, that I’m a son.  My dad is James E.  My mom is JoAnn C.  And they’ve done a WONDERFUL job at first controlling everything about my life.  And then moving on to coaching me in baseball, in academics, in relationships between family members and in the workplace.  And then my parents became some of the biggest cheerleaders ever as I moved to college and played baseball…they came to games, they talked to others about what I was doing…as I got married, as I had my own children, as I moved to Panama.  They became confidants as well as I’ve had good conversations about family, about jobs, about faith, about politics, about relationships.

I’ve had a great earthly example of how the roles of parents change as the seasons of life of their children change.  I’ve seen the confusion that sets in as you have one child that needs to be controlled, another that is in the coaching stage, and another that is in cheerleader stage…sometimes you feel a bit weird.  But it is what it is.

We treat our kids EQUALLY, but not the SAME.  I invite you to research that difference.  My children are equal in my eyes, but they are not the same.  Anyone that knows Pepper and Drew will attest to the fact that they are not the same.

God above treats us equally, but not the same.  Not all are teachers, not all are leaders, not all are prophets…But all are equal.

Anyway…thanks for delving a bit into some of my thoughts for this fine Tuesday.  Parenting isn’t easy.  Parenting isn’t simply straight forward.  But it is worth it!

Soli Deo Gloria!

 

Love and Respect

Hello!!!

I just wanted to take a few moments to talk about my Friday night with you!  Yay!

As many of you know, my life has been centered around teen-agers basically since I was one!  First I was one.  And once I became “not” one then I coached them.  And then I coached them and taught them science.  And then I left coaching and moved into Bible studies and youth group stuff while still teaching science.  Now it’s teaching science, integrating the Bible hopefully on a daily basis, administrating the high school, teaching Sunday school, helping prepare the youth group Wednesdays, leading Junior/Senior men small group, and facilitating Friday night small group as well…and lest we forget, I have 2 teens in the house as well that are a part of all this teen stuff.

Teens are cool.

I am cool.

It’s a partnership made in Heaven!  Hahahaha!  {I can HEAR Allison rolling her eyes from the back room as I write this}

Anyway, Ali and I kicked off our first Friday night Bible study of the year last night by cooking our new favorite dinner (“discovered” by Pepper), chicken curry alfredo, for everyone, mixing up 3 gallons of the sweetest sweet tea imaginable (yes, I used a whole 2 cups of sugar per gallon), making the ever-famous “crack-dip” (so named because it’s addicting), purchasing every bag of regular Ruffles that El Rey had to offer, setting out the baby carrots and cutting the celery for the more health conscious (although dipping it into the “crack-dip” negates any benefit), and “dumping” together the blueberry dump cake!  Great night.

Ali and I are still amazed at the study these teens really wanted to do.  After our Philippians study with Matt Chandler’s DVD, we began to talk with the group about what to do and over and over and over the discussion turned towards male/female relationships.  There is a huge need for this.

Ali and I actually purchased the “Love and Respect” DVDs and workbooks quite some time ago with the thought of facilitating this study with married couples possibly through the church.  God had other plans, though.  The couples idea never took flight, but doing this Biblically based marriage study with singles began to make more and more sense.  I’m convinced that studying Biblical marriage is a necessity for singles!  This allows for folks to learn what God would have a marriage look like.

Anyway, so it really was the teens themselves that promoted this idea of doing a Biblical marriage study.

Our previous small group opened up the doors and invited lots of other people to join us.  And it looks like many will be coming!  Unfortunately, the Crossfire worship band (Crossfire is the Wednesday night youth group) had their retreat last night as well and as such we were missing a few people…but they’ll be back!  And I know that others expressed interest in coming as well.

Another cool thing is the parent response!  Parents are awesome!  They have been really supportive of having us go through this study with their teens, and I’m totally thankful for that!

The discussion was lively, hilarious, and heart-felt last night.  It was a bit difficult because I know where the DVD lessons are headed and many times Ali and I would just have to give a short answer and then say, “But just wait!  Because Emerson’s going to talk about that…and as you’ve seen, he’s hilarious!”

So just be praying for us as we continue to talk with this group of teens and ask them questions and have them ask us questions…this topic of Biblical marriage can be dicey at times and OF COURSE touches on some “touchy” issues, but, hey, these issues aren’t going to hide from them just because we don’t talk about them.

Ok, y’all!  That’s it!  Time take La Mulita to the taller for a new placa!

Soli Deo Gloria!