The Affirmation Crisis by Randy Hix

Author:Randy Hix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family & Relationships/Religion
Publisher: Elm Hill
Published: 2018-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

THE FATHER’S BLESSING

An old story tells us about a man who asked three stone masons what they were doing. The first man said he was laying bricks. The second man described his work as building a wall. But it was the third man who explained genuine concern for his work. He said, “I am raising a great cathedral.” Ask this same question to a group of fathers concerning their role in the family, and you would get many contrasting answers. One father might say, “I am supporting my family.” Another father might see his role differently and say, “I am raising children.” One father sees his responsibility to put food on the table, while the other sees his responsibility as participating in the shaping of his child’s life.80

As we have seen in previous chapters, the father sets the pattern for generations. The influence and impact of the father compounds when we consider the power of a blessing.

Fathers have a special role to play in our discovery of who we are in life. Because of the “bigger than life” stature a father can carry in the eyes of his children, his words carry tremendous force. That is why a father telling his child statements like “You’ll never amount to anything” has such a devastating effect. On the other hand, a father who lovingly affirms his child is giving him a solid foundation toward developing into a healthy, well-adjusted adult.

The benefits of the father’s blessing are far reaching and make the difference between success and failure, victory and defeat, happiness and misery in an individual’s life!

The movie Field of Dreams has had a profound effect on many people, especially men. Field of Dreams is the fanciful story of a middle-aged man who, having never reconciled with his father while his father was still alive, is given an opportunity to do so. The popularity of such a film reveals how many people there are who never received their fathers’ blessing.

In 1874, sociologist Richard L. Dugdale, a member of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York, and a colleague of Harris’s, was delegated to visit jails in Upstate New York. He studied the records of inmates of the thirteen county jails in New York State, as well as poorhouses and courts. He published his findings in The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity in 1877 (Dugdale 1877).

Dugdale studied the family of Max Jukes, a frontiersman who was the descendant of early Dutch settlers, and who was born between 1720 and 1740 and lived in New York. In a jail in Ulster County, he found six members of the same “Juke” family (a pseudonym), though they were using four different family names. He began researching the New York hill family’s ancestry in an effort to find the basis for their criminality.

His study concluded that Max, the patriarch, did not believe in Christ or in a Christian home. He had 1,026 descendants. Three hundred were sent to prison for average terms of thirteen years.

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