My oldest daughter graduated high school recently, and at the small ceremony we had, I offered to her the following charge. Because of time constraints, I had to edit the original piece down a bit to make it fit with the time we were allotted. I present the unedited version here with her permission.
In this post, I’m pleased to share my tiny little corner on the internet with guest reviewers, Jerry and Linda Mead. Jerry is a retired minister in the PCA, and he and Linda have three adult children, five grandchildren, and one additional grandchild who is currently preparing to make his arrival later this year. I offer their review of Larry McCall’s Grandparenting with Grace: Living the Gospel with the Next Generation here unedited and hope this resource can be useful for many of their peers. 
Halloween is an interesting time. Little kids’ eyes begin to glow with the possibility of being able to dress up as their favorite superhero-princess-ninja-pumpkin. Even teenagers start plotting some way to look cool or funny so that they can make the rounds on Halloween night. [One of my daughters and our neighbor have schemed to go as Bob Ross and his painting.] And all of this costume fervor is going on because… candy!
But in the midst of all of this, a huge opportunity went unnoticed for me for years. Regardless of how I felt about the intersection of my Christian convictions and the practices and themes of Halloween, I couldn’t deny the reality that there was an intersection between my front door and many of my neighbors who I would not otherwise be able to meet.
So last year my family started what I hope will become a tradition for years to come. 
We set up a “Parent’s Survival Station” in our front yard. The neighborhood kids go to my front door where my kids, who can dress up in their own costume, hand out the candy. But my wife and I sit at the table in the front yard and offer bottled water and cups of coffee to the parents. We also set out a pad of paper where I invite people to write down any prayer requests that they might have. I then took what prayer requests we received and worked through them the following day. This survival station was warmly received by the parents (with a few snide requests for tequila shots in years to come), but we got to talk with a few of my neighbors at a more significant level than the hey-how-ya-doin’ level. Who knows where the Lord can take these encounters? At the very least it seems like a great way for us to work on fulfilling the second greatest commandment to “love your neighbor.”
This is not saying that everyone needs to do it the way our family has chosen to do it. But I hope this encourages some folks to see the opportunity that literally comes knocking every October 31st. Take our idea for loving our neighbors and make it your own and make it better for your neighbors.
I’m sure this has left some of my readers with one major concern, so let me calm your fears. Yes, I make sure my kids end up with some candy at the end of the evening. They are a valued and valuable part of this process, and I don’t mind saying ‘thank you’ with a few Three Musketeers and Snickers. Lastly, if anyone reading this shows up at the house on Halloween night I have an apology to make. Sorry, but no tequila shots.
My wife and I had the privilege of participating in our oldest son’s homeschool graduation ceremony this past weekend. Each of the six graduates and their parents had 8 minutes each to show their video montage of photos and make any remarks. So our son chose the song “Into the West” by Annie Lennox [choking back tears… proud father of LotR fan] and my wife and I chose enough photos to fill up about 3 minutes. That left us with about 5 minutes to make our remarks as his parents. So I wanted to say something more than the standard “we’re so proud of you and love you.” Sin
ce we give people charges when they enter into a new office in life, I thought it’d be appropriate to give him a charge at this boundary between boyhood and the “office” of manhood. I hope this manuscript of my charge to my son may challenge you young Christian men out there as you begin to carve your path forward, a path of loyalty to the King of kings.
There is a heart-warming scene in JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit near the end of the book where Thorin Oakenshield lies dying from wounds he received during the Battle of the Five Armies. As he dies, Thorin shares his last words with Bilbo, a simple hobbit who had proved to be a faithful companion and friend to Thorin through some very difficult times. And his last words had nothing to do with how Bilbo had helped the company escape from capture by three trolls, or from a cadre of giant spiders, or from being locked in an elvish dungeon. Thorin commended Bilbo for his love of hearth and home:
Thorin and his company of dwarves had grown weary of their exile from their homeland, having been driven out of the Lonely Mountain by the terrible power of the dragon Smaug. And the dwarves longed for their home and for the inheritance of wealth that had been stolen from them, an inheritance that they wanted to regain. But somewhere along the way, somewhere in their travels, the value of the wealth the dwarves sought to regain overtook the value they placed on regaining their home. And only here at the end of his life did Thorin’s fading eyes regain their sight. It wasn’t gold and jewels and the vast comforts that the Lonely Mountain afforded that held life-sustaining value. It was family and friends sharing life around a common table, however slim the fare might be, that was the true treasure worth pursuing.
Many of us, if you can allow me to extend the Hobbit analogy, have retaken the Lonely Mountain and have failed to see that the comforts we have are always best when shared with others. We like to think we value “…food and cheer and song…” as much as the next person, but we rub elbows with people at work, in our community, in our churches, and even next door who are lonely… strangers to the warmth of our tables and our companionship. And a dear lady in the church I serve reminded me of this when I asked for prayer requests one time. She simply said, “We need to watch out for the lonely.” That was a few weeks ago and her words have been my constant companion. Those words make me wonder: who do I see on a regular basis that may wrestle with loneliness? Who might see the craziness that gathers around our family table as a taste of medicine for what ails them? Who would feel warmly remembered by receiving a hand-written note from me, an impromptu phone call, or an invite to grab a cup of coffee some evening? Where do I see the lonely and how can I participate in bringing them Bilbo’s “…food and cheer and song…”?
And then I remember that it is the LORD himself who points us in this direction. The 68th Psalm speaks to us along these lines (emphasis mine):
A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
is God in his holy dwelling.
God sets the lonely in families,
he leads out the prisoners with singing… (Psalm 68.5-6 NIV)
The LORD is the original champion of “…food and cheer and song…” For what else are His redeemed children called to do but to gather each week to feed at His table, to remember the glad news of life conquering death, and to sing our hearts out alongside people of all walks of life? And while the LORD trains us to love and value “…food and cheer and song…,” the back doors of our church sanctuaries can be a cold reminder for those that wrestle with loneliness that they are departing fellowship to re-enter isolation. So maybe – just maybe – we can begin to do as my dear sister asked a few weeks ago: to watch out for the lonely. And once we see them, how do we invite them into the food and the cheer and the songs of our lives? We may be the kings and queens of our own Lonely Mountain, but do we have the heart of a simple hobbit from Bag End? Are we willing to reflect God’s good work of setting the lonely in families and leading in song those who have been set free?
Do I “…see strangers as neighbors and neighbors as family of God“?
Do I “…recoil at reducing a person to a category or a label“?
Do I “…see God’s image reflected in the eyes of every human being on earth“?
Do I know that I am “…like meth addicts and sex-trade workers…,” …taking my “…own sin seriously – including the sin of selfishness and pride“?
Once I’m done asking myself these jack-hammer questions, I can move on to the second 
paragraph in the preface to Rosaria Butterfield’s most recent book The Gospel Comes with a a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World. Whew. But for a person that’s being honest with their heart’s default mode and their daily practices, that’s about the pace of the book from launch to landing.
In a sense, Dr. Butterfield’s book is a little like Aslan, good but not safe. But that’s kind of her point. If a life motivated by the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is safe and comfortable, then it is a life unfamiliar, in some very practical ways, with the God who entered the un-safe-ness of life under the sun in order to love and rescue the unwashed and the unworthy. So in her very narratival fashion, Dr. Butterfield walks her readers along the smooth and jagged edges of what it looks like to regularly open one’s home to neighbors, dogs (hers and the neighbors’), strangers, church members, grad students, at least one black snake, and a seemingly constant stream of children (the source of the aforementioned reptile). She draws the reader along with story after story of how regularly having people in the home opens up an expectation that no topic is off-limits. As she says, “We were – as we almost always are around here – a politically mixed group. Unbelieving neighbors and church members all together (p.120).” But this is all what we might expect if the people seated around our dinner tables reflected our neighborhood as often as it it did our hand-picked group of friends. As she says a little earlier, “The gospel creates community that welcomes others in… It isn’t always easy. It begins with recognizing people as your kin (p.86).”
Dr. Butterfield’s book excels in amazing ways at setting a vision for radically, ordinary hospitality and its transformative power for our post-Christian culture. Her closing list of “Imagine a world where…” is pure gold and worth typing up and putting on the refrigerator or bathroom mirror. While she does get down to the practical and the nitty-gritty of what it looks like to practice radically ordinary hospitality (see her “The Nuts and Bolts and Beans and Rice” in the concluding chapter), this reviewer’s fear is that this vision of hospitality is so far from where most people live right now that folks won’t know where to start and, in turn, fail to do so. We all know that feeling well. You get up on Saturday morning determined to clean out the cluttered garage only to raise the door, see the mountain of undifferentiated stuff that has to be tackled, and then close the door in favor doing some other task your familiar with. So if I had to recommend a starting place, I would simply offer Dr. Butterfield’s wise words from her conclusion:
In married households it is vital that both husband and wife share a calling for hospitality and work together to establish a budget for time and food and people. Wives, let your husbands lead. Husbands, be sensitive to your wife’s energy level… the pace is set by the one who feels the most frail… [Hospitality] should make us stronger in Christ. If hospitality becomes a point of contention, something is wrong. Stop and reevaluate. Pray. Map out goals and values. Be a team.
Of course the ministry of hospitality isn’t simply practiced by married couples (something Dr. Butterfield says as well), nor will it look the same for all households. For instance, I have a single friend whose hospitality ministry looks like foster-parenting two children taken from a home due to the current opiate epidemic. I have another set of friends who are hosting an international exchange student; another set of friends who gave a lady a home during a period of time when her marriage was crumbling; and another set of friends who are slowly working their way through the church membership rolls and inviting a different family over each Lord’s Day. At the end of the day, Dr. Butterfield’s vision for practicing radically ordinary hospitality is as bold and bracing as it is alluring and refreshing. If Christ’s redeemed people began practicing and coordinating this kind of hospitality, then walls would crumble as our doors opened, and we would be able to “…put the hand of the hurting into the hand of the Savior (p.207).”
Yesterday, I had the privilege of baptizing another covenant child, and as I have done on many occasion, gave the child’s father an opportunity to pray for his son after the waters of baptism and the Triune name were applied. The prayer that I post below is the prayer that father prayed (with names removed). Even now his prayer for his son moves me to tears.
Father, I thank you for the opportunity to witness, firsthand, your kingdom moving forward. For we believe, in faith, that you have marked [our son] as one of your people, a part of your Church. I know we have yet to see the faith in his life, but we are trusting in you to take his heart of stone and give him a heart of flesh. I pray that his faith would not be one born out of crisis, but that his trust in you for salvation would be like the air that he breathes… that long before he can express it, your saving grace would work in his life. We look forward to the day he can put into words the great work you have done in him.
Father, I thank you that children are truly one of life’s greatest blessings, not life-accessories for selfish adults, not burdens to be endured by exhausted parents, but blessings in the purest sense. For they are blessings that can, in turn, be a blessing to a dark and dying world. So, to that end, I pray for [our son’s] physical health, that you would keep sickness and injury from him so that he may care for the sick and the dying. I pray for his strength, that you would make his body continue to grow strong so that he may be a defender of the weak and the abused. I pray that you would continue to fill his life with those who love and care for him, so that he may be an advocate for the unloved and the forgotten.
Lord, your word tells us that to whom much is given, much is required, and, as parents, we have been so richly blessed. So, I ask that you enable us to be the mother and father that your word calls us to be – that we would not neglect to teach our children your word, to discipline them according to your law, and to love them as you have loved us. Also, as I have just asked you to bless [our son] with great blessings, so I trust that you will use him in mighty way to advance your kingdom – that everywhere he goes the darkness would run and hide for fear of your bright light that shines through him.
We are trusting in you to do all these things. I pray them all in Jesus’ name. Amen.
A few months ago, my thirteen year-old son and I read a book together entitled The Dude’s Guide to Manhood: Finding True Manliness in a World of Counterfeits by Darrin Patrick. Having read not a few things on the topic myself and judging a book by its 
cover (a practice which is not altogether bankrupt as it turns out), I was pleasantly pleased with Patrick’s very readable book. In my opinion, the highlight of the book was chapter 8, “Say, ‘I Love You, Man’: The Connected Man”. I know this sounds like the biggest fruitcake chapter of them all, but Patrick absolutely nails the modern man’s propensity to be disconnected, overly-independent, uninvolved, and anonymous when it comes to our male friendships and the heavier matters we all deal with in life. He says on page 112, “Sometimes people drift away, but a lot of times a crisis or disagreement drives them away… It takes perseverance to face hard conversations, poverty and wealth, good times and bad… Perseverance means fighting through each others failures — the hurts, the brokenness — and enduring the wounds in order to cultivate a relationship.” In my experience as a pastor working with other men, maintaining a certain relational independence and anonymity toward male friends is an extremely dangerous situation, allowing our lack of perspective as individuals to grow in unchecked and unhealthy directions. But a man with true friends — not fans or drinking buddies but other men who won’t let us go off the rails without slapping us with the truth of where we are headed — is a rich man indeed.
I can see this book used as a somewhat of an evangelistic tool. Patrick has allowed the book to be “scripture lite” for the first ten chapters so as not to come off as preachy or “for Christians only”, but his last two chapters help the reader to see Jesus as the True Man and Hero we are called to follow (chapter 11) and yet how we all fall short and must start the path toward masculinity as forgiven men (chapter 12). But quite possibly the greatest value I experienced as a result of reading this book were the really good conversations that it stirred up with my son.
A central part of my calling as a pastor is equipping others to integrate what they believe with what they do. Sometimes (a.k.a. a whole lot of the time) this means what I talk to others about is what I am currently learning… how the Lord is currently shaping me. So as I observe my oldest entering the teenage years, I find myself identifying more and more with the rest of
the parents who have a child in the youth group. So… as I look to learning how to shepherd the small flock living under my roof, I’ve come across this solid parenting resource. Alex Chediak has written a book that has some fantastic nuggets of wisdom that are seated in some very engaging “conversations” revolving around the topics of character, faith, relationships, finances, academics, and the college decision. For instance, his discussion of “over-parenting” versus “under-parenting” and the resident dangers that each contains is all very good, but he really hits the nail on the head in the portions that draw out the deleterious effects of parents who allow their young adults to have an unadmonished high self-esteem all while being underachievers. Chediak says, “Confidence and self-esteem grow in proportion to the expectations of others and actual accomplishments (p.15).”
Chediak’s “conversation starters” at the end of each chapter are designed to treat the teenage son or daughter with the dignity of an adult all while trying to draw them out to see how they are struggling. The conversation starters about the topic discussed above includes things like, on one hand, inviting your teenager to tell you how they think you’re doing with the whole under-parenting vs. over-parenting thing. But on the other hand, there’s a suggested conversation starter aimed at identifying areas of needed growth in your teenager’s life. This kind of give and take is the life blood of any mature relationship, which is precisely what we are inviting our teenagers to enter into. Ultimately, Chediak’s book, though aimed at the parent who is preparing their young adult to engage the college chapter of life in a faithful manner, is good for any parent trying to prepare their child for life as an independent, Christian adult.
Boat14 WV 