Up a Tree

I walked outside, looked up in tree in our yard and saw C.W. up in the tree. It is amazing how boys survive, with both the lack of fear, and that lack of thinking one step ahead, like "how am I going to get down?" or "I wonder if this little twig I'm standing on will hold my weight?" (look real close, can you see the limb he is standing on? Yeah, me either.)

This is how God made boys. Boys who test boundaries, who explore, who attempt feats of strength are our future dad's, future soldiers, future police officers and future preachers.

The duty of every parent of boys is NOT to keep them from being boys, but to mold them into men. To take what God has given them by way of nature and personality and then prune, bend, shape, mold them as best we can, by God's grace, into what they should be. We have failed if we turn our boys into sissies, but we have also failed if we turn our boys into selfish, reckless, arrogant men. I worked as a 4th generation apple farmer before I moved to NC. I know a little about pruning trees, especially young ones. You can prune a tree so much that you ruin it forever. You can bend a young tree until it breaks. But, it is just as bad and just as disastrous to let the tree grow wild without any pruning. My Grandpa wouldn't let anyone prune his young trees, he had to do it because he didn't trust anyone else to work on them at such a critical age. Are our kids more valuable than trees? He that hath an ear, let him hear.

That being said, all boys are different. Mine are very different, and only one of the four attempted to scale the tree. Since all boys are different, all boys needed to be molded and shaped and pruned differently. Not by what society says boys should be, but what God says boys should be. Reading through Proverbs (a book written to boys specifically: 'my son') you don't read a lot about sports, but much about the soul.