CHARACTER

part one

 

As a father I accepted  the mandate, opportunity, and privilege of setting the standards of good character for my children. I see character as the behavior expressed from our values, beliefs, and truths. If I did not intentionally determine the character I wanted my children to have, the main thing they would learn from me is that choosing good character is not important. Since I would not intentionally guide them in the development of specific  attributes, they were going to learn from my apathy and would collect a fruit basket of various qualities from the influences around them. As children, they are not capable of making wise choices and this lack of guidance causes foul smelling fruit. Without a father’s wisdom to assist them, they will not realize that the values they are collecting do not logically interconnect. 

 

The effective process for training the character of our children was not an occasional lecture, although they were included, I quickly found out that my reactions to their behavior was the most impactive. As I corrected their actions and as I counseled them on how to act in certain situations, I recognized that what I fostered and what I allowed were the qualities my children developed, which makes character development a 24/7 job. If I was too tired to intervene in cruel sibling behavior, they learned  when it was safe to mistreat one another. There is no time when mistreating someone is appropriate. My allowing the behavior was a stamp of approval, just as if I saw one of them expressing kindness and praised them for it. My response to their current behavior announced what I deemed as good character.   

 

To intentionally develop a standard, I had to determine the values I thought were important then prove them by living it myself. Children become what we foster or allow and absorb more from watching us than from listening to us. The basics of being a good father is being a good husband, a good friend, and a good man. The character necessary to fill all three of those roles successfully lay a pattern of what is normal and the standard they can achieve. If we allow ourselves to falter in any of these roles, we endanger the stability of our children’s foundations. Fortunately, God has provided guidance, examples, strength, mercy, and grace to aid our pursuit of modeling good character. 

 

The character we currently display was nailed in place like shingles on a roof during our childhood. The quality of the shingles and our ability to repair them when necessary will determine if they provide good protection from the rain. What we consider important, what we give our time for, what we get excited about, what makes us angry-these are the things that expose our character, our values, and our standards of right and wrong.  These are the quality of our shingles. As we select these shingles and nail them on our children’s lives, how they weather the storms and learn how to repair their own shingles is determined by what we speak and what we demonstrate.  

 

In my next blog, I will present some of the character attributes we developed in our children and how we did it. 

Jerry