Oh, For the Wisdom of Solomon: Part 1

Dirty diapers, baby vomit, and Friday nights at home aren’t the things that scare me (most) about my new role in fatherhood. It’s the stuff that comes sixteen years from now when Maddie thinks I’m an idiot for not letting her surf the web on her internet visor while driving her auto-pilot hydrogen fueled hovercraft to Boston for the afternoon. “Dad, you were born in like, the twentieth century; why do you think you know what’s going on today?” she’ll say.

 

PBS recently ran a documentary called Growing Up Online that featured a number of parents struggling to get a grip on their children’s internet use. The show described a variety of internet abuses including cheating on homework, spending every waking moment online, and even one middle school boy who committed suicide after the bullying that he got at school carried over into online social media outlets at home and overwhelmed him. (Join the discussion on my Next Generation blog.)

The generational gap that Growing Up Online claims is widening with each new generation is what scares me most. What if there’s a gap so wide between my daughter and me that we struggle to have any sort of meaningful relationship at all? Or worse, what if Maddie makes a string of bad decisions that spiral her life into a tailspin? What if she’s not happy and I don’t know how to help her?

Last week, I sat down with the senior pastor of my church, John, to talk about the sermon series on Proverbs that we began at in January and will continue through Palm Sunday. Before I could even ask a question, John started talking about fatherhood. He told me that he’s grown to love wisdom literature in the bible more and more as his kids got older, because it helped lay the groundwork for teaching them some common sense principles that would help them avoid a tailspin.

“We live in a decreasingly common sense world,” said John. “The media paints a picture of the Donald Trump life we’re supposed to live where to accumulate possessions and wealth by any means necessary is called success.”

I glanced through Proverbs after my conversation with John and was comforted by the thought that people have been looking into this book for fundamental wisdom for almost 3,000 years. The gap between my generation and my daughter’s isn’t going to change that. In a world where new technologies become obsolete in a dozen years or fewer, and what you need to know changes every five or six years, the wisdom of Proverbs has stood for 3,000 years and will stand for 3,000 more. This wisdom doesn’t change.

Sometimes a person’s life is less like a walk down a path and more like waking up in the current of a surging river. When the landscape around you is changing faster than your eyes can focus, wisdom that doesn’t change may be the only thing keeping you from getting swept away by the fear of being a father, being a husband, or losing your job.

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