This post is from Moms Take Ten episode 66, “For Fathers, part 1–My Dad”, which you can listen to wherever you listen to podcasts or at https://sites.libsyn.com/403493/for-fathers-part-1-my-dad
The past month, I have witnessed a change in my son. His aggression has decreased. His respectfulness has increased. He is throwing fewer things. He is regulating his emotions better. He is using his words more to communicate his thoughts and feelings. We made some changes to his diet and his sleeping arrangements. He started seeing an art therapist. Those things have helped, but the main reason for the change, from what I have seen, is the increased involvement of his father. Now, my husband has always been intentionally involved in our children’s lives. Lately, though, he has shouldered the burden of response to my son’s behaviors even during his work hours. I had come to a point where the emotional and physical demands were taking such a toll on me and I was starting to feel hopeless. I came to my husband, declaring I simply did not know what to do. We had conversations before where we strategized, talked about what I was learning in my classes, and prayed. This time though, without even telling me, my husband decided that I would no longer carry that weight. It didn’t matter if he was in a meeting or had a lot of work to do, if he heard my son start to escalate, my husband was out of his office and moving my son to a place where the two of them could work through it together. When his company said it was time for everyone to go back to the office multiple days a week, Jonathan spoke with his boss about the importance of his presence at home and created a schedule that would support me when the kids weren’t in school. And little by little, as my son spent that extra time with his father, he began to change.
This has been so life impacting to our whole family. And it has highlighted more than ever before how important both moms and dads are in our children’s lives. When God created the world, he made male and female, united them together and told them jointly to be fruitful and multiply. God established what a family should look like and he did so intentionally, for both men and women reflect different aspects of who God is and are able to parent their kids uniquely through the way they are each designed. Both parents matter.
On Moms Take Ten, I take great delight and feel great responsibility in speaking to moms. For the next month, I want to spend time speaking to and about dads. There is more to cover than a single Father’s Day episode could include, so I am devoting the entirety of June to this conversation. I want these episodes to remind us moms about how much the fathers of our kiddos matter. Sometimes we can become territorial about our children and how they are parented. We can start to think that we are the only ones who truly know how to interact well with our children. We can be critical of our husband’s attempts and we can take over when we feel they are doing it incorrectly. We might struggle to dialogue with them about our parenting values and goals. Let this series encourage us to honor and support our husbands in their role.
For the men who have been listening, this is for you. For the men who are just now joining, I am so glad you are here. My prayer is that by the end of this series you will feel exhorted and encouraged in your parenting. That your desire to do so in a way that glorifies God is renewed and that you receive some practical ideas for how to go about that. I also hope you will be motivated to truly partner with your wife in the work of parenting, and discover increased joy in time with your children.
Now, if I could, I would invite my own father to join me for an episode. I have mourned his passing even more as I prepared for this series. I’d like to tell you about him, though, and share with you some thoughts he left behind in his journals.
My dad did not grow up with a believing, or even a good, father. This is the case for far too many of us, and we will talk more about this in our final episode of the series. The more that I learn about his childhood and what my grandmother experienced in her marriage, the more amazed I am at the man my father became. All glory to God for that.
Dad was the third of nine children in a Hispanic family living in the city of Chicago. Their apartment was crowded, the streets were their playground, and life was hard. When he was around five years old, their family was invited to a church called Belden Regular Baptist. My grandmother gave her life to the Lord and that was the beginning of my dad’s relationship with his Heavenly Father. I was told recently that my grandmother learned to read while attending the women’s Bible study. When it was her turn to read a passage on her first visit, she began to cry because she couldn’t read. The women gathered around her and vowed to teach her and they did so in the Scriptures. That church wrapped their arms around my dad’s family and loved them well.
In a journal entry he wrote years ago he said, “Thank you for leading me to Belden. Thank you for keeping me from gangs, drugs, prison, and other things.” He went on to list some of the many ways that he had seen God provide for and protect him.
When my dad became a husband and then a father, he knew he wanted to do things differently than his dad. He knew that he needed God’s help if he was going to break the generational cycle that he had been raised in. He spent time in the Word. He surrounded himself with godly men. He made church a priority. Both dad and mom were intentional about talking about God and the Bible at home. While we were growing up, that was a little awkward and inconvenient. We would get incredibly embarrassed from the questions he would ask our friends about their relationship with Christ. As adults, we deeply respected his intentionality.
He was not perfect. We knew it, and so did he. He modeled humility and forgiveness time and again.
When he passed away six years ago, we started to read through the journals that he left behind. They were filled with what he had learned from his time in the Word and with his prayers. They were raw and honest and God exalting. I was reading some of them again as I prepared for this episode. I mentioned one already. Here’s part of another.
He was praying that God would increase his faith. Then he began claiming the promises of Scripture and what it means to be a child of God. He said, “I claim his father as my father!! What joy fills my heart by making that statement—The father of everlasting love is my father. Father of the fatherless (Ps. 68:5) “And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son and if a son, then an heir through God. (Gal. 4:1-7)
A son, I can talk with the father. A son can call on his father to protect him. A son can present his needs to the father. A father, in his great wisdom, can intervene for his son. A son can rest in the presence of his father. The father carries the responsibilities of bringing up and nurturing the son, of providing and sheltering the son. I am so glad to be your son. May my life make you glad that I’m your son, living for your name, living to bring you honor, living to make you proud.
This is the Father that my dad grew to know, and who he was striving to be like.
In another journal entry, my dad was praying through the armor of God and “fighting” on behalf of some of his family members. Then he said, “Father, thank you for fellow warriors like Jonathan Stoyko, and Jon Taylor, and George Stoyko, and Randy Taylor, and Michael Loosa, and Mr Matthews. Thank you that I don’t fight alone, that others are around to call on and support in times of trouble.” The next few episodes, we will hear from some of those men on the topic of fatherhood. I hope you join me for those conversations.
Lyssa Stoyko 