STAKING OUR CLAIM

Tales still pour out of the old west.  They shaped the still dominant frontier mind set of our nation.  Whether real or imagined, the roster of our western heroes who transformed the west into the “Wild West” and eventually the settled west is long, old, but still fresh; “Duke” Wayne, Louis L'Amour, Wild Bill, the Earp brothers,  et. al.

The stories that stick with us are about conflicts, most often over land and territories.  Mining claims, neighbor’s fence lines, sheep or cattle, ranchers or sod busters.  It was all about where you stake your property and what you do on it.

Not much has changed in our culture.  Staking out our territory lets friend and foe know where we stand, what’s ours  that's worth standing for.

So, Matt and Gary want to make this simple.  We place the following stakes to frame our message and what we want you to know about our lives.

First and foremost, we each and together consider our lives centered around our discovery of God’s amazing grace and goodness.  Both of us early in our lives were transformed by our decision to engage Jesus as the One we’d follow.  We became serious practicing Christians with a few lapses, of course; Matt at 7, Gary at 11. These were life-shaping choices, and they have real-life applications for all we do and what we have to say about our lives.

As for the theme of our blog and book,this central conviction is still at the center.  QUESTION: What do we have to offer to our children that is significantly different than that offered by other well-intentioned fathers?  There are some pretty good “Christian” and non-Christian father books out there; lots and lots.   ANSWER:  It is not just how we have applied the revealed truths of Scripture to our lives and, hence, to Taylor, Colton, Brooke, Gracen, and Charis, it is about how we have teamed up to “father” them together.  We have mustered our gifts and marshaled our energies to see goodness and godliness multiplied through each of these now little people.  And, yes, truth be known, even the "real" Lone Ranger had Tonto.

We are a father-son team.  We play well together, and we know each other well.  Our knowledge is somewhat intuitive, mostly experiential, and all built on a platform of our grasp on of personality issues.  Though Matt is a trained and experienced therapist, most of the latter we owe to our mutual understanding of the Enneagram and our consistent application of its insights.  It applies to our family even in assessing those random and sometimes challenging encounters with and earth full of bent humans.

The Enneagram (enne = 9 in Greek, the number of categories that motivate behaviors) is easily understood and with a little study and practice can be applied by otherwise untrained laypersons.   It began as a biblically based personality structuring by desert monastic fathers of Egypt in the very early Church.  It migrated over the centuries through religious variations around the world and has been refined in recent years by secular psychiatrists who have popularized it.  We deal with this in limited but useful detail in our PERSONALITY DYNAMICS page.  We both teach and model what we know of God, His Church, and His family of believers.

And, we triangulate well.  it's a gift, but it's an acquired one, not accidental.   Each of us lives out our life’s journey in pursuit of the heart of God, and we seek to amplify the gifts He’s invested in us as a means to best fulfill our calling, our purpose.  Then, we look to each other for companionship, for discovery, for accountability.  It’s a trust relationship that sometimes gets, well, “too” personal.

Then there are the kids.  Man, do we love them.  And we love the bright sparks of life we see in them. They’re the sparkles of hope to liven up the dull spots and soften the hard ones.  And we—again, “each” and “together”—apply the sacred realities of the full, wild, wonderful life there is in walking with God so they, too, will apply them all the days of their lives...for generations to come.

Cultural demographers have names and traits for our generations.  It's important enough to understanding fathers and their fathers and their children that we have added GENERATIONAL CULTURES to this site. Knowing Gary’s “Vet” or “Traditional Generation” and Matt’s “Generation X” and how we are guiding the “Millennial Generation” (and even the “Electronic Generation” for the two youngest) has proved more enlightening than we'd expected.  Gary has become a speaker and consultant in the practical applications of culture differences and cultural uplift to help ease the befuddlements and the pain of conflicts we don't solve well.

It is the “Cowboy Way” to know as much about the herd and the destination as possible. We don’t just saddle up. Plenty of unexpected wildness happens whether by the nature of the ornery steers or the intruding squalls, hail storms, and trees across the trail. Best we know about how entire periods of culture are shaped by events out of our control before we head ‘m up too far.

What Matt and Gary have done, Matt as a professional therapist and Gary as an aware grandfather, is to survey the trail ahead. The book and the blog is such a survey. In Generational Fathering we report our story and, like it is on the cattle drive way up in the mountains, we’ll leave notes on the posts along the trip with instructions, warnings, and encouragements. Getting the cattle to the market and the kids to the destination as good and godly mothers and fathers themselves is why we ride, not alone, but as saddlemates.