Spiritual Survival Guide
5: Complicated Stuff
So, instead of having wise fathers who handed on their wisdom, we had absent or dysfunctional fathers. And now we have to face up to the fact that we ourselves are the current generation of absent and dysfunctional fathers. So what can we do to change things? For those of us who have children, what can we do about changing ourselves, about being more present, more functional, and more wise fathers? First of all, while we’re incarcerated, there’s only so much we can do about being physically absent. No one is going to open the prison gates so that we can go and play with our kids or help them with their homework. But what we can begin to do is to send signals to our kids that we care and that we want to be present. We can begin to write, consistently. We can ask a lot of personal questions and then really pay attention when they answer. We can begin to pray for them, daily. We realize that this is still inadequate, and that our kids really need our physical presence, but it’s a healthy start. We can start behaving now in the way we’re going to be when we can be physically present again. As for becoming more functional and wise as fathers, there’s a lot we can do about that right now too. The goal is to become fathers who pass on our love and our wisdom to our kids. But the problem is, we can’t give what we don’t have. If we’re honest, we have to admit that most of us don’t have a lot of excess love and wisdom inside. If the best gift we can ever give our kids is a wise and loving father, then the best way to do that is for us to begin to be in touch with our wise and loving heavenly Father. Our earthly fathers may have left us. But our heavenly Father hasn’t. Our earthly fathers may have been absent. But our heavenly Father is always there for us. Our earthly fathers may have wasted their chance at father- hood. But our heavenly Father is a God of second chances, and is giving us a chance to learn from him what it is to be wise and loving. There’s still time to become the father your children need.
From Where I Sit: Tom Beatty, Director of New Life Corrections Ministry
Listen to some words of wisdom from Tom Beatty, a former inmate and now a prison chaplain, on being a man and a father.
We inmates (and former inmates) are handicapping our kids!
There are 2.2 million children under 18 now who have at least one incarcerated parent. Children of inmates are about 7 times more likely to be incarcerated than their peers. And kids from “fatherless homes” are
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