Liberty and Confidence – Being Dad with Phil Lower, September 1, 2022

Have you ever seen a kid running full steam and kind of teeters off to the side and falls down?

What does that child do? They look up and see what mom and dad’s reaction is. If mom and dad are freaked out, they start crying. If they’re calmly watching, they get back up and go play.

Parents that want that child to grow up and understand their choices won’t make a great big fuss. They’ll tell them to get up, brush themselves off, and go on and play.

That child will grow up with greater confidence because of their experiences.

Liberty comes with a price. But, if you want your own liberty, you must defend other people’s liberty, too.

To be at liberty, you have to have the environmental and legal ability to make choices, even if those choices could hurt you, so you can learn from them.

To be confident in those choices, you have to have been burned, cut, scraped up, beat up, knocked down time and again. You have to have had broken relationships and strong relationships. You have to have lost money, lost opportunities, lost work, lost family and friends, made money, made or found opportunities, found work, created an opportunity for yourself or others, and grown new family and friends. That is life.

This also means that your children will grow up with a balanced understanding of the true nature of life and how to win.

My advice is to raise your kids with a box of Band-Aids and an air horn. The Band-Aids are for the booboos. The air horn is to warn them of danger and to celebrate their successes as loudly as possible.

Thoughts from Matthew 7:12

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