The Intentional Father

When he was around age ten or so, I started dropping hints. “Hey, man, when you turn thirteen, you’re going to enter into a sacred and ancient rite of moving from adolescence into manhood. And I want to tell you, this is going to be hard. It’s going to be scary. You’re not going to know what to do. But we’re going to walk through this together, and

One of the highlights of this time was Nate’s decision to get baptized. “Do you want to be a follower of Jesus?” I asked Nate after we had gone through this material. “Do you understand the gospel?” “Yes.” “Do you understand the biblical story? Are you committed to walking with God and practicing the ways of Jesus?” “Yes, I am.” “Do you want to do

There’s a line from The Power of Moments that resonated with me so much, and it’s this: “Beware the soul-sucking voice of reasonableness.”1 These moments I’m talking about have the power to change our lives forever, but they won’t be as powerful if we try to be just reasonable. We have to be unreasonable in the way we mark these moments.

And this changed everything for me and Nate, to the point where he said, “Dad, I’ll wake myself up every morning for this. I want to be good at being a man.”

Make a list of resources you’d like to use for each shift: Bible passages, biographies, movies, experiences, and anything else you can think of. Categorize them into the five different shifts. Plan to take at least a month or two on each shift. What challenge or challenges will you use to help your child understand each shift and identify its rewar

Adventures in Missions was an organization that, for over two decades, has been sending young adults around the world to do the exact program I was trying to create for Nate myself. They expose young people’s hearts to the poor, give them a vision for the kingdom of God, break off the spirit of entitlement and selfishness that often exists at that

We began by talking about fighting for the truth—also called apologetics. I tried to help Nate understand what it looks like to fight in forms outside of raw strength—what about fighting through legal capital, or authority, or privilege, or community action? These are all weapons that can be used in a battle, so how can we bring them to bear in a c

On the other hand, most men don’t have a clue who they are or who they’re supposed to be. Which means our sons don’t know how to become who they’re supposed to be, and that leads to a huge area of confusion. You can help eliminate this confusion for your son by walking through this chapter of self-discovery with him. Nate and I began this part of t

According to Wikipedia, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stages of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.”1 They’re in between. They’re neither here nor there.