Today we had a great time with Melinda on Moody's Midday Connection talking about Extreme Grandparenting: The Ride of Your Life, one of our favorite subjects. When we wrote this book and created the DVD study to go with it, we wanted to challenge this whole group of today's Grandparents not to miss the incredible opportunity they have to influence the next generation. During the interview, I was reminded of how easy it would be for grandparents to stop growing in their faith and wisdom – to rest on their laurels and determine that they were just going to coast to the finish line.

That would be a terrible decision and a huge waste of the dividend years. Grandparents have so much to give to their children and grandchildren, but to do so we need to remain wisdom hunters and continue to be students of God's Word. Our use of technology is such a great illustration of this challenge. Everyday, I feel like I have to come up the learning curve on some new piece of equipment, program or application in order to just survive and take advantage of all of the wonderful uses of technology. It is the same way with our role as a grandparent. In order to remain relevant and useful, we are compelled to keep learning about God and seeking His wisdom. Our Grandkids need to see that a life of faith is worth living and we can let our own lives show them that it is. What a great goal! I hope it encourages all of us grandparents to keep keeping on.

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If you are a parent, God is asking you to do something special just for Him.

You have been singled out to do a favor for God. He is asking you to be His representative to a small but vital part of the next generation. He needs someone to be His voice, His arms, and His heart. He chose you. He chose you to assist Him in a miracle. He gave you children and then said, “Now go and give these precious lives meaning.”

Sounds great in theory, but you wonder how you are going to accomplish that. The answer is actually not that difficult . . . all you need to do is treat your children the way God treats you. He does it with grace. And here’s the good part. If the only thing you get right as parents is raising your kids through the example and power of God’s grace, everything else will be just fine.

As a parent, you never know where or when God is going to give you a high five. We (Tim, me, our granddaughters and their mom, Karis) were following Colt to a “super cool, newly discovered” swimming hole on Oak Creek in Sedona, AZ. In single file, we were all trailing our 6’4”, super buff trail guide as we made our way to this highly hyped, hidden spot that promised to entice the grand girls to jump into the creek and catch some crawdads.

As we climbed over red rocks and around fallen trees, I was visiting with this shirtless, bronzed college age son of mine. Tim and I had arrived in Sedona one day ahead of the rest of our family and I was telling Colt that one of things we did was go to the grocery store that night to buy all of the food for our family vacation.

“Mom, did you go to Safeway”?

“As a matter of fact, we did.”

“Did you see that they had blackberries for 99¢”?

I barely got a “yes, I did” out before I fell off of the rock I was scaling. Here we were in the middle of Oak Creek Canyon and my son, who up until this point could have cared less what groceries cost, was sharing shopping tips with me. Fortunately, he was ahead of me and didn’t see the simultaneous look of shock and the wide smile that spread across my face.

99¢ blackberries are a good deal but the bigger bargain was the pay off of watching one of our kids fending for himself. It’s amazing how conscientious they become about money when they are earning it and trying to make it go as far as it can.

As we arrived at our beautiful destination, I realized that I had just gotten confirmation of another destination reached along the trail of parenthood – financial responsibility. I will never eat another blackberry without smiling at this great memory.

BTW: Please keep Colt in your prayers along with all of the other firemen and emergency crews who are fighting the wild fires in Arizona right now. Thanks!

I'm left-handed.

I began my elementary education in a school designed for right-handed students. My desk had an armrest on the right side. The lady with the hairnet in the cafeteria always placed our eating utensils on the right side of our tray, along with our carton of milk.

It drove me nuts.

The biggest frustration came in how I was taught to write. Your paper is supposed to be slanted in a parallel angle to your writing arm. That means I should have slanted my paper with the top turned toward the right corner of my desk, the same direction that my left arm lays. That wasn’t allowed. I had to slant my paper with the top toward the left corner of the desk, like all the right-handers did. This caused real problems. Instead of my writing arm setting the same direction as the paper, my arm came in from the left, forming an upside-down V with the paper. This required me to have to crook my wrist and technically write upward on the paper instead of side-to-side.

For years I used the emotional stress from all of this harsh treatment from my first- and second-grade teachers as an explanation for the parade of poor conduct grades that followed me through most of my schooling. Turns out, I was just easily distracted and talked too much. When I was in the seventh grade, my father went to a sales convention and found a device to put on your pencil or pen that wouldn’t allow you to crook your wrist as you write. If you did, the device forced the tip of your writing instrument off of the paper. The person who sold him the device also mentioned one other thing: “Make sure your son slants his paper in the same direction of his left arm.”

The effect was instant and dramatic.

My handwriting immediately improved. The speed at which I could take notes also stepped up. As it turned out, I had a bit of gift in drawing too.

Unfortunately, my conduct grades stayed the same…

This story was excerpt from Dr. Kimmel’s book, Discovering Your Child’s Heart, which is part of the Kids Flag Page package.

There aren’t a lot of pictures of my father among the old black and white photos of my family of origin, for the same reason there aren’t many pictures of me in the many albums you can look through in our home. There are thousands of photos of the four Kimmel kids (collectively and individually). There are just as many of Darcy with the four Kimmel kids. You can find them smiling into the camera at Disneyland, in Paris and London, on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, and at the hundreds of other locations that formed the backdrop to many wonderful Kimmel memories.

But there aren’t many of me. It would be easy to conclude from the evidence that me and my father were not present for these Kodak moments—the birthdays, graduations, vacations, Christmases and special occasions that made up the critical years of our children’s youth. But that would be a mistake. I was there, just like my father and the countless other fathers who have very little visibility in family albums. We just weren’t in the picture.

We were taking it.

It is to us fathers that God has given a vital role of spending a lot of time working behind the scenes. We’re the producer, financier, cameraman, and the guy in charge of security. It is our job to make sure the on-going drama being played out at center stage in our families ultimately has a meaningful ending.

Obviously, there are some family albums that don't have any pictures of dad. Maybe he was deployed; vigilantly maintaining a post for his family as well as everyone else’s on the edge of some foreign battlefield. To him we stand and salute. Maybe he had passed away. To him, we bow our heads and remember. Maybe the winds of regret or the circumstances within relationships removed him from the scene. For him, we must find a place in our hearts to forgive.

But most of the dads were there. They just don’t show up much when you look back through the albums. You can’t see them, but you can feel them. That’s because they were not only there, but they’re still there, in your heart.

Maybe the next time you look at one of your family albums crowded with pictures taken by your father, you might want to see it from his perspective. He was looking through the lens when that particular moment was captured. You were his pride and his hope. You were then. You still are now.

To all of those fathers who weren’t in the picture but did so much to make it happen I say, Happy Father’s Day.

©Copyright 2010 Family Matters and Dr. Tim Kimmel

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