Charlie's 14th

Ok, I'm off by a day, but we're celebrating it tonight. H and I and Charlie at Pizza House. Last year, I had a few guys over to help bring him into his 13th (nothing bizarre, no hazing, just a campfire). This is the letter I wrote and read to him then. It's good for me--and for Charlie, I hope--to think of these things again, a year later:



Dear Charlie,
There's nothing magical about your 13th birthday. You've been baptized into Christ's church, and you've proclaimed publicly your faith in him, so the milestones that matter most are behind you. But some of us have noticed that we're not very good at acknowledging our boys becoming young men, so we thought we'd do something about that. This may not the best way to do it, but it's a start. We've been experimenting on you all along, and we see no reason to stop now.

In 1 Cor 13, Paul writes, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." We don't want to read too much into this. Maybe Paul had in mind a specific time when he became a man; his culture certainly gave it more thought than we do. But we can say that Paul saw a time when he was a child and a time when he was a man, when childish things--childish speech, thoughts, and reasoning--had to be put away and grown-up things put on. No, we're not saying that you need to put away all things of childhood. We want you to enjoy the good things God has given you. But we are saying that you need to hold onto these things loosely and with the discernment of a Godly man, to put on more and more the new self, to seek those things that we know make up biblical manhood. To put it simply, we want you to pursue Christ as a man of God does. These are the things that all the men here tonight are striving in God's strength to do.

So I've decided to do this tonight with several purposes in mind: one, to give you a kind of peg to help organize your growing-up memories, that there might be in your thinking, years from now, at time that you can point back to and say, "I became a young man then." We do this to put before you a charge - that Christ calls you, as his man, to obedience to him, to conformity to the Word of God. We do this as a promise to you - that we will help you in this, disciple you in this, and bear with you any burdens or joys God brings you to as you grow into manhood. But mostly, we're doing this to pray, to commend you to our Lord as a brother who's starting a new, wonderful, often confusing period of life.

I love you very much, Charlie. You're my oldest son, and though I can't say I love you more than your siblings, I can say that I've loved you longest. I've also prayed longer for you, that you would grow in grace and in the knowledge of Gd. We want to continue that tonight. So listen carefully, think back often on what you hear these men say--and I'll help you to do that--but most of all cling to Christ, the only one who can show you what being a real man means.

Now, as I've said to you often as you're going to bed, May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you tonight, and always.  

Love, Dad.