Parenting, Fathers & the Flight Plan of Faith: What Actually Transfers

Here’s a number that’s been sitting on me since the weekend: 940 Saturdays.

That’s roughly how many you get with a kid from the day they’re born to the day they leave for college. If your child is five, you’ve already spent a few hundred of them. If they’re fifteen, you can count what’s left. That number will either wake you up or break your heart. Probably both.

We had a friend in the pulpit this Father’s Day, and he said something I can’t shake. Most of us are pouring our energy into having the right strategy — the right schools, the right activities, the right schedule — when what our kids actually need from us is the right values. Those aren’t the same thing. You can run a tight ship and still miss the whole point. You can fill every hour on the calendar and still feel like you’re missing each other in your own house.

Here’s the deal: the values in our home are either what we create or what we allow. There’s no third option. If we don’t build them on purpose, the culture is glad to build them for us — through screens, through comparison, through the quiet lie that performance equals worth. A lot of us have been parenting on autopilot, hoping it works out, secretly afraid it won’t.

And I think the reason that lands so hard is that it isn’t really a parenting problem. It’s a gospel problem. The thing we most want to give our kids — a settled sense that they’re loved, that they’re enough, that their worth isn’t tied to a scoreboard — is the exact thing the gospel gives us first. We love because He first loved us. You can’t hand your kids a security you’ve never received yourself. But when you know you’re a son or daughter of God — chosen, named, kept — you finally have something real to pass down.

That’s what frees you. It means you don’t have to be a perfect parent; you just have to be a faithful one. Our kids don’t need us to pretend we’ve got it all together. They need to watch us pray when we’re scared. They need to see us worship on a Sunday we don’t feel like it. They need to hear us say, “I was wrong — will you forgive me?” Because the apology your kid watches you make might be the most powerful sermon they ever hear. You cannot subcontract that. The church gets about 100 hours a year with your child. You get over 3,000.

Our friend told a story about settling his late father’s accounts. The man had almost nothing — a small apartment, a modest check. After the final bills cleared, the account was actually overdrawn, and his whole inheritance came down to three pennies the teller slid back across the counter. Three pennies. And he said he wouldn’t trade them for the world, because what his dad really left him wasn’t in that account. It was in him — work ethic, presence, a faith his father didn’t just talk about but lived. The question was never going to be what his dad accumulated. It was what transferred.

That’s the question for all of us — parents, grandparents, mentors, anyone pouring into a kid who isn’t even theirs. Not what are you accumulating, but what are you transferring? Someday the people you love will take stock of what you actually left them, and it won’t be the stuff.

So here’s one concrete thing to do this week. Don’t overhaul your life. Just take one ordinary moment — the drive home, dinner with the phones face-down, the few minutes before bed — and be all the way present for it. No performance, no agenda. Just you, showing up. Presence matters more than perfection, and the ordinary Tuesday is usually where the real stuff transfers.

You don’t have to fly a perfect flight. You just have to keep flying, faithfully, and trust the God who’s building the house right alongside you.

We’d love to have you join us on Sunday.