Skill

A father’s influence on their sons is profound. As young men, we look first to our fathers to help lay the foundation for our own future growth. They help us distinguish between right and wrong. They encourage our strengths and nurture our struggles to prepare us for the future.

But fathers aren’t perfect. Sometimes opportunities to teach life lessons or impart simple skills get lost in the chaos of life. And it’s easy to look back with longing and regret at those moments.

The point is to not dwell on mistakes. Rather, it is to learn about what you might want to prioritize as a father. So, what do their kids wish their dads taught them when they were still young. Here are five things they said:

1. How To Be Present

“I wish I had learned from my father the importance of experiencing life, moments, and relationships over working for the dollar. Make your living but be present. Cherish family because time is the one thing you can't get back.”

2. How To Know My Worth

“My father never taught me to be confident in myself. He was abusive and manipulative and I would doubt whether any actions or decisions were the right ones. One thing stands out in my mind is that I must cherish my own children and never make them feel inferior.”

3. How To Fix Things

“My dad was one of those guys who was very mechanically inclined. If I could go back in time to being a kid again, I would have asked my dad to take time to bring me in on some of his repair jobs. It would have given me much needed confidence when working with my hands, which happens a lot as a dad.”

4. How To Care

“My dad wasn't very present during my childhood. He was a traveling businessman and was gone 2-3 weeks of every month. The biggest thing he never showed me was how to care for the people I love.”

5. How To Problem Solve

“My dad was very much a ‘Let me do it’ kind of guy. He wanted to fix the problem rather than help us learn about it. I appreciate what he was trying to do, but I think it hindered my ability to think for myself while I was growing up.”

Picture this: you’re nestled comfortably in your airline seat cruising towards your holiday destination when a flight attendant’s voice breaks through the silence: “Ladies and gentlemen, both pilots are incapacitated. Are there any passengers who could land this plane with assistance from air traffic control?”

If you think you could manage it, you’re not alone. Surveys indicate about 30% of adult Americans think they could safely land a passenger aircraft with air traffic control’s guidance. Among male respondents, the confidence level rose to nearly 50%.

We’ve all heard stories of passengers who saved the day when the pilot became unresponsive. For instance, in 2022, Darren Harrison managed to land a twin-engine aircraft in Florida – after the pilot passed out – with the guidance of an air traffic controller. However, such incidents tend to take place in small, simple aircraft. Flying a much bigger and heavier commercial jet is a completely different game.

Takeoffs and landings are arguably the most difficult tasks pilots perform, and are always performed manually. Only on very few occasions, can a pilot use autopilot to land the aircraft for them. This is the exception, and not the rule.

Landing is complicated, and requires having precise control of the aircraft’s direction and descent rate. To land successfully, a pilot must keep an appropriate speed while simultaneously managing gear and flap configuration, adhering to air traffic regulations, communicating with air traffic control, and completing a number of paper and digital checklists.

Once the aircraft comes close to the runway, they must accurately judge its height, reduce power, and adjust the rate of descent – ensuring they land on the correct area of the runway. On the ground, they will use the brakes and reverse thrust to bring the aircraft to a complete stop before the runway ends. This all happens within just a few minutes.

Both takeoff and landing are far too quick, technical, and concentration-intensive for an untrained person to pull off. So, if you’ve never even learned the basics of flying, your chances of successfully landing a passenger aircraft with air traffic control’s help are close to zero.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Pride; Self-confidence; Self-exaltation – This illustration speaks to the overconfidence of the human nature. We have been encouraged to overestimate our abilities and underestimate our shortcomings in today’s culture; 2) Criticism; Pastor; Minister – This could also apply to a church setting in which members criticize the performance of the pastor and leadership and often have the thought “I could do their job so much better!”

In the dead of night at the heart of the Colombian jungle, army radios crackled to life with the message the nation had been praying for: "Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle." The military code revealed that four children missing in the jungle for 40 days had all been found--alive.

The youngsters, all members of the indigenous Huitoto people, had been missing since the light plane they were travelling in crashed into the Amazon on May 1, 2023. The tragedy killed their mother and the two pilots and left the children--aged 13, nine, four, and one--stranded alone in an area teeming with snakes, jaguars, and mosquitos.

Rescuers initially feared the worst, but footprints, partially eaten wild fruit and other clues soon gave them hope that the children might be alive after they left the crash site looking for help. Over the next six weeks, the children battled the elements in what Colombia's President Gustavo Petro called "an example of total survival which will remain in history."

If there were ever children well-prepared to tackle such an ordeal, the Mucutuy family were the ones. Huitoto people learn hunting, fishing, and gathering from an early age, and their grandfather told reporters that the eldest children were well acquainted with the jungle.

Speaking to Colombian media, the children's aunt said the family would regularly play a “survival game” together growing up. She recalled, “When we played, we set up little camps. Thirteen-year-old Lesly knew what fruits she can't eat, because there are many poisonous fruits in the forest. And she knew how to take care of a baby.”

After the crash, Lesly built makeshift shelters from branches held together with her hair ties. She also recovered fariña, a type of cassava flour, from the wreckage of the Cessna plane they had been travelling in. The children survived on the flour until it ran out and then they ate seeds. The fruit from the avichure tree, also known as milk tree, is rich in sugar and its seeds can be chewed like chewing gum.

But they still faced significant challenges surviving in the inhospitable environment. Indigenous expert Alex Rufino said the children were in “a very dark, very dense jungle, where the largest trees in the region are.” In addition to avoiding predators, the children also endured intense rainstorms.

John Moreno, leader of the Guanano group in the south-eastern part of Colombia where the children were brought up, said they had been "raised by their grandmother," a widely respected indigenous elder. He said, “They used what they learned in the community, relied on their ancestral knowledge in order to survive.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is the duty of parents and the church community to train up children to survive and thrive in the hostile environment of the world. It is literally “a jungle out there” for our children and they must be prepared when they are young.

Condoleezza Rice, the former diplomat and Secretary of State, was a sophomore in college majoring in piano performance, working toward a professional musical career. That summer, she went to study and perform at the Aspen Musical Festival, a prestigious and competitively sought honor.

While there, she came into contact with, as she put it, “11-year-olds who could play from sight what had taken me all year to learn.” She knew that she could not compete with people of such innate talent. She knew she would never be the best, and that meant this wasn't the path she wanted to pursue.

At the start of her junior year, she changed her major from music to international relations. And the rest is history.

Rice earned graduate degrees in political science from Notre Dame and would go on to become an expert on the Soviet Union and eventually foreign policy. She served as the National Security advisor and then US Secretary of State, as the first woman of color to do so.

Her life, and the future lives of countless others, was changed that fateful day when 19-year-old “Condi” decided she would not be a pianist. She didn't waste time staring at a door that was closing, but instead, while the opportunity was still ripe, pushed a new one open.

2022 saw some truly bizarre Guinness World Records, including:

• Fastest time to find and alphabetize the letters in a can of alphabet soup (2 minutes and 8.6 seconds).
• The farthest tightrope walk in high heels (639 feet, in four-inch stilettos)
• The largest gathering of people with the same first and last name (178 Hirokazu Tanakas in Japan, beating the 2005 record of 164 Martha Stewarts).
• Fastest time to eat 10 Carolina Reaper chilies.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This is a lighthearted look at human “accomplishments.” But it does raise the question, “What new and innovative activity can you accomplish for the Lord and his Kingdom this year? How can you use your spiritual gift to unlock new avenues of service or outreach for the Lord?”

An article in The Wall Street Journal noted a new highly prized management skill—empathy. According to the article,

Empathetic leadership has long had corporate disciples. But the concept has become a bigger focus of [corporate leadership] as businesses seek ways to bolster staff worn down by the pandemic’s stresses, or at least show they are trying. Appreciating co-workers’ points of view and understanding their struggles, some executives say, leads to more engaged, happy, and productive staff. Many workers say that is lacking.

For example, the ticketing company Eventbrite Inc. began an empathy-focused leadership development program in 2020 that all managers can take. It includes lessons on active listening, showing vulnerability, and building trust with employees. Cisco Systems Inc. says it is building leader and team-coaching courses that weave in empathy. In one course, participants spend eight hours learning about each others’ strengths and personal styles, as well as how to better understand and trust each other.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Of course, empathy is a good quality, but the Bible and Jesus identified this human need before any management experts did.

One hundred years ago (1922), a Minnesota man named Ralph Samuelson went to a local lumberyard. Most people would have said that Samuelson found two ordinary eight-foot-long pine boards. But Samuelson had a more creative idea. He saw two water skis. Here’s the backstory on his invention of waterskiing.

Samuelson lived in Minnesota and wondered if you could ski on water the way you could on snow. At 18, he made his own skis and had his brother pull him behind his boat. He unsuccessfully tried snow skis and barrel staves before realizing that he needed something that covered more surface area on the water. That’s when Samuelson spotted two eight-foot-long, nine-inch-wide pine boards.

Using his mother’s wash boiler, he softened one end of each board, then clamped the tips with vises so they would curve upwards. He affixed leather straps to hold his feet in place and acquired 100 feet of window sash cord to use as a tow rope. Finally, he hired a blacksmith to make a small iron ring to serve as the rope’s handle.

Samuelson tried several different approaches. In most of his attempts, he started with his skis level with or below the water line; but by the time his brother got the boat going, Samuelson was sinking.

Finally, he tried raising the tips of the skis out of the water while he leaned back—and it worked. As his brother steered the boat, Samuelson cruised along behind him. To this day, this is still the position that water skiers assume. Samuelson began performing tricks on his skis and crowds as large as 1,000 came out to watch him.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Creativity; Persistence; Vision – Those who are truly successful often start with a dream and persist despite setbacks. Just because it has never been tried before, doesn’t mean it can’t work. 2) Skill; Spiritual Gifts; Talent – God gives different gifts to his people to use for the common good. Don’t neglect your gift, but use it to glorify God and to serve his people.

Author Lyall Watson, writing about the culture and habits of pigs, concludes that when young pigs play it is voluntary, random, and stimulated by novelty. “Jumping where there is nothing to jump over, running without going anywhere, fleeing when there is no enemy to flee from--all these are actions that lack any obvious function. They appear to be undertaken purely for pleasure.” Young wild boars chase windfall apples as readily as kittens chase balls of wool.

We call such behavior “play” and find no difficulty in recognizing it when we see it. It is easy to distinguish. An animal involved in play-fleeing or play-fighting looks very different from one seriously occupied in flight or fight. But it would be wrong to regard play just as something opposed to work. It is far more important than that.

Play is voluntary. You can’t make someone play or legislate play into being. A pig wearing a silly hat and jumping through a hoop isn’t playing. Play implies, pleasure, fun, and a definite lack of constraint. It’s something that comes more naturally to the young than it does to adults.

Play is almost certainly a complex collection of activities that are not just frivolous. The amount of time spent on it by young animals suggests that it is important; and a lack of it may impair the acquisition of vital social abilities. Play seems to be necessary for a healthy brain in pigs as well as people.

Sally-Lloyd Jones, the author of the popular Jesus Storybook Bible for Children, tells the following story about visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York City:

A few years ago, I overheard someone commenting on a piece of [modern] non-representational art. I think it was a Rothko [a 20th century American abstract painter]. "My child could to that!" someone said. I take that as a compliment.

“My child could do that.” But really, isn't that the point? Artists like Rothko were specifically drawn to children's art. Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

The power of a child's art is defined by what they can't do--by their lack. They know they can't do it. And as a result, their art is not about showing off skill or expertise. It's coming from somewhere else. It's all heart ... A child is physically not able to master [pencil or paints]. They struggle to depict things--and every line has heart ... The power of the art of a child comes not from their ability or their strength. It comes from their weakness, their not being able, their vulnerability.

Over the course of several months, Peter Skillman conducted a study pitting the skill of elite university students against that of the average kindergartner. Groups of four built structures using 20 pieces of spaghetti, 1 yard of tape, 1 yard of string, and 1 marshmallow. The only rule, the marshmallow had to end up on top.

Business students began by diagnosing the task, formulating a solution, and assigning roles. The kindergarteners, by contrast, got right to work, trying, failing, and trying again. Author Daniel Coyle explains the outcome, “We presume skilled individuals will combine to produce skilled performance.” But this assumption is wrong. In dozens of trials, the kindergartners built structures that averaged 26 inches tall, while the business school students built structures that averaged less than 10 inches.

We see smart, experienced business school students, and we find it difficult to imagine that they would combine to produce a poor performance. We see unsophisticated, inexperienced kindergartners, and we find it difficult to imagine that they would combine to produce a successful performance . . . individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.

The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.