We are told to "seek first His kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be added to us" (Matt. 6:33). We want to know our children will grow to love us and their hearts will turn toward us as they continue to grow, but too often we try to make our children our numer one priority. We make them our world, and then we wonder why our godly parenting has not yielded that closeness. Jesus was starkly clear when he said in Luke 14:26 "if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brother and sister, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

Too many of us have made idols of our own children and spouses. We think we are loving them by doing this. We think we are raising and supporting good Christian families by doing that, but we are only idolaters.

We are not going to build strong families by our own diligence, but only if we seek God and his kingdom first...and then all these things will be added to you.

The solution is seeing parents, and particularly men, seek to be Christ followers FIRST. It is seeing men love Jesus Christ more than their mothers, fathers, wives, and even their children.

Because when we do this, we have a fellowship and connection with the greatest love of all. When we make an idol out of our kids or family members, we lose connection and fellowship with the source of greatest love.

When we love Jesus MORE than anything and anyone, He gives us all we need. He returns children's hearts to their fathers and fathers to their children (Malachi 4:5-6).

Though my dad never disowned me or walked away from me, I did do a lot of my growing up without my father around. He never wished for this, and I absolutely do not BLAME anyone for this life. Blaming anyone is a waste of time because I could be using that time and energy healing from the hole I had and have. I have done a lot of healing in my life, learning to be a man without having the constant input from a father. As Donald Miller wrote in his book Father Fiction, "wounds don't heal until you feel them." I began to feel the wounds years ago...probably in college. I began to ask myself questions about how I saw the absence of my father affected me.

Now again, I have to clarify that my dad is not some deadbeat dad who I am just now blaming for anything. He did his best to love me all he could from a distance. Divorce is crappy, and he did his best to love me throughout my entire life. That being said, truth still remains, I did a lot of growing up without a father, and of course that sucks...plain and simple. In that growth, though, I have learned a lot about who I really am as a man, but that only happened once I allowed myself to feel my wounds and grow through them.

I mean look at me now. I am a husband to my best friend, which is a fear [wound] I once thought I would never heal from. I am a father to 2 beautiful girls God has given to me, I am convinced, to wreck me each and every day. I am a man who desires to love my wife every single day with an integral outlook and dedication. I am learning to accomplish myself as a wounded healer. I am always healing wounds as I discover them, but I am much more of a man even now than I ever dreamed when I was younger. I can now resound with Miller:

"We are the ones who will wrestle with security who will overcome our fear of intimacy, who will learn the hard task of staying with woman and our children, who will mentor others through the difficult journey of life, perhaps rescuing them from what we have been rescued."