First, let me say Happy Father’s Day to all the dad’s out there. You (we) truly deserve some credit for being dude’s in a world where being a dude is not so cool anymore…When my father was younger, being ‘the man of the house’ was important and carried with it a lot of weight and responsibility. Being his youngest son (and his being an older father), I was raised with a different set of values than most of my peers. Something happened in the 60′s and 70′s to change the nature of fatherhood completely. I don’t know if it was Vietnam, Woodstock, Feminism, the killing of God, or what but certainly my fathers’ way of raising kids and being a man quickly went by the wayside in popular culture. And there were so many things about his way that were great! Men stayed with their families through thick and thin. They earned the money and their wives raised the children from home. More than once I heard the phrase “wait till your father gets home” and that truly meant something to me (I had messed up and dad was going to set me straight).

Today, our kids don’t respect their parents the way we used to. I didn’t fear my father but I certainly respected his authority. My kids don’t have that same sense of respect for me and I used to believe that I’d failed in raising them but I’m not sure that’s correct. I can tell because my oldest child thinks that the youngest child should respect him as her elder. Obviously, the lesson to respect your elders has penetrated but the application is self-centered rather than centered on others. Maybe that’s the difference in the generations. The last couple of generations don’t really care about anything outside of their own little world. Somehow we’ve become a world where our ‘fellow man’ does not extend beyond the realm of those we know or who we can benefit from. So this Father’s Day I’m asking you to think about how well you empathize with others. Empathy is almost foreign to the current generation. The ability to put ourselves in anothers’ shoes not to walk a mile in them but to feel what the other person is feeling and just to understand. We’ve removed that in our goal-oriented society where we need to know what we will gain from doing something and if that gain takes longer than a day, it’s just not worth it.

So, starting today, let’s take a moment to understand someone else. Someone who we don’t stand to gain from in our understanding. Maybe it’s our Pastor whose message today doesn’t fit well with our definition of God. Maybe it’s the waitress who appears to be distracted or rude. Maybe it’s the teenager covered in tattoo’s with 75-80 piercings who would normally receive your scorn. Every one of these people (and everyone else that we meet) have a story and a need. So many times we want to fix that need when really they just want someone to listen and understand, without judgment, without trying to fix it (which is a form of judgment), but with empathy…