Summer 2016

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IN HIS BOOK POINT MAN , Steve Farrar
shares a powerful illustration of the impor-
tance of fathers throwing a rope to future
generations and not thinking so short term.
He uses climbing Mt. Everest as the ex-
ample. Like almost everyone who has ever
lived, he also has never climbed the world’s
largest mountain. But plenty have written
about it.
In order to climb Everest, one begins
with a 120-mile trek over a couple of weeks
that enables the team to become accli-
mated to the altitude. Any hike that begins
at 13,000 feet and goes to 20,000 feet is
tough. Various camps are established and
then the real ascent can begin.
In 1988, Jim Hayhurst, along with this
twenty-year-old son, Jimmy, was part of the
Canadian team that was making the ascent
to Everest. As they were trekking across the
Himalayas on the first stage of the climb,
they had to ford one of the many rivers
flowing down the lower part of Everest.
throwing a
SOLID ROPEto future generations
I
Patros Logos: a father’s words for homeschooling dads
That’s when Jimmy slipped on a rock and
fell into the fast-rushing river. He tumbled
and twisted down the river like a rag doll.
He tried to grab on to a rock, but the river
was simply moving too fast. Suddenly, he
stopped. His backpack had caught on a
rock in the middle of the river. And just
four feet away, the river tumbled over a cliff
and dropped one thousand feet to the val-
ley below.
Jim says of his son, “I couldn’t help him.
If I started toward him, I might dislodge
another rock, I might change the direction
or pressure of the water and he might slip
off the rock that was holding him above the
waterfall. I had to stand, twenty feet away
from my son, and watch him hang at the
edge of a 1,000 foot cliff, and I couldn’t do
a thing to help him.”
His son Jimmy slowly reached back, look-
ing for a secure handhold. His hand found
only loose rocks, nothing that could support
his weight. After minutes of grasping, Jim-
my finally found some rocks that didn’t shift
when he grasped them. He would be able to
put his weight on them. Now he needed a
way back upstream. “Throw me a rope,” he
called over his shoulder. They did. And by
the very slim margin of forty-eight inches,
he avoided falling a thousand feet to a sure
and swift death.
Christian dads have a sacred responsibil-
ity, metaphorically speaking, to “throw a
rope” to this generation, as well as the ones
to come. Life is too short to simply do “fly
by the seat” parenting/discipleship. It’s not
that there needs to be a 300-page manual
we diligently work through with our chil-
dren which encapsulates every shred of in-
formation we think is important to trans-
mit to future generations.
What is important is that we live with a
continual awareness that we are in fact pass-
ing our lives on to future generations. Every
time dad wrestles with his little girls or plays
ball with his boys, something important is
being transmitted. Every moment spent in
a posture of worship, prayer, praise, inter-
acting over eternal truths, or listening to
the Word of God preached is also transmit-
ting important information into the lives of
impressionable souls.
Likewise, every time we trivialize eternal
truths, bad-mouth the pastor behind his
back, find yet another lame excuse not to
attend church today, or yell at our children
for no good reason (a good reason being
that they are in imminent danger), we also
pass on our own sinful baggage.
For what it’s worth, I have read that if
you yell for eight years, seven months, and
six days, you will have produced enough
sound energy to heat one cup of coffee. Not
only is yelling an ineffective mode of heat-
ing coffee, it also tends to be an ineffective
mode of parenting.
Someone once said that the best thing
in the world that parents can do for their
children is to love God with all their hearts.
Sounds like a solid and biblical aspiration
to me!
The old Preacher in Ecclesiastes (3:1–8)
reminds us that there is a time for every
matter under heaven. Our times are in
God’s hands and we would do well to ac-