Lisa Barry: As the pace of society quickens more every day, it seems the amount and quality of our time is in decline. There are so many things clamoring for our attention and we're led to believe that each thing needs to be sandwiched in somehow. But is that really the truth?

Today on Gateway To Joy, Elisabeth Elliot talks one final time to fathers about their most important role. If you're a father listening, what sort of essay do you think your children would write about you? Would they speak of a strict taskmaster who runs a tight ship? Or would they go on and on about special times and things you've done together? Let's join Elisabeth now as she talks about being available to our children and making ourselves known. Here she is.

Elisabeth Elliot: "You are loved with an everlasting love." That's what the Bible says. "And underneath are the everlasting arms." This is your friend Elisabeth Elliot, talking again to fathers. "A Child is a Father's Call." By that title, I mean that when God gives you a child, God has issued a call--a serious call to you as a father to be to that child, whether it's a son or a daughter, what a father is supposed to be.

How blessed we were in the home that we grew up in in having a father who took us out for walks and to interesting places on Saturday afternoons, a father who called our attention to the birds and imitated birds to almost absolute perfection, a father who noticed things, even though he had only one eye. He had lost an eye through a childhood disobedience when he was twelve years old. But with that one eye, he could see more than we could see with two eyes. He would be pointing sometimes to a bird that was up in a tree. It would take us five minutes to see it. He had trained his eye and his ear.

On weekdays, there were occasions when we were able to go to visit his office, which was in Philadelphia. It was a pretty crummy building. It's still there on Thirteenth Street. And it's a very trashy neighborhood now. It wasn't much of anything back in those days, either. But that was where he spent his whole life, working as an editor of a magazine which was then called The Sunday School Times.

And we just loved to be taken into his office. I can still see the huge, clattering Linotype machine, and the operator would make some lead slugs with our names on them, and we treasured those, of course. I can see my father's dusty little room with the golden oak desk, family pictures on it, a dark green blotter, a neat little tray of paper clips, pencils that were always sharpened and all their points going in the same direction, and his old-fashioned dictating machine.

He explained things to us. He showed us around. He was proud to introduce us to the people in the office. I always dreaded, from the time I was about seven or eight years old, going into the office for one reason. I loved it, but the one thing I did dread was being trotted around to see all the "girls." My father called the women who worked in the office girls. I don't think any of them were under 50 years old.

But they would always say, "Oh, is this Mr. Howard's little girl? Oh, my goodness, how you've grown!" I just cringed, because of course I was long and lean and skinny and shy.

I want to ask you fathers, "Are you a mystery to your child?" Do they have any idea what you actually do when you leave the house? Let's think about this. Let me read some more from my grandfather's book, Father and Son. I want to emphasize again--this is not a book that you can find in the bookstore. You might find it in some dusty old library, but it's not in print. It's written by Philip E. Howard, who was my father's father.

"One New England farmer almost always maintained that his boys could not do the farm work as it ought to be done. They might try, of course, but he himself slaved early and late to do the things he might have taught them to do. It was a mental slant of his to keep boys just outside the enthusiastic, expectant training of their highest possibilities by letting them understand that there were some things quite beyond them.

One son pushed his energetic way upward in spite of this training, while the other son deteriorated under it until the day came when the first son was supporting his father's family; and for the most part, the brother and his family.

In no realm of human mystery is the growing boy more curious and sensitive than in all that pertains to sex. In nothing, I think, it may be safely said is the average father more reluctant, more remiss, more helpless and blind than in dealing with his son's rightful desire to know the foundational sex facts.

Yet there is no subject touching our human relationships and God's plan for our lives, save the one supreme question of a boy's primary relation to Christ, that brings father and son into such an intimacy as that in which the father takes his son into his confidence on the sex problems that every boy must face.

Many of us have been afraid to do it. That's the plain truth. We are afraid of telling too early the essentials of sex, and we're afraid that we may not know how to tell the story properly and wisely at any time. But there are two things in which we have reason enough to be afraid: Our own blind notion that somehow it will all come out right and our own fear of tackling the task.

Not to try to help the growing boy in this is infinitely worse than not doing it as well as we might wish. We can harm him more by silence than we are at all likely to harm him by premature knowledge. As a matter of tested fact, no father need bother his head very much about the danger of thrusting this subject upon his young son as one about which the boy is not thinking. The probability is that by the time the father makes up his mind to give his son the needful sex facts, the son will have heard enough that is misleading and vile to give the father a man's job in uprooting the choking weeds.

Why, man, wasn't it so with you when you were a youngster? What would you give today to get memory entirely clear of the tarnish that came before you were ten years old? Your white-souled little boy, with his glad face and fine spirit and loving ways, is no more exempt than you were, and perhaps just now not so separate as you may have been from the atmosphere of contamination.

There seems to be a moral, soft, coal smoke in the very air of our social conditions that turns to a dull gray any new snowfall. It makes a great difference whether your boy knows the wonderful story of sex truth from you, or a drab perversion of the story from the ignorant or worse."

May I suggest a tiny little booklet? This is Elisabeth Elliot talking now, not my grandfather. But I did write a little booklet for children between the ages of 10 and 16. It is most emphatically for both boys and girls. I get a little tired with this assumption that books on sexual purity are exclusively for girls.

Where do people get that idea? It does take two to tango. It should be equally important, if not even more important, to instruct your sons more than your daughters, perhaps earlier than you would instruct your daughters. In either case, let me recommend a little book called Sex is a Lot More Than Fun. It's just a thin booklet, twelve pages, for kids between the ages of 10 and 16, a plea to preserve the priceless gift that can only be given once. That gift is called virginity.

Now back to my grandfather's book. He's telling a story. "We were in Italy at the time. I don't know just what led the older boy to ask questions on the subject just then, but it was during a vacation period when we were together as a family. It was down by the lakeside on Como that the youngster asked me if I could tell him how babies are born. I saw that the moment had come when his interest in the question was keen and reasonable. I asked him to go with me to our rooms.

There, overlooking the lake, we sat by the wide windows while I told him much of the wonderful birth story. I was led to make the whole occasion as natural and beautiful as I could, and I reminded him of the flowers and birds that he loved, the nests with the delicate eggs resting in them, the young birds coming from the eggs, the chickens under the care of the mother hen, the kittens that he had often seen as the mother cat fed them and watched over them.

The boy listened as sedately as one could wish. He glanced over the lake to the mountains beyond. He gazed steadily into my eyes and nodded, with an occasional, 'Yes, I see,' until I said that very much as the mothers of whom I had been telling him brought their little ones into the world, so the baby's mother cared for the little baby life within her own dear body, keeping him safe close to her own heart.

Then the boy's eyes opened wide. I told of the months of care before the baby could live out in the air and light like the rest, and that finally when he had grown to be just such a small baby as the boy had often seen, he was ready to leave the mother's body by a way God had prepared.

'So you see,' I said very quietly, 'why it is that I have always told you how much I loved my own mother and why any boy'--but the boy was standing now, his eyes flashing with excitement. His hands were clenched and he began to stride up and down the room. What happened to him? Was it all a blunder to tell him so much?

'Oh, isn't that wonderful! Isn't that wonderful!' he was saying. 'I don't wonder that you loved your mother.' Then his voice choked, and what he said about his own mother is one of the confidences of father and son. I can never forget the scene as the child, all elated with the revelation of the mystery of sonship and mother love, fairly glowed with the fervor of a new and understanding purpose to know his mother as never before. That was an hour of mountain outlook, new intimacy and opening channels for later frank talks between us.

An almost identical experience was a similar conversation with the younger brother, with complete breaking down of any wrong reserve between father and sons on the problem that involves such far-reaching issues for the growing boy."

I challenge you fathers, talk to your sons before they have the opportunity to hear it in the gutter. Tell them about God's beautiful plan for sex.

Lisa Barry: We only have a minute and a half remaining before we say good-bye to this series, and I want to be sure you have one last opportunity to hear about the Father's Day gift package. We don't offer too many things that are specifically geared to fathers, and that's why this is so important. Dads have a tough job and they deserve a helping hand. Unfortunately, there aren't too many resources out there that encourage a biblical view of fatherhood.

Here's a chance to get helpful books, this tape series and a few leaflets all with Dad in mind. One of the books is Hints on Child Training by Elisabeth's great-grandfather, Henry Clay Trumbull. If you haven't done so already, give us a call and tell the operator that you'd like to invest in the Dad in your family.

Here's how to get in touch with us. Our phone number is 1-800-759-4JOY. That's 1-800-759-4569. Or you can write to us at: Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. Our Internet ministry address is gatewaytojoy.org. Gateway To Joy has been a production of Back to the Bible.

This is Lisa Barry, and for all of us here at Gateway To Joy, have a great weekend.