Lisa Barry: Is there anyone listening to me today who feels nervous about one or more of their child's friends or the schooling he or she is getting? These are common concerns. Today on Gateway To Joy, Elisabeth Elliot shares some wisdom on the subject from her grandfather. All this week Elisabeth has been reading excerpts from his insightful book that unfortunately is no longer being printed. But rest assured, we'll hear enough of the material to make a difference if we apply the things we're learning. Let's join Elisabeth now as she continues our focus on fathers and their unmistakable call to fatherhood. That's next on today's edition of Gateway to Joy.

Elisabeth Elliot: "You are loved with an everlasting love." That's what the Bible says. "And underneath are the everlasting arms." I've been talking this week about a child being a father's call. God calls you to fatherhood when He gives you a child. Are you fathering your child?

The story is told in my grandfather's little book called Father and Son, which is sadly out of print, about a little boy who was very sensitive and timid, and he always slept in a little trundle bed which was rolled under his parents' bed by day and brought out at night. When he went to bed at night, he could hear his parents' voices sitting in the sitting room across the hall. So it seemed to him that he never slept, because when he went to bed they were up, and when he got up in the morning, they were already up, too.

After loving good night words and kisses had been given him by both his parents, he nestled down to rest. This little boy was accustomed night after night to rouse up once more and to call out from his trundle bed to his strong-armed father in the room from which the light gleamed out, "Are you there, Papa?" The answer would come back cheerily, "Yes, my child. I'm here."

"You'll take care of me tonight, Papa, won't you?" was then his question. "Yes, I'll take care of you, my child," was the comforting response. "Go to sleep now. Good-night." And the little fellow would fall asleep restfully in the thought of those assuring, good-night words.

I've had many letters from women whose husbands do not seem to fathom at all the supreme importance of the job that the Lord of the universe has assigned to them: To husband their wives and to father their children. Not father merely in the sense of begetting them, bringing fertility to their wives, but father in the sense of recognizing that God has given them this child. He has called them to fatherhood. It is a summons, a privilege, a solemn duty, a serious call, and one of the greatest joys that God gives a man who receives it with thanksgiving.

I had a letter from a wife who was trying her best to hold the family together. Her husband was an alcoholic. Her job seemed a lonely one. Once again today, I appeal to you fathers, reading more from my grandfather's eloquent book, Father and Son. He speaks of the importance of the father knowing where the children are.

"Within the same gang, there were boys who meant quite different things to Dave." I'm skipping some things here. "They were not seen much in his home. They met mostly at school, on the streets, usually in an incidental touch-and-go fashion, and sometimes in a clash with a tough bunch that tried to terrorize the town, sometimes playing circus or Indian or walking on stilts or coasting on the glare crust of snow on the steep Vermont hillsides.

How much did Dave's father know about that gang? About Gene, on the one hand, and Charlie on the other. And how much of the home training, the home atmosphere, would go with Dave, when with a shout he would beat it out of the front gate and down the street in answer to the beckonings of the bunch in the distance?

Eight years old, and even then an enthusiastic member of a social group outside the home. And that is the law. The outer contacts are inevitable. Dave cannot, should not, indeed live on the inside of the front gate. Your problem as a father is not how to stave off as long as possible the schooling he gets and gives in his own boyhood social groups, but how to guide it and convert it into useful material for his total development.

There's hardly a greater general problem of fatherhood as related to the boy in the years just preceding the teens than the entrance of these collateral influences into the child's life. For in one sense, they are beyond parental advance control. That is to say, they come like gusts of wind on an inland lake from any and all directions, and not in accordance with the prevailing wind.

Outside the home, every boy is exposed to these collateral, extra-parental influences of his gang or bunch, and to many other influences besides. He may pick up a magazine in the home of a chum."

I guess some of my listeners don't even know this vocabulary that's 70 years old. Chums are buddies or friends. "He may pick up a magazine in the home of a chum and in two minutes get mentally mired in bogs, the very existence of which was unknown to him.

Even in the moment of writing these words, a man in middle-life entered the library where I am at work and we greeted each other as old friends. I'm startled as I recall a talk we had when we were small boys. He was a boy of unusual ability, in which he brokenheartedly told me of the persistent attempts of one of the bunch in our city street to break down his boyhood purity. I remember as of yesterday the distress in his voice as he confided in me, his chum.

He passed through the tempest of boyhood by the grace of God into a life of usefulness in business and in the church. But it was true that in those days, his home knew nothing of his testing times. His father? Well, his father was not living then. But if he had been?

Come now, how many of us as fathers really are alive, really know what are the influences for good or for evil that are flowing about our boys outside the home? We cannot always forestall them or manipulate them to our liking, but we can at least know them and help the boy to see them level-eyed. We must find out what these influences are by quiet observation more than by close questioning.

Sometimes too much questioning gives rise in the small boy's heart to the suspicion that his father does not really trust him. If a boy comes under the sinister spell of that notion, then there's a barrier at once thrown up between himself and his father.

Much can be learned if the father will be at home some evening when his boy has a chum or two up in his room. He's proud of that room. His treasures are there. While the boys are looking things over, the father can drop in and cheerfully look the boys over, enter into their talk, tell of a story, a short one, that fits in with something of interest to them, and let them see that he hasn't forgotten when he was a boy.

Any man who has been among boys at all, with his eyes open and his heart warm toward them, can make keen deductions from a bit of fellowship with his boy's chums. An overnight in the open with the youngsters helps wonderfully to let the father get what the boys might call 'inside dope.' Some of the bunch come to the house in the late afternoon and pack the backpacks." My grandfather writes "haversacks." You've never heard of haversacks, have you?

Father, in old clothes, shoulders his haversack and blanket, while the little fellows trudge along with their outfit as they make their way through the town and over the hill and along the creek to the woods, where there's a grassy ravine and a spring of good water. Then come the delights of making camp; father, not bossing the job, but pitching right in as a hewer of wood and drawer of water and cooker of bacon, plus anything else that he ought to be.

After supper, as the twilight falls and the night wind begins to whisper in the hemlocks, the campfire crackles, the little chaps gather around it for a talk and a sing. Father is just a boy with them, chipping in with the rest of the talk, but not swamping the youngsters with his mighty store of wisdom. A good-night prayer together by and by seems to come in just right, and then the campers crawl into their shelter tents and presently their chatter dies away and sleep is upon them.

But Father doesn't sleep at first. He is looking out at the stars above the hemlocks, listening to the wind in the trees, the breathing of the boys around him, and picturing to himself just who and what these little fellows are, his boy's chums. And he wonders not only what they mean to his boy, but how his boy is influencing them.

In that brief evening, he has seen how quickly one boy leaps to wash the dishes, how another never knows where anything is, how another neatly avoids doing what he can switch over to anyone else to do. A little world of educational influences, as complex as the cosmic mind, is gathered around that miniature camp. It is very late when sleep comes to the man; very early when he emerges from the tent and shows a 'morning face' with a cheery word to the little fellows who tumble out, ready for the new day.

In that one night, Father has learned enough about his boy's bunch to give him a reason for saying a word now and then to his boy about things to look out for. No, the boys were not as free as if Father had been not been there, but it is a dull father indeed who cannot make safe deductions from his fellowship, even for a little while, with small boys, or big boys, either.

When the boy begins to show signs of belonging to a gang or bunch, then it is high time for the father to bestir himself and get counted in. He can be. He ought to be. Not as a mentor, not as a guardian, but as a real chum. In writing of some of the difficulties involved, Professor Fiske has said, 'The greater difficulty is the fact that the father in growing older has lost his youth, or rather, his youthfulness. He has forgotten how it seemed to be a boy. And the feelings, the surest criterion of age, are greatly changed. The finer emotions and the naive enthusiasms the man has lost forever, and with these, his lost youth.

It's one of the needless tragedies of life that men thus lose their youthful joy and the zest for living, and with it the sympathy, the real sympathy, of their own boys. What business has any boy's father in growing old, except in years and baldness, which don't count?'"

Lisa Barry: We've heard a lot of great information these last two weeks, and I'm convinced that I'll never be able to apply it without review. Even though the focus of the programs is on fathers, they are principles that reach out to me and convict me as well.

A resource that we're offering during this series is one that all parents would appreciate. It's called the Father's Day packet, but you women are more than welcome to purchase it for yourself, too.

Here's where to get in touch with us for purchasing information: Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. Or call 1-800-759-4JOY. Our Internet ministry address is gatewaytojoy.org. Gateway To Joy has been a production of Back to the Bible.

Tomorrow Elisabeth talks about boys growing up, so I hope you'll join us for another look into fatherhood on the next Gateway To Joy.