BY BRUCE GREEN
Paul Simmons is the head football coach at Harding University. In December of last year, they won their first ever Division II national championship in football. Pretty heady stuff, right? You wouldn’t know it from the press conference after the game. Here’s some of what Coach Simmons had to say:
I want my young men to be awesome daddies, I want them to come through. … I got so many young men that come from broken homes that had fathers that weren’t even there and I’m telling them all the time, “Hey, that’s not going to be us. We’re going to come through. We’re going to have a generation of men who come through for their families. We’re not going to give in when it gets tough.”
In speaking of the game they had just won he said:
This is not tough … this is really, really, easy. What’s tough is when you’re 35 years old and you and your wife can’t get along. You have a kid that’s up all night crying and you got to get up and go to work in the morning. But you get it done because that’s what a man does. He comes through. He honors his wife by putting himself last. He honors his kids by putting their needs in front of everything else.
We are trying to raise a generation of Christian Warrior Father Husbands that will come through and lead. We’ve got a broken culture, and we need men. We’re trying to impact and raise up men. That is so much important to us than a national championship. I’ve said for a long, long time if we get it done and win a national championship, but nobody modeled to you what it means to be a Christian father and a Christian husband, and nobody showed you how to lead by serving then the whole thing was a waste of time and we have failed. And we don’t want to fail.
Coach Simmons is certainly doing his part to raise a generation of men, who like Noah, will come through for God and their family.
But fathers, how do we do that? The trait I want to call your attention to is this: handling hard well. I think that’s often the dividing line between coming through and not coming through. After all, Noah lived during possibly the hardest of times. He couldn’t do anything to change that, but he could handle hard well and that’s exactly what he did.
As Coach Simmons pointed out, fathers will experience difficult times. Rather than wasting time trying to get around whatever hard comes our way, we need to let God take us through it as Noah did. That is how you handle hard well.
As we do, we need to remember the words of a recently retired coach who said, “You gotta embrace hard. Hard times make tough people. Easy times make soft people.” And this final observation, “Lazy people do a little work and think they should be winning! Winners work as hard as possible and still wonder if they are being lazy!”
Let’s not shy away from the work and effort involved in handling hard well. God will bless us for it, and we will be a blessing to others.
You can find more of Bruce’s writings at his website: a-taste-of-grace-with-bruce-green.com