Turn your heart toward home.
You've been gone so long.
Please don't wait too long.
Turn your heart toward home.
You've been gone so long.
Please don't wait too long.
Turn your heart toward home.
Home.
Has there ever been a word filled with so much meaning?
And what experience compares with the feeling,
the overwhelming emotion of coming home to a loving family after a long absence?
Well, whether you're living at home or a great distance away from your roots,
the films you're about to watch are designed to turn your heart in this direction.
This is a teaching series featuring a man who,
perhaps more than any other person in North America,
is helping husbands and wives reach a new level of commitment to each other
and a new belief and confidence in parenthood.
He's psychologist Dr. James Dobson.
For some, these films will be a long-awaited sequel to Dr. Dobson's first series,
Focus on the Family, which was the most popular presentation of its kind ever.
But for those watching who may not be familiar with the work of this family specialist,
perhaps I should add that he has a Ph.D. in child development.
He served for 14 years as Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics
at the University of Southern California School of Medicine
and for 17 years on the attending staff of Children's Hospital in Los Angeles.
His books on the family have all been national bestsellers,
including Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives and Preparing for Adolescence.
And his advice has been widely sought by those in professional and governmental circles alike.
President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the White House Conference on Families,
and President Ronald Reagan asked him to serve on two national commissions
dealing with the important issues of juvenile delinquency and pornography.
And finally, his daily radio series, Focus on the Family,
is one of the most highly rated programs on the 800 stations that carry it
across North America and overseas.
So let's get underway, and I can't think of a more exciting way to begin
than the plan for the next 60 minutes.
We take you by videotape to the great city of Cincinnati, Ohio,
for a major pro-family rally that drew proclamations from the governor and mayor
and a capacity crowd from 10 states.
This is the 16,000-seat Riverfront Coliseum,
which was sold out for a speaker for the first time in its history.
And that speaker was Dr. James Dobson, who has just been introduced.
APPLAUSE
You'll make me cry.
LAUGHTER
Oh, what an incredible greeting.
I think this is the beginning of a love affair with the city of Cincinnati.
APPLAUSE
I am impressed.
I'm impressed to see 16,000 people who have not come here to watch a basketball game
or to hear a concert or what have you,
but coming out to hear two speakers of all things.
I mean, I have to tell you all, I don't like listening to speakers very much.
That's not one of my favorite activities,
and if I was in your shoes, I probably wouldn't be here tonight.
LAUGHTER
Someone said a number of years ago,
if all the speakers in the world could be laid end to end,
it'd be a good idea just to leave them that way.
LAUGHTER
But we're delighted to be here.
Now, we do not know many of you here.
I hope we can remedy that while we're here.
But in a way, we do know you,
because we got a lot of mail from the Cincinnati area,
and that mail is very, very important to me.
And we have gotten some delightful letters.
I got a letter the other day from the mother of a four-year-old girl,
and this mother said that she had sent her little girl to Sunday school for the first time,
and this little girl came home and she said,
Mom, guess what? She said what?
She said, I'm not afraid of the dark anymore.
And the mother said, why not?
And she said, well, I've been to Sunday school,
and now I know that I've got a gargling angel to look out for me.
LAUGHTER
Another man wrote and said that they listen to us every day.
In fact, their clock radio is fixed so that we come on,
even if nobody is home, it comes on,
and the dog listens.
LAUGHTER
He said the dog seems to be improving.
LAUGHTER
It's also amazing how people get things mixed up.
No matter what you say on the radio,
I don't know if their cars are going under an underpass
and they just don't hear it or what,
but whatever you say, it will come back mixed up.
And a while back, we offered a book.
We'd had Tim Hansel on the program,
and we offered his book to people who would write in,
and the name of the book is When I Relax I Feel Guilty.
Two weeks later, we had the Pinners on the program,
and we offered their book, The Gift of Sex.
A lady got a little confused,
she wrote in and wanted a copy of the book,
When I Have Sex I Feel Guilty.
LAUGHTER
I told her, we don't have a book like that,
but I'm sure it would be a bestseller.
LAUGHTER
But I hope you will keep writing to us,
because we absolutely love to hear from you,
and I want to read you now my favorite all-time letter.
This came from the mother of two children under three,
so you know what kind of pressure she's under,
and I love this letter.
She said,
Have you ever done that?
All the way into your bedroom,
confident of my approval for her obedience,
she said with a smile,
I rolled him.
LAUGHTER
The kid's a little dizzy, but he's okay.
LAUGHTER
It's going to be a fun evening, I can see that already.
Now, I need to tell you where I'm coming from this evening.
Seven years ago, we were engaged in another film series
in San Antonio, Texas, called Focus on the Family,
some of you may have seen that,
and at that time, I was trying to make a decision about what to do
about the conflict between the ministry and the message
that I wanted to get out
and the need to stay home with my own children.
And I've done a lot of dumb things in my life,
but I think the smartest thing I ever did was to stay home
and watch my kids grow up.
And these have been seven good years,
and I've had an opportunity to do that.
So this is kind of a celebration of that decision today,
because in those seven years,
I've not only had an opportunity to stay home with my kids,
and with Shirley, of course,
but I've had an opportunity to do some thinking.
And what I want to do this evening with you is bring you up to date
on some of the thinking that I've been doing in the last seven years
as I've moved through my own midlife years.
Now, I am 48 years old.
I would be 49, but I was sick a year.
LAUGHTER
And by all rights, I ought to be going through a midlife crisis.
I mean, I ought to be struggling with a lot of midlife stuff.
I've seen an awful lot of other people do it, and I'm not.
I'm not. I have not gone through a midlife crisis.
But I'll tell you this, a lot of my friends have,
and I think every man over 35 years of age out there in California
is in a midlife crisis of one sort or another.
And it's really kind of funny, if you're not part of it, to watch it.
Have you noticed that every man in the midst of a midlife crisis
wears that, like a neon sign across his chest?
Have you noticed that?
In the first place, a man in a midlife crisis wears a silk shirt.
I don't know why that is, but he does,
and he unbuttons it down...
LAUGHTER
..down about to his navel,
lets lots of grey hair show...
LAUGHTER
..which he's blow-dried.
LAUGHTER
Usually he tucks a little medallion down in there.
Have you noticed that? Kind of let the hair grow up all over it on all sides.
And speaking of hair, he does weird things with his hair.
You don't know what he's done, but you know it doesn't grow that way.
LAUGHTER
I was standing the other day looking at a man in the midst of a midlife crisis.
I mean, it was written all over him.
And I looked at him, and I knew something was strange,
and then I realized the guy was totally bald,
and he had whipped his sideburns...
LAUGHTER
..up over the top.
As I was standing there looking at him, the wind blew and picked it up...
LAUGHTER
..about a half inch and let it crash.
LAUGHTER
He also...he also drives fast cars.
That somehow helps. I don't know why, but it somehow helps.
So he's usually got a Porsche or a Nissan 300ZX,
or if he's having financial problems, a Volkswagen with mag wheels.
LAUGHTER
And he's probably fighting with his wife
because her age reminds him of his own,
and that's kind of grating on him.
I heard of a guy the other day that came in
and his wife was putting something on her face at night.
He said, what is that? She said, cold cream.
He said, what's it for? She said, wrinkles.
He said, man, it must be working. You got a whole raft of them.
LAUGHTER
And he just might run off with his secretary.
That seems to be part of the syndrome.
I brought a little article that I took out of the Los Angeles Times.
This actually appeared in the Times, a Xeroxed page here,
of such a man, and I think you will appreciate this.
He said, a young man spotted a Mercedes for sale for $75 in a newspaper.
He telephoned to inquire, assuming the figure must be a typographical error.
A woman answered the phone and told him the figure was correct.
He asked whether the car was damaged.
No, it's in perfect condition, she told him.
Then why was she selling it at such a ridiculously low price?
Well, my husband just phoned me from Las Vegas, she explained.
He's there with his secretary.
He's told me he's leaving me and that he went broke gambling
and he asked me to sell the Mercedes and send him half what I got for it.
LAUGHTER
Now that's a vicious woman.
LAUGHTER
Well, I am not going through this kind of midlife crisis.
Shirley and I have been married for 24 years.
We're very happily married. I don't have any silk shirts.
So that's not where I am.
But I'll tell you where I do find myself at this moment,
and I'm deadly serious about this.
I have, for the last seven years, and especially the last three,
been going through what I might call a period of contemplative reassessment
where I've been thinking about the meaning of life and the major questions that it poses.
You know, like, who am I really?
And what am I doing here really?
And where am I going really?
And what's the meaning of life?
And what am I going to do with the rest of my time here on this earth?
There's something about the 40s that scream those questions at you,
whether you're in the midst of a midlife crisis or not.
It's almost impossible to go through the 40s without struggling with some of those questions
as you see the sand starting to run out of the hourglass.
I was going through that, and I stopped it all as much as I possibly could
to do some thinking about who I am.
And I drew two conclusions from this time of reassessment.
They're not profound. They're not cerebral.
But it made an impact on my life, and maybe they will be of some interest to you.
The first has to do with the incredible passage of time.
I cannot believe how fast time is going.
The clock is ticking. I think that's part of that midlife experience.
And every year it seems to go faster, and it's almost as though I'm holding on to time
like a well-greased string that's sliding through my fingers.
And the tighter I grip it, the faster it goes.
Some of you have experienced the same thing.
And if not, your mirror will tell you.
And if your mirror won't, your enemies will.
And if your enemies won't, your friends will.
A few years ago, folks, I got the blow of my life.
I think maybe this was the beginning of this awareness of the passage of time.
But I was getting ready to write the book, What Wise Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.
And I wasn't getting it done.
And the publisher was concerned that the telephone was keeping me from getting the book written.
And so he called me and he said, pick out a hotel you'd like to go to,
and we'll send you there, and you can get away from the telephone,
and you can write the book in a shorter period of time.
I selected the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, Texas,
and I went down there and wrote for about 10 days and got the book finished.
But I would get up in the morning, have my devotions, and start writing,
and by about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I was pretty well burnt out,
and I needed some exercise.
Now, folks, I love to play basketball.
I realize that a 48-year-old man has no business whatsoever on a basketball floor,
but I love to play the game.
And so I would walk a half a block to the YMCA in the afternoon and play basketball there.
Well, obviously, there were no men my age on the basketball floor.
All the men my age that play basketball are now dead.
And I walked out on that court the first time,
and there were a bunch of kids, 16, 17, 18, maybe 20, there,
and they looked at me like I was 105.
And I asked if I could play a game with them, and they said yes, reluctantly.
And there was a black kid that guarded me who had tremendous ability and tremendous skills.
I would think he probably went on to play college ball.
He just had it. He was just good.
And there was something about him guarding me and the pressure of that competition
and all these kids thinking I'm over the hill.
I reached back about 20 years, and I pulled out some moves, long forgotten,
and adrenaline started pumping, and I put some moves on this kid,
and I made two or three baskets in a row.
And he looked at me and stepped back, and he said,
Man, you must have been something in your prime.
I cried all the way home.
Unfortunately, I wasn't something in my prime.
That makes it even worse.
You know, this passage of time is something that many writers write about,
and I enjoy reading those that get a grasp of it.
But I think the person who understands it better than any philosopher I know
is a little woman named Irma Bombeck.
She really understands that concept of time.
And she makes us laugh, obviously, especially about aging and that process.
I saw her on the Phil Donoghue show, and Phil asked her if she was sensitive about her age,
and she said, No, I'm not sensitive about it.
He said, Then how old are you?
She said, I'm somewhere between estrogen and death.
She said, The man next door is elderly, and he wears a pacemaker,
and she said, Every time he sneezes, my garage door goes up.
But sometimes, folks, Irma does not make us laugh.
Sometimes Irma makes us cry.
And she wrote, I think, the most incredible piece about the passage of time in her book,
If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?
The name of the piece was When Does the Mother Become the Daughter?
And the Daughter Become the Mother.
And she was describing the changing relationship between herself and her mother
and the stress that occurred associated with it.
She said her mother was always so strong.
Her mother was always so stable, so independent, so secure.
The one she looked up to, the one she modeled her life after.
But in recent years, that relationship has been changing,
and her mother has been becoming the daughter, and Irma has been becoming the mother.
Their relationship was flipping upside down.
She said it started when they were riding in a car together one day,
and Irma was driving, and her mother was sitting over here to the right.
And there was a sudden stack up of automobiles, and the brake lights came on,
and Irma put on the brakes to keep from hitting the car in front of her,
and reached out instinctively to keep her mother from hitting the windshield
instead of her mother reaching out to keep Irma from hitting the steering wheel.
And they looked at each other for a moment
and realized something had changed in the relationship.
And then there was the following Thanksgiving,
when Irma baked the turkey and her mother set the table.
And as time goes on, it's Irma saying,
Mom, we're going shopping in the stores today, and don't you look nice in that dress?
As Irma's mother had said to her a thousand times before, Irma, you look so nice today.
And Mom, don't forget to wear your sweater today,
because you know they turn the air conditioning up so high,
and I don't want you to get cold.
Instead of her mother saying, Irma, wear your coat now, bundled up,
wear your galoshes, stay warm, don't catch a cold.
And as time moves on, the mother is becoming the daughter,
and the daughter is becoming the mother,
and the relationship is changing, and it's difficult.
She says, I don't want it. I resist it.
I don't want to see my mother becoming dependent upon me.
But the inexorable march of time changes the relationship.
And as time goes on, it's getting her mother up at night
and taking her to the bathroom,
and waiting to take her back to bed,
as her mother had done for her all through childhood in the early days.
As the years pass and senility starts to set in,
it's her mother saying, Irma, dial the number for me, will you?
You know, I don't ever get it quite right.
And then as her mother moves through old age,
it's Irma saying, Mom, will you please stop talking about seeing Dad last night?
Do you know he's been gone for ten years?
And the mother has become the daughter, and the daughter has become the mother.
Irma said shortly thereafter, she was riding in the car with her own daughter,
and her daughter was driving, and there was a sudden stack up of cars,
and her daughter put on the brakes to keep from hitting the car in front of her,
and then reached out instinctively to keep Irma from hitting the windshield.
And the last line of the piece says, My Lord, so quickly, so quickly indeed,
I am there right now.
My mother is becoming my daughter, and I am becoming her father.
And it is a wrenching experience if you have not been through it.
My father died in 1977, and my mother and father were truly best friends.
They were one flesh in the biblical sense.
And when my father died, it was as though my mother had been cut in half.
And she will never be the same again.
Oh, she's adapted. She's doing all right.
But she will never be the same because her friend is gone.
The other half is gone. The one she lived with for 43 years is gone.
A couple of years ago, she had to have some abdominal tests.
Anytime a woman in her 70s is having some intestinal problems,
there's a little six-letter word that everybody thinks about,
whether you say it or not.
And my mother went in for the test, and I thanked the Lord that they proved to be negative.
And I went over to her house to give her the news and to talk to her.
She has a little condominium near us.
I said, Mom, isn't it good news? You don't have cancer. You're going to be all right?
I thanked the Lord for that. She smiled. She said, Oh, yes.
She said, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I'm going to be all right.
And I do thank the Lord. But she said, Can I be really honest with you about something?
I said, Sure, Mom, of course.
She said, Would you understand if I told you that I thought
that I might be going to see your dad, and I'm just a little bit disappointed?
I said, Sure, Mom, I understand that.
Folks, you want to see the passage of time?
Look at the people closest to you within the family.
Don't look outside the family. If you were riding on a fast-moving train
and you wanted to know how fast you were going, you would not look at the distant mountains.
You would look at the ground beside the train. That would tell you how fast you're moving.
And so it is with the family. You want to know how fast the years are passing?
Look at your children. Look at how your relationship with your children is changing.
Look at your brothers and sisters, your uncles and aunts. Look at your parents.
See, I think that's one thing that causes a midlife crisis for men,
because when you hit your 40s, it's not unusual to lose your father,
and that's an emotional impact. That makes you think about life.
It makes you think about how short it is.
Shirley and I have been married 24 years, as I told you,
and in only 18 years, I will be the age my father was when he died.
Or putting it another way, I was sitting in church one Sunday morning about two months ago,
and I was doing a little math there, and I calculated that if I'm fortunate enough
to live as long as my father did, who died at 66, I have 18 years left,
I have now lived 72% of my life.
Now, folks, this is a guy who nine years ago was in his 30s.
Isn't that a great way to mess up a Sunday morning?
I should have been listening to the pastor.
You see what a midlife crisis is? In the first place, the midlife years are misnamed.
The 30s are the midlife years. The 40s are the two-thirds years.
See, and you think of yourself as a young man in your 30s,
and you round the corner, and you're thinking 28% left,
and there's something about that that makes you think.
Now, there will be people here who will say, what a morbid thought.
Not so. This is a very important biblical concept.
It's all through the Bible.
King David wrote about it. He said,
For as man, his days are as grass,
as the flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
But the wind passeth over it, and it is gone,
and the place thereof shall know it no more.
What a graphic way to say it. It's a biblical concept,
and it's an important one because it has a way of putting everything else into proper perspective.
It certainly makes the pursuit of materialism empty and meaningless,
at least as a reason for living.
There's got to be something more important than that.
The Lord's been using a lot of interesting ways to get that message across to me.
Shirley and I got married at a time when we had absolutely nothing,
and it looked for about ten years like we were going to keep it.
We didn't have any financial problems because we didn't have any finances.
But I finally got through USC and quit paying those enormous school bills
and joined the staff of USC School of Medicine and began writing,
and things started changing for us.
And we have tasted now some of the things that people hunger for,
but part of the analysis of the 40s has to do with the meaning of life,
and that doesn't provide a whole lot.
And the Lord's used some interesting ways to get that message across to me,
even a game of Monopoly.
You know, when I was a kid, I used to love to play Monopoly.
I'm sure some of you did as well.
But I hadn't played the game in over 30 years,
and our teenage daughter one night brought the game home,
and she said, Dad, there's a new game out called Monopoly.
I think you would enjoy it.
And I said, why not?
And we sat down to play the first game of Monopoly that I'd played in over 30 years,
and the old thrill came back, and I started winning, folks.
And I had Boardwalk and Park Place,
and I had Illinois and Indiana and Kentucky and St. Charles and St. James,
and I mean, I even had Baltic and Mediterranean.
And I started putting little greenhouses all over the board,
and they turned very quickly into big red hotels,
and I was getting money like crazy, and I had it in my pockets,
and I had it under the board.
I had $500 bills in my shoe,
and my family was squirming, and I was loving it.
There was greed that was coming back on me again,
and it wasn't long before it suddenly ended.
I mean, boom, boom, boom.
Danae and Shirley, Ryan has already gone to bed.
Danae and Shirley threw the dice,
and they hit my hotels two or three times in a row,
and before I knew it, I had won.
And I'd been such a lousy sport about the whole thing
that they went to bed and made me put the game away.
So I'm sitting there at 12 o'clock at night,
putting the game away, and I've got a very empty feeling
because all of this excitement and all this enthusiasm
had no place to go.
And I take my property that I was quite proud of,
and I put it back in the box.
There goes Boardwalk and Park Place and all the rest of them.
Then I took my $500 bills out of all the places,
and I put those back in the box,
and I got this empty feeling here.
The whole thing is going back in the box.
And then the Lord spoke to me.
It was not an audible voice,
but you know it when you've heard from Him.
And He spoke to me.
This is what He said.
He said, Jim, pay attention,
because I'm about to give you a lesson.
That's not just the game of Monopoly
that you're playing there.
That's the game of life.
You sweat and you strain and you save and you build and you grow
and you get bank accounts and you get property
and you get ERISA and retirement programs
and a piece of the rock and all this stuff.
And then you make a bad move sitting at your desk
where you spend an awful lot of time.
All of a sudden, it's like there's a vice around your chest,
and boy, it's kind of hard to breathe.
I never noticed that pain down that left arm either,
and the fingers are kind of numb.
I got a little pain in my jaw.
I wonder what that is.
Taking a shower, you look down.
There's a little swelling on the side here.
You touch it.
It's tender.
My goodness, I never knew that was there before.
I'd better check that out.
Riding down the freeway, you make a sudden turn.
When you shouldn't have, boom, boom, boom,
you put it all back in the box.
Every last dime goes back in the box.
Every dime.
There are no You Haul It trailers that follow the hearse.
The Egyptians tried to take it with them.
That's what the pyramids are all about.
Unless somebody gets there first, you go back to that Egyptian tomb,
and you'll find everything they stored there
among the grinning white bones
because they couldn't take it with them.
And we can't take it with them either.
And I want to tell you all something very personally.
This is perhaps telling you more about who I am
than I want you to know,
but if I don't allow you to see who I really am, I can't help you.
I'm not at all sure that I want to give a whole lot to my children either
because it takes a steady hand to hold a full cup.
And I can't think of any better way to destroy them than to deprive them
of that need to build and save and be disciplined and grow
and dedicate themselves to a task.
I think we're so busy giving our kids what we didn't have as kids,
we forget to give them what we did have as kids.
Well, that leads me inextricably to the second conclusion
that I've drawn at this time.
And I need to say to you all, I know that there will be all faiths
and even the absence of faith here tonight,
and it is not my purpose to invade your territory
or to insult you or to try to tell you,
you have to believe what I believe.
But you came to hear what Shirley and I think and what we believe,
and I would be dishonest if I didn't tell you.
And the conclusion that I've drawn that outranks all others
is that nothing in life matters except love for God and His Son Jesus Christ
and love for mankind beginning with my own family.
This is why I've been home for the last seven years,
because these years are passing so fast and I wanted to be there
to have that influence on my kids and see them grow up
and to instill those values that I care about.
Danae is now in college.
Ryan is going into high school, and the years have passed so, so rapidly.
I know so quickly now that the skateboard will be warped
and standing over in the corner of the garage.
The bicycle tires will be flat, the swing set is already gone.
The halls will be quiet, the beds will be unslept in.
We'll go through Christmas and there will not be the two stockings hanging there.
I know that. I accept that. I'm not fighting that.
I wouldn't try to hold my kids back if I could.
I want them to grow and become independent and live their own lives.
I understand the process, but I'll tell you this,
when those two children are gone,
something precious will have gone out of my life
because I have valued those years with my kids so much.
And by being home the last seven years,
I have their childhood videotaped up here in my mind.
You can't see it, but I can see it.
I can turn it on right now.
The little insignificant things that don't matter to you are here, right there.
I can turn it on and I see a little five-year-old boy come up to me.
I'm sitting in my study. I'm watching a football game.
It's New Year's Day. USC is just beating Ohio State to death.
This little boy comes up to me and he says,
I want to get up in your lap. And I say, no way.
He says, how come?
I say, because I have to be kind of careful about who I let climb on my lap.
That's why. And he says, who can climb on you?
And I said, well, you wouldn't know him. He said, yes, I would.
I said, well, he's a kid with blonde hair.
He says, I got blonde hair.
I say, I know, but this is a kid with blonde hair and blue eyes.
He said, I got blue eyes.
I said, yeah, I know, but this is a kid with blonde hair and blue eyes
and his name's Ryan. He said, that's my name.
I said, I know, but you wouldn't understand.
You don't know this kid. He's a kid with blonde hair, blue eyes.
His name's Ryan and he's my son. He's my only son.
The only son I will ever have.
He is the only boy in the world that can climb on me
any time he wants to without asking.
He says, I got blonde hair and blue eyes. My name's Ryan.
I'm your son. You love me. Move over. I'm coming up.
We played that game for four years, 500 times.
He loved the game. That's why I don't have to think to tell you about it.
I've been through it over and over again because it said something to Ryan
about him being special to me, but I have that videotape.
That's up here in my head. I can turn that off.
I turn on another videotape and I see a little girl coming home from school.
She's six years old. She has little pigtails out the side here,
but they're all messed up and her dress is disheveled
and she's got one sock down around, one shoe,
and it's obvious that she's been burning on the rollover crash bars at school.
She comes in and she's so happy to see us and she hugs her mother and she hugs me.
She goes in and sits down at the table and surely brings her some sandwiches and some milk.
She's sitting there and she's eating it. I'm watching her.
And she doesn't know that. She doesn't really know yet just how much I love her.
Perhaps someday she will comprehend it, but she doesn't understand it at six years of age.
That's just a passing moment. It's gone. But I've got it right here.
Nobody can take it away from me. I've got it here because I was home to see it.
And I'm thankful for that.
Let me tell you one other thing about Denea, if I can.
She absolutely loved her childhood. She didn't want to leave it.
She loved her room. She loved her records. She loved the traditional memorabilia of childhood,
the stuffed animals and all that stuff. She loved it.
But alas, she turned 13 years of age one day and she went into her bedroom and closed the door.
She stacked up her records and all of her little treasured toys and put them on top of it
and a stuffed animal or two and a few of the other things that she had enjoyed as a child.
And she carried them next door and left them in front of Ryan's door where he was sleeping.
And she put a note on the top and she said, Dear Ryan, these are yours now.
Take good care of them like I have. Love, Denea.
Shirley found the note and she brought it to me. I was in my study.
And we sat and I read it and we both cried.
Because we heard in that note the door of childhood gently shut.
And once it closes, no power on the face of the earth can open it again.
It is closed forever. And it's just like crossing a line.
I mean, there are children one day and the next day it's over. It's gone.
And again, I thank the Lord that I was there to witness that process.
I'm not a perfect father. I do not have perfect kids.
Shirley is not a perfect mother. And we struggle in the same ways that you do.
We struggle to find something that we could do together as a family.
Have you had that problem? We tried everything.
You know, we weren't content to just find recreation each one of us wanted to do.
But we were trying to find something we all enjoyed doing together.
We had a hard time finding. We tried hiking. That didn't work.
We tried bowling. Believe me, that didn't work.
We tried tennis. That was a disaster.
I've been playing tennis since I was eight years old and Shirley hasn't.
And I hate to tell you all this, but I don't enjoy playing tennis with Shirley.
Sweetheart. Honey, darling.
The reason is because I don't enjoy chasing the ball.
But we finally hit on skiing as our thing.
And it has been a marvelous thing for our family.
You just cannot imagine how much we have enjoyed going over those mountains together
with the wind in our face, the beautiful scenery that God has created.
We've had some of our most wonderful times, the four of us together, skiing.
But I need to tell you all something about skiing for those of you who don't know.
On the first day when you've got young children,
that can be one of the most frustrating events in the entire world.
Because you can guess who gets to carry the skis, buckle the boots, buy the lift tickets,
get the locker, park the car, make three trips back to the house,
bundle them up in all those clothes, then take them to the bathroom.
All that stuff, it's an enormous task.
And on this particular day, my kids were about to drive me crazy.
They were struck by a sudden wave of childish irresponsibility.
And they were losing skis and dropping stuff and forgetting gloves.
And I was on their backs.
I mean, I was yelling at these kids and crabbing at them and writing them.
And I violated everything I write about.
Does that make you feel better?
I took them up to the ski lodge.
Shirley was already up there.
And I let them out.
I said, go have a good time.
Slammed the door.
I drove the car back down the hill to park it.
And all the way down the hill, I was talking to the Lord.
I was saying, Lord, what am I going to do with these kids that you gave me?
You ever ask that question?
Just a little irritated at Him for giving me these kids.
And He didn't say anything.
He sometimes lets me talk to Him that way.
I really wasn't being disrespectful.
I parked the car.
And I got out and I walked back down to a little pickup area where a flatbed truck comes
and picks people up and takes them back up the mountain.
And when I walked to this spot, there were about eight or ten people there.
And among them was a girl about 17 years of age.
And she was saying strange things, nonsense things, especially the word whomever.
She was saying whomever, whomever, just this word over and over again.
And I thought she was on a bad drug trip or something.
And the other people were kind of pulled back away from her.
So she was just kind of standing there all by herself saying these words.
And then she turned and looked at me.
And I saw the unmistakable look of mental retardation in her eyes.
About that time, the truck came.
And we all got up in the back of the truck.
And she stumbled over there and got in the truck too.
And she stood right in the center of that flatbed truck and looked up the mountain
and continued to say whomever.
Here she is with her shoulders back saying whomever, whomever.
And there was a visible rejection by the other people that were there.
They were young. You could tell by the sneers on their face.
They kind of moved back from her.
And they looked at her and then looked at each other as if to say,
who's the crazy that we've got with us?
And then I realized that the big man who was standing near her was her father.
And he did something I will never forget.
He took about three steps toward her.
He just engulfed that girl in his arms.
And he put his big hand on the back of her head and just pressed it gently to his chest.
And he looked down at her and he said, yeah, babe, whomever.
And I had to turn my face away from that crowd to hide the moisture in my eyes.
Because you know what that father was saying?
He was not talking to his daughter at all.
He was talking to us.
That father had seen the same rejection, the same sneers that I had seen.
And he was giving us a message.
You know what he was saying?
He's saying, yeah, it's true.
You're right. She's retarded.
We can't hide that. We long since quit trying to hide that.
She's retarded. I know she won't write the books.
She won't sing the songs.
She won't accomplish a whole lot.
She's already out of school.
We did the best we could.
But I want to tell you people something.
That's my girl.
And I love her.
And I'm not ashamed to be identified with her.
Yeah, babe, whomever.
The love of that father for that retarded girl flooded out of his soul and filled mine
and mine outward to my children.
And I said, OK, Lord, I get the message.
Two weeks later, I was on national television.
I was given four and a half minutes to answer such questions as,
how did the family get into the trouble it's in and how do we get out of it?
I couldn't have answered the questions in four and a half weeks.
But I tell you this much, I know the answer.
It has something to do with what that father was feeling for his girl,
his retarded girl on that day.
It'll heal a home.
It'll solve parent-child relationships.
It'll even help you cope with the tragedy of mental retardation.
Fathers who are here, don't let these years get away from you.
If your children are still at home, don't let them slide through your fingers.
On the other end of life, looking back, there will be no compensation.
No houses and land and machines and stocks and bonds and all that good stuff.
Nothing will make up for the loss of your kids.
To those of you here tonight who are achievement-oriented and you've reached your goal,
I don't mean to insult you.
Let me tell you that I admire you.
You've worked hard.
You've gotten there because of self-discipline and self-control and hard work and long hours.
But to some degree, I have to.
And reverberating in my head these last seven years has been one question I cannot get away from.
And that question is, so what?
Or an infinitely more important question, now what?
For the wind passeth over it and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.
The wisest man who ever lived other than Jesus Christ, Solomon, had it all.
He had money.
He had fame.
He had power.
He was a king.
He had everything there is to want.
He summed it all up at the end of his life in the book of Ecclesiastes, and what did he call it?
Vanity.
Vanity, vanity, vanity.
It's all vanity.
There's nothing else but vanity.
You see what this does?
It trivializes everything temporal.
Vanity.
1970, I published my first book, Dare to Discipline, my name across the bottom, beautiful green jacket,
nice design on the cover, my picture on the back, pretty heady stuff for a guy 33 years old.
A guy came up to me just the other day and he said, you've really arrived.
I said, what do you mean?
I said, I found a copy of Dare to Discipline at a garage sale for 35 cents.
That's what it all comes down to.
Now, folks, I really kind of fooled you a little bit tonight.
I have kind of told you that I was talking about the midlife crisis and the midlife years.
I'm really not.
I mean, who cares?
Who cares about the academic characteristics of a midlife crisis?
I'm talking about something far more important than that.
I'm talking about the stuff of life, and it's appropriate for all of us.
It's appropriate whether you are a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic.
You still have to deal with the questions I'm talking about, like who am I and where am I going?
What's the meaning of life?
And especially, especially into what will I drop the remaining years of my life?
Three weeks ago, I had one of the most difficult assignments of my life.
I spoke at the funeral of a 21-year-old boy, the son of a staff member of ours,
who took his own life because he couldn't answer those questions.
He was 21. He was asking the same questions.
He couldn't find answers, and he saw no reason to go on living.
The experience of the last seven years has said to me,
go back to your roots, back to your faith, and in that faith I find meaning and purpose
and dignity and self-esteem, self-respect, self-control, and identity.
I know who I am because I know whose I am,
and I've come down at this stage of my life with only two objectives for what's left.
The first is to serve my fellow man, beginning with my own family,
and the second is to be acceptable to the God who made me,
and to hear those words, how I want to hear those words,
well done, thou good and faithful servant,
and nothing else will stand the scrutiny of time.
Applause
Music