Testimony - Father and Daughter Time

When I first heard about the father-and-child time, I was excited. I was excited because I know this is something I had wanted to do with my daughter for quite some time now. My daughter is turning 6 this year. I remembered reading a parenting article some years back which says that for a child, quality time is spelt as “quantity”. I couldn’t agree more to this statement and it had caused me to rethink about the definition of the quality time for my daughter since then. As much as the quality time is important for my daughter, the consistent and regular time spent with her is equally important to her too. After I signed up for the Fathers Club and attended the first two meetings, I am convinced through Pr. Chris and other fathers’ sharing that I needed to have a consistent and regular time with my daughter.

Being a typical man, my usual first response to solving a problem is to first find the solution “myself” and then only present it to my wife and daughter for acceptance and feedback. Little did I know that I was stuck as I couldn’t seem to figure out a weekly time to spend between me and my daughter! This troubled me for a few days without any solutions.

Because I was determined to have the father-and-daughter time, I decided that I needed help from my wife and daughter. In one family dinner time together, I explained to them that I had been trying to figure out this father-and-child time thingy without much success. To my surprise, just within a few minutes into our discussion, my wife had proposed a weekly timeslot that seemed workable for all of us and without much hesitation I happily accepted it. The thing that amazed me was that what I couldn’t quite figure myself for the last few days was able to resolve within a few minutes with the help from my family!

My first lesson learnt from this experience is that I must involve my family especially my wife when solving family issues although some of them may seem trivial to me.

Later that night after dinner, both my daughter and I decided that we should brainstorm about the things or activities that we can do together during the father-and-daughter time. To show my commitment to her, I took out one new writing notepad and told her that I would write down these ideas on it. Besides, to make it more personal to her I named our father-and-daughter time to Daddy-and-Enxi time and wrote it down as the title to our activity list. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we managed to come out with close to 10 activities in that night. Guess what, quite a number of these ideas were contributed by my wife (lesson #1). My daughter was equally excited about this process. She took out one of her writing notepads and started to copy the list of activities from my notepad. I think she was trying to tell me that she has a part to play to develop the list and share the ownership of the list – rightly so.

Second lesson learnt: Showing commitment to my action either verbally (telling her about the Daddy-and-Enxi time) or visually (writing the ideas in a notepad) is important to my daughter. It shows my commitment to her about our time and at the same time excites her to do the same.

I know this is just the beginning. Having read the Secret 3 on Consistency of The 7 Secrets of Effective Fathers by Ken R. Canfield, I am reminded the key to success to our father-and-daughter time is to ensure regularity and predictability on my time with my daughter. Up till now, my daughter and I were able to spend time doing some of these activities during our Daddy-and-Enxi time and we had also added new activities to our list. In every week, I can tell from her look that she looks forward to this time as much as I do to spend the quantity and quality time with her. Cheers.

Teoh Sing Peng

Wife: Teoh Chiew Chuan

Daughter: Enxi

The Desperately Trying-To-Be Effective Dads

This photo was taken on the last session of our classes.
Those who were absent, we would need to photo-shop you in :)
You can download a higher resolution photo (186 KB) here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/-EePMMtVBVSO4HcObfsfLg?feat=directlink
If you need an even higher resolution (1.8 MB) photo, email me.

And now for the Testimonies! Graduation of 1st Batch.

We have just concluded our 7 weeks for classes for "The 7 Secrets of Effective Fathers" and 7 weeks of small group activities, which we call the Mentoring and Accountability Group (MAG).

I have asked you to write your reflection as a testimony of how you have grown as a father over the last 14 weeks. I am overwhelmed reading your testimonies, which I will post on this blog with your permission. I rejoice with you that your relationship with your wife and children have grown deeper and that you are diligent in wanting to see change in your own life. I am overwhelmed also because I had only wanted to start small and what I am hearing is far far more than I expect. For which I can only conclude that it is God’s work. Can you now imagine with me what other fathers would do when they hear what’s happening? Only an ignorant father could not care less about the testimonies of these men. Our families are at stake here!

Thank you for being such an encouragement! I urge you to write and encourage everyone if you have not done so.

We have just read in our journalling from 1 Thess 1:2-3 and this is how I felt when I read your testimonies:

² We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. ³ We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let me just share some thoughts here:

I am thankful for each of you and it is my prayer that the fruit of your fathering will abound more and more.

Therefore our fathering must be centred on three things: Faith, Love and Hope.

1.       Faith – our work must be produced by faith. We must have faith to believe that God is the Author and Perfecter of our fathering. Faith also means that in our fathering, God must be in the centre of what we are doing, because He is the perfect Father. We must therefore grow deeper in love with our Heavenly Father more each day. This is a non-negotiable and we must continually watch out lest we fall. And we get other men in our lives to watch out for us too. We should never be alone in this journey of faith but to walk together with other men in the Body of Christ.

2.       Love – our labor must be prompted by love. Not a selfish or self-centred kind of love. We are not doing this because we want others to notice how good we are as a father. We are not even doing it because we want to feel significant. We are doing this because we love our family too much to have them experienced the blessings of God less than what they deserved. Our wives and children need our best effort.

3.       Hope – we endure and persevere because of our hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. We long for the day when we appear before Christ and to hear Him say: “Well done, good and faithful servant!” That would be the greatest joy. In fact in 1 Thess 2:19 For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? 20 Indeed, you are our glory and joy. What will be our hope, joy and crown some day? To see our family in heaven together. They will be our glory and joy!

Loving Mum

I personally think Chapter 7 on "Loving Their Mother" is a tough one. Some of us may be confronted with the reality of the health of our marriage. This is a great time to take stock and if you did genuinely do the homework on rating your marriage together with your wife, you have already taken your marriage one notch up.


This is the exercise: Rate your relationship with your wife. (1[Bad] to 10[Great]) 


The chapter rightly states the matter:

In many marriages, the husband and father is more in love with his children than he is with his wife. 

Meeting on 20 Sep - Secret 3 - Protecting and Providing

What a great time we had!

Thanks for all the sharing! It is so great to hear stories of your journey.

For those who missed, here's the gist:

1. I shared the importance of the three roles fathers play as prophet, priest and king in the home.

• Prophet - we hear from God and speaks prophetically into our family. We bring words of encouragement and build into their lives as we maintain a vital relationship with God.
• Priest - we represent our family to God in prayer and petition. We started the time of meeting with prayers for our family. This is one thing we must continue to learn increasingly.
• King - not the worldly idea of the kind of dictatorial kings we have today. Although God will ultimately be the absolute King over His Kingdom, in some sense fitting the phrase of a "dictatorial king", He is however a benevolent dictator. Kind of oxymoron statement in our understanding but because God is absolutely powerful, loving and just, He is able to be just that. Jesus has already set the perfect example of the servant leader, so I don't think we will misunderstand that term when applied to God.

These are important roles that we need to learn over time.

2. Next we break into our MAG (Mentoring and Accountability Group) to share in what ways we have grown as fathers. This meeting is the mid-way point of our 7 sessions together. Each group then has a chance to share in the meeting what was shared in the small group. (Men, please remember to type out what you have written and email it to me.)

In summary, this is what I gleaned from the sharing:

• We have become more intentional with our children. We are making time for them but we also acknowledge that this is hard work.
• We are listening more and less "preachy" towards them. Certainly our listening skill has improved.
• There is greater self-awareness of who we are as fathers, especially after the evaluation exercise we did with our children. We have gained from their feedback and we have begun to change the way we father for the better.
• Our children are interested in our involvement with Fathers Club. Some even reminded their fathers about the next meeting.
• Because we are listening and engaging, our children are opening up more. What has changed? The fathers! Many of us acknowledged that our children are the "Yes, No, OK" communicator with us, most of the time a one-word answer from them when we try to converse. This has change especially after the fatherhood evaluation we did with them that started the communication going.
• We have to learn to the say the very important phrase "I am sorry."

3. I shared with the fathers a powerful video about a 10-year old boy who became handicapped on one leg due to an accident and how mentoring and role modelling through a 72 year old man can bring much hope to the boy and his family. Today's chapter covers how as fathers, our role is to protect and part of it is our response to crises that happen in our family. See this video and you will be blessed. Can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsWY2WFml_I

The summary chapter notes is available for download as usual.

Meeting on 6 Sep - Secret 3 - Consistency

I showed a video of Eminem's rap song "When I am Gone". The lyrics is here. I was introduced to Eminem, an American rapper, by my son Shaun who shared during one of our father-son talk about music. He told me he likes Eminem because he's honest and truthful about life. Interesting to hear that from him.

Fathers, our children appreciates it when we are upfront (honest and truthful about our life!)

Videos like this are popular among young people because they can identify with what the song writer is trying to communicate. This is a song clearly about absentee fathers. That may explains the popularity because many kids suffers from that!

Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wYNFfgrXTI

"When I'm Gone"

[Introduction]
Yeah...
It's my life...
My own words I guess...

[Verse 1]
Have you ever loved someone so much, you'd give an arm for?
Not the expression, no, literally give an arm for?
When they know they're your heart
And you know you were their armour
And you will destroy anyone who would try to harm 'her
But what happens when karma, turns right around and bites you?
And everything you stand for, turns on you to spite you?
What happens when you become the main source of her pain?
"Daddy look what I made", Dad's gotta go catch a plane
"Daddy where's Mommy? I can't find Mommy where is she?"
I don't know go play Hailie, baby, your Daddy's busy
Daddy's writing a song, this song ain't gonna write itself
I'll give you one underdog then you gotta swing by yourself
Then turn right around in that song and tell her you love her
And put hands on her mother, who's a spitting image of her
That's Slim Shady, yeah baby, Slim Shady's crazy
Shady made me, but tonight Shady's rocka-by-baby...

[Chorus]
And when I'm gone, just carry on, don't mourn
Rejoice every time you hear the sound of my voice
Just know that I'm looking down on you smiling
And I didn't feel a thing, So baby don't feel my pain
Just smile back
And when I'm gone, just carry on, don't mourn
Rejoice every time you hear the sound of my voice
Just know that I'm looking down on you smiling
And I didn't feel a thing, So baby don't feel no pain
Just smile back...

[Verse 2]
I keep having this dream, I'm pushin' Hailie on the swing
She keeps screaming, she don't want me to sing
"You're making Mommy cry, why? Why is Mommy crying?"
Baby, Daddy ain't leaving no more, "Daddy you're lying
"You always say that, you always say this is the last time
"But you ain't leaving no more, Daddy you're mine"
She's piling boxes in front of the door trying to block it
"Daddy please, Daddy don't leave, Daddy - no stop it!"
Goes in her pocket, pulls out a tiny necklace locket
It's got a picture, "this'll keep you safe Daddy, take it withcha'"
I look up, it's just me standing in the mirror
These ___ walls must be talking, cuz man I can hear 'em
They're saying "You've got one more chance to do right" - and it's tonight
Now go out there and show that you love 'em before it's too late
And just as I go to walk out of my bedroom door
It's turns to a stage, they're gone, and this spotlight is on
And I'm singing...

[Chorus]
And when I'm gone, just carry on, don't mourn
Rejoice every time you hear the sound of my voice
Just know that I'm looking down on you smiling
And I didn't feel a thing, So baby don't feel my pain
Just smile back
And when I'm gone, just carry on, don't mourn
Rejoice every time you hear the sound of my voice
Just know that I'm looking down on you smiling
And I didn't feel a thing, So baby don't feel no pain
Just smile back...

[Verse 3]
Sixty thousand people, all jumping out their seat
The curtain closes, they're throwing roses at my feet
I take a bow and thank you all for coming out
They're screaming so loud, I take one last look at the crowd
I glance down, I don't believe what I'm seeing
"Daddy it's me, help Mommy, her wrists are bleeding,"
But baby we're in Sweden, how did you get to Sweden?
"I followed you Daddy, you told me that you weren't leavin'
"You lied to me Dad, and now you make Mommy sad
"And I bought you this coin, it says 'Number One Dad'
"That's all I wanted, I just want to give you this coin
"I get the point - fine, me and Mommy are going"
But baby wait, "it's too late Dad, you made the choice
"Now go out there and show 'em that you love 'em more than us"
That's what they want, they want you Marshall, they keep.. screamin' your name
It's no wonder you can't go to sleep, just take another pill
Yeah, I bet you will. You rap about it, yeah, word, k-keep it real
I hear applause, all this time I couldn't see
How could it be, that the curtain is closing on me
I turn around, find a gun on the ground, cock it
Put it to my brain and scream "die Shady" and pop it
The sky darkens, my life flashes, the plane that I was supposed to be on crashes and burns to ashes
That's when I wake up, alarm clock's ringin', there's birds singin'
It's Spring and Hailie's outside swinging, I walk right up to Kim and kiss her
Tell her I miss her, Hailie just smiles and winks at her little sister
Almost as if to say..

[Chorus/Outro]
And when I'm gone, just carry on, don't mourn
Rejoice every time you hear the sound of my voice
Just know that I'm looking down on you smiling
And I didn't feel a thing, So baby don't feel my pain
Just smile back
And when I'm gone, just carry on, don't mourn
Rejoice every time you hear the sound of my voice
Just know that I'm looking down on you smiling
And I didn't feel a thing, So baby don't feel no pain
Just smile back...

The Fatherhood Journey

This article was published in DUMC Floodgates (July-Aug 2010). This is the unedited version.

The FATHERHOOD Journey – to boldly go where no man has gone before.

I enjoyed preaching on Fathers’ Day. The enjoyment wasn’t just primarily that I am sharing about something I am passionate about, but seeing my twenty-year old son sharing his testimony (click on this link to hear him) about his relationship with me. There is no greater joy as a father than seeing him on stage sharing about the fruits of my relationship with him over the last twenty years. Hearing him said that I am his hero, friend and teacher was a proud moment for me. In fact from the way he “preached” through his three-point mini “sermon” with such confidence and in the way he engaged the congregation, I am quite sure some day, he will be a better preacher than me! And the funny thing about being a father is this: We will never be envious when our children do better than us. In fact, we rejoice when that happens. If we understand this principle, then we will begin to see the multiplying effect of our lives through our children.

It seems so long ago but I still remember that awesome but fearful experience of seeing him coming out of mum’s womb into this world. It dawned on me then that my life from that moment on will be changed forever. I am now entrusted with someone whom I have no idea how or what he will turn out to be in this challenging world. While we may be confident about taking on a new assignment at our workplace because we are adequately trained over time, fathering is something else. I had wished I was more prepared but being entrusted now with this tiny baby in my hand, I am reminded of Captain Kirk of starship Enterprise: “Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

The toughest thing about being dad is this. We will not know how we fare in our role until years later when they are on their own. Often we are more concern about our children’s behavior in their growing years and our interventions are reactive. Pro-active parenting is not the norm for many. We focus on what’s urgent rather than important. Urgent matters require our immediate attention but important matters are often relegated to another time, which is often unavailable anyway, or forgotten. Our ultimate goal in parenting is not whether our children will behave themselves when we are looking. It is when they know how to live rightly and making wise decisions when we are not looking. It's inculcating a godly fear of God in their lives and through that, they will have godly wisdom in life to make all of life's decision. (Psalm 111:10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding.)

We often prepare our children well with “mind training”. The higher the IQ, the better they will be. The endless pursuit of academic trainings misses the point about heart and spiritual development. These are priceless preparation that comes only through much personal contact, coaching and attention from us fathers. Often we put high price tags on low price items and the consequences of that mistake will reveal itself in the later years. Many adults I had counseled reveal the pains of bad decisions. I wished they had certain basic biblical principles to work with and someone they could seek counsel from before they made those decisions. Fathers, we play a crucial role in the life of our children. Fathers build confidence, prepare children for the real world and provide a look at the world of men. Our children are thirsting for our words, echoing the words of our Heavenly Father to His Son Jesus: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." (Mark 1:11)

In the formative pre-adolescent years, mum’s input is vital. Dad’s most important influence is at adolescence. Before the industrial revolution of the 18^th century, fathers passed on their trade skills to their sons, and thus led the adolescent son into manhood through apprenticeship. Adolescent daughters are starved of their fathers’ affirmation that their princesses are beautiful and loved. Her choice of future partner and satisfaction in marriage are hinged on her relationship she had with her father.

Using the metaphor of an arrow in the hands of a warrior, the Psalmist described in Psalm 127 that children are blessings to keep our legacy going for the family, city and nation. They are arrows to be released and let’s pray they will hit their marks accurately. The family preserves the best of the past and invests this legacy for the future. Every baby born is God's affirmative vote for the future of man and our opportunity to initiate some new beginnings.

We have just launched our Fathers Club! (dumcfathersclub.blogspot.com). It’s a journey we need not walk alone. We have many who have boldly gone before us.