10,000 Hours

Today was Father's Chapel at St. Mark's, so all the dads were invited to join us for chapel. I really thought about what my lesson would be today. What does the Bible say about being a father? And finally, I put a calendar in my box. For this talk I could have put a stopwatch, or an alarm clock, but I thought a puppy dog calendar would most illustrate my point.

I love to read, on a wide variety of subjects, and when I thought and prayed about what to say today I started thinking about the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers is about what makes some people so successful in sports or business or other aspects of life, and Gladwell's argument is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to really master a subject. That's 10,000 hours where you are working to get better at something, whether it's golf or piano, mathematics or law. When you think about all the demands on our day that is an incredible amount of time. What Gladwell does well is tell story after story of the lives of those who are successful and show how they spent those hours. Sometimes those hours came by chance, in that certain individuals were in the right place at the right time to have an opportunity for that much practice. Others worked to make the time. But each success story started with 10,000 hours of practice.

At this point I am sure you are thoroughly confused as to where I am going. How does this have anything to do with fatherhood, or the Bible? As a parent, we have the opportunity for lots of practice at loving our children. There are 8765 hours in a year. Even taking out say, 8 hours a day for sleep, (wishful thinking), that's still 16 hours a day to love our children so in 625 days or just 1.7 years we have reached the 10,000 hour mark. And I'm not even including the 960 hours of pregnancy that came before that. So just think... in just two puppy dog calendars, before the second year or your child's life you were an expert in loving him or her.

For our Father, 10,000 hours is but the blink of an eye. God loved us before we were born and will love us after we are gone and the Bible is full of compelling stories that illustrate just how great God's love for us truly is. We are called to model our lives after God's only son. Which is an awesome task. We are called to become experts in love.