To My Young Black Friend
[This letter has been stripped of its personal identifiers and shared in hopes that it might be of benefit to someone else.]
To my young black friend,
I know we’ve had a lot of good conversations over the years, but there are some things I wanted to write down for you – things to keep with you as you navigate the life you’ve been given.
More than anything, I want to tell you how proud I am of you and how delighted I am to get to see the man you’ve become. I am amazed at how different you are from your dad and how you are able to offer the kindness, love, and availability to your children that your dad was never able to offer you. I love your desire to teach them the Bible as you learn yourself. I love your sincere and honest love for God and how I see that shaping your life and the man you are and the man you are becoming.
I am so proud of you. I hope you are too.
I know you worry about making enough money sometimes, but never forget that the difference you make in your kids life will never be reflected in a paycheck, but by the love and presence you give them. We have talked about this before, and I’ve written about it HERE, but the fact thsat you are sticking with your family and raising your children, when it’s easy and when it’s not so easy, will be the biggest thing to affect their life outcomes. Your kids will be smarter, happier, safer, do better in school, make better relationship decisions, will be dramatically less likely to ever go to jail, and will be far less likely to live in poverty – just because you are there. You are doing all of that for them simply by being you and being there.
No one needs to tell you that life will have its challenges. But always guard your heart and never let those things steal your joy or your peace (I’m a work in progress on this too).
Some people will treat you good or bad for all sorts of superficial reasons. Some of those reasons will obviously be your age, race, or gender. Never give the people who would treat you bad the power to determine your life. They really don’t have that power if you don’t give it to them. You continue to be amazing, have a winning attitude, and trust that God is watching over you and you will live to see that those people are irrelevant in your life.
Carrie once busted her tail for a company that one day sat her down and told her that she would never progress beyond a certain level in the company because she was a woman. She immediately began looking for another job and was quickly hired by a company that was borderline sexist in the opposite direction in how it prioritized the hiring and promotion of women – but only really awesome women. A few years later, her old boss had to come see her at her new job for some reason, and couldn’t believe the office she had. It was a good moment for her. You’ll find the same thing in life if you are open to it. For every person who is going to give you a hard time because you are young, black, or male, you’ll find someone else who will bend over backwards to give you a shot because of those things. Be awesome and take your awesomeness where it is appreciated and help those people win.
As you raise your kids, I know you want to teach them how to succeed and thrive in life. I don’t know of anything in this life that does more to improve relationships, refine character, deepen the soul, and clarify what things are truly worth valuing and running after than putting Jesus at the center of your life. Honestly. The longer I live in loving submission to the God I find in Jesus, the more I realize how much I need Him, how good God is, how God sets me free, and how God transformatively good God is to so many other people I have had the gift to know. So, in mentoring your kids, I would above all things strive to teach and model for them a life shaped by the goodness of God.
After that, the next thing I would focus on is teaching them how to succeed in relationships. Outside of their relationship with God, nothing else will be more shaping in their life than that. You and I have talked about these things before, but as they get older, I would share with them the things we’ve talked about and the things I wrote about in “A Case For Marriage” and “Sex Talk” and maybe “Quick Tips on Dating.” Based on scientific research and thousands of years of collected wisdom and experience, our modern cultural map for romantic relationships most reliably leads to heartache and misery. It’s possible that your kids may not listen to you in this, but if you try to inform them and teach them something better, at least they’ll have a choice presented to them by someone who loves them enough to talk to them about these things. So often, that is the very thing that God does in our lives over and over again. In Deuteronomy 30:19, God says, “I lay before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” God isn’t out to get us or steal life from us, but to help us live out the full, bursting, beautiful potential God has put inside of us. In knowing you, I think your kids will get that.
After a thriving relationship with God and potentially a thriving romantic relationship and family, you’ll want to teach your kids how to succeed financially. The immediate good news in this is that you and your children were born in modern day America. This means you are already some of the most wealthy and free people to ever walk the face of the earth. America has its problems for sure, but never forget to be grateful for the elevated time and place that God has put you in.
Being poor in America today is still incredibly rich by a global and historic standards, and while that is worth remembering we both want more than that for your kids. Thankfully there is a well-researched three-step path you can point your kids towards, that will make them nearly poor-proof. You can read more about it HERE, but the three steps are: 1) Finish high school, 2) Get a full-time job and keep it for at least a year, and 3) Wait until you are at least 21 and married to have children. If they do those three things, they are golden. This can be improved on by surrounding themselves with good influences and wise advisors, but these are the basics. Also, as you will see in the same link and we have talked about a ton of times, your kids are already five hundred percent less likely to live in poverty simply because you are sticking around and raising them in a two-parent household. Well done!
Proverbs 13:22 says, “A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children.” You who inherited little but heartache from your own dad are already passing on an inheritance of love, goodness, safety, stability, prosperity, spiritual maturity, wisdom, and character to your own children and I know that rich inheritance will only grow over time.
I’m so proud of you and the man you’ve become. Happy Father’s Day.
Your friend,
Nathan Dean
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