Sons loved by fathers

"Fathers are really close to their sons down here," I thought as I walked around Guayaquil, Ecuador, watching fathers and sons with their arms interlocked or draped over one another as they walked, having one-on-one lunches together, or simply having an afternoon coffee. Initially the level of physical closeness struck me as isolated, but as I moved around the Guayaquil, and later on in Quito, I noticed the same pattern. It seemed that fathers displaying physical and emotional closeness with their sons is simply a normative cultural value and likely a parental expectation.

As I thought about the United States, I began to wonder why it seems that this level of relational closeness is not the norm here. I was at a sushi restaurant one night with friends in Quayaquil and I saw an older teen arriving late to join his family for dinner. He greeted them all by kissing and hugging his mother, father, and middle school-aged younger brother. Kissing the mother was normal, but kissing his dad and brother on the cheek in public is something I don't normally see here in the States, not even among Christians.

Most guys in America grow up with their fathers never really paying too much attention to them emotionally. Most guys I know can't have sustained conversations with their fathers unless it pertains to work, sports, the weather, a theology lecture, and so on. Why is this?

As I sat in the Quito airport, I saw a father and son chatting. There was something different about this conversation. The son looked to be about 20-years-old and the father looked to be in his late 40s or early 50s. They were sitting next to each other, but the father was turned at an angle toward his son and doing nothing for about 40 minutes other than looking at this son right in the eye, and giving him affirmative head nods and pats on the back. The father made occasional comments. The father wasn't on his Blackberry and his son wasn't sending and responding to text messages or hooked up to an iPod or a game system. They were talking to each other uninterrupted. The look on his dad's face communicated something like, "You're the apple of my eye and I'm interested in everything you have to say no matter what." It was encouraging to see.

Of course, this is not exclusive to Ecuador. I've seen similar things when I travel to Guatemala among my friends and their own families there. I am also certain that some families in the United States have similar patterns, as well. The difference in Latin America is that this level of relational connectedness between fathers and sons seems very public.

When a father, then, tells his son that God, his heavenly father, loves him, he has a very good context for understanding what that means when his father teaches his son about the Scriptures: physical, undivided, affirmative, unconditional love and affection. "You know son," a father might say, "kinda like the way I treat you but without sin" (Deuteronomy 7:7-13).