Kearney Kids Parenting Show
First Baptist Church Kearney’s very own Minister of Children, Abraham Leonard, interviews pastors and authors on the subject of parenting, seeking to learn from their insights. We hope and pray that this resource is transformative for your parenting!
Kearney Kids Parenting Show
Parenting: Dr. Hershael York
Listen as Dr. Hershael York shares his thoughts about parenting with parents around the globe.
Hello,
SPEAKER_01:welcome to the Kearney Kids Parenting Show. I am your host, Abraham Leonard, Minister of Children at First Baptist Church Kearney. I am so glad that you have joined us. Please welcome to the show, Dr. Herschel York. We're so glad that you're able to join us today. Could you tell us a little bit about your family, your ministry, and just how you're doing?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I am married to Tanya, have been for 44 years, and we have two sons, Michael and Seth. They're both in ministry. Michael is a pastor in Ashland, Kentucky. Seth is the director of a really large Baptist camp ministry. of what's called Crossings Ministries here in Kentucky. And he's the director of their Cedarmore camp. Crossings has about 10,000 students come through in the summer. And then they have a lot of retreat traffic as well throughout the year. And so Seth directs that. And he is a deacon at Buck Run where I was pastor for 20 years. And now I'm just a member. And we transitioned to Dr. Chris Parrish as the pastor, and I'm traveling every week pretty much now. So, yeah, Tonya and I are doing great. We're really enjoying this stage of life. By the way, we have five grandchildren. Michael is a parent of Henry, and Seth is the father of Stella, Herschel III, because I'm actually a two, Harper, and Jenny.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's awesome. To start off, could you just give us maybe, well, a lot of people have a lot of good parenting stories, and it sounds like you've been doing it for a while, but do you have maybe one or a couple of your favorite parenting memories that you could share with us?
SPEAKER_00:Man, I have so many. I really enjoyed pretty much every stage of my son's life. You know, older teen years were a little tough, but they were great kids, and I just really enjoyed them. I think probably one of my favorite things, I made the determination when they were young that I really wanted to just keep their heart with me, especially through adolescence and young adulthood. So I told them each that when they turned 11 that I would take them on a trip anywhere in the United States they wanted to go, just me and him. And when they were 16, I'd take them anywhere in the world. And my sons are really, really different. They're nothing alike. They both look like me, but they don't look like each other. It's really strange. And Michael was sort of the brainiac kind of kid. And at 11, he wanted to go to Chicago to see Wheaton College. He wanted to... Me, Kent Hughes, who was pastor of College Church and an author. He wanted to see the Shedd Aquarium, the Natural History Museum, and Moody Church. And we did that. That was Michael at 11. Seth wanted to go to Orlando for all the obvious reasons. And at 16, Michael wanted to go to London to see the British Museum. The Lindisfarne Gospel, the British Library, and London in general. And then I wanted a side trip to Liverpool. He was a Beatles fan. And so we did that. And Seth wanted to go fishing for peacock bass in the Amazon. And we did that. Yeah, and we went to Sioux Falls and fishing for peacock bass in the Amazon. Just had a great time. And both of them, they're now... 42 and 40, and they could still tell you every detail of those trips. They really mattered in their lives. I used them to sort of tell them, okay, here's what's going to happen. You're 11 now, here's what's going to happen as you get into your adolescent years. And then when they were 16, here's what? Manhood. You're on the threshold of manhood. Here's what that's going to look like and what it needs to look like. It was really incredible. And I have such a close relationship with both of my sons. And I did with my dad. My dad went home to visit the Lord in 2009. So, man, just what a sweet and precious stream of grace. So those would be among my favorite things would be my trips with my son.
SPEAKER_01:That's cool. I can remember a lot of times when it was just me and my dad and how special those memories were to me. And so that's really cool. I want to kind of move to maybe some hard times that you've had as a parent and how you've overcame them. Do you have some of those that you could share with us?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there were a lot of really difficult challenges. One is when they were two and fours, when I was on staff at a church in Lexington, Kentucky, it was my family's home church, my wife's home church, and I was on staff there for seven years. but I really felt the Lord leading us to go to seminary. And so we packed up and moved to the Memphis, Tennessee area. We actually lived in Eastern Arkansas, the Arkansas Delta, Mississippi Delta in Arkansas. And we didn't know anybody. And we, to go from a really, just a super support group to an area where you don't know anybody and you don't have babysitters and Also, we didn't have money. You know, I left a comfortable job. We lived in a church parsonage. We were really well cared for. And I go down, I didn't have a job. I didn't have the prospect of a job. I didn't know anybody. And just going through, you know, we had one car and every day, you know, I had to go from where we lived in Arkansas across the Mississippi River to Memphis, where I went to the seminary at Mid-America, Baptist St. Louis Seminary, and Leave Tanya along with those school boys. They had health issues when we got there. Mosquitoes were so bad, my son Michael actually went into anaphylactic shock from so many mosquito bites. We had to take him to Le Bonheur Children's Hospital. Seth had a very similar thing happen. Yeah, and just navigating all of that, being a parent, being a student, not having a job, financial pressures, not knowing anybody. But man, the Lord was so faithful. And, you know, we just did what we needed to do. And they were hard. And yet, you know, it's like many people will say, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't take a million dollars for it, nor would I take a million dollars to go through it again. You know, the Lord really used it in a marvelous way in our lives and in our parenting. But that was hard. You know, there were There were other kinds of challenges in there later, you know, in the teen years and those kinds of things that a lot of parents go through as your kids struggle with. Do I believe this because my dad believes it or is this really my conviction? You know, man, just sticking with them through bad decisions and all that, you know, that was obviously a challenging time, but the Lord was really gracious in that too and Again, today at 42 and 40, they look back on it with nothing but gratitude. And us too, we're grateful the Lord was gracious.
SPEAKER_01:That's really neat how the Lord shaped you through all those hard times and how you guys grew through that. So if you're going to go back in time before you had a kid, what kind of parenting advice, maybe something that you've gleaned as you've been through parenting um or you're still going through parenting but as you've been through a lot of parenting um what would you tell yourself now that you kind of wish you knew before you started
SPEAKER_00:so much uh you know i i don't i don't have like major regrets like i i totally blew it or something i have a lot of small regrets things that you know i just grew i was i think i was too harsh I was not a strict parent in the sense of making them sit around on their hands but they had high expectations and I don't feel bad about that I feel bad that sometimes when they were just being kids I would act in an intimidating way instead of a more loving way
SPEAKER_02:I
SPEAKER_00:look back and just sort of used the authoritarian parent posture more than just, hey, let me explain to you why this is not good. Now, I'm not one who thinks that parents need to just always treat their kids. There needs to be consequences and all that, but I think that I erred on the side of being authoritarian, not merely authoritative, and not always explaining myself. It was just like, because I said so, a little too much. I look back at that, and I wish, like all of us, I wish I could know then what I know now. I wish I could have mellowed earlier than I did. And last night was funny, I was talking to one of my sons last night, He was talking to me about an issue they had to deal with with somebody. And as he was telling me, I said, hey, as the guy you got this from, let me just tell you, what's your tone as you say that? You know, tone matters. And I said, you need to take the sort of the verbal chest bump out of that. And I recognized it because he got it from me. He heard it from me. And he said, thank you for that advice. And he texted me the day that... He used that advice and it went well for him. I wish that I had figured that out a little bit earlier as their dad. Neither one of them complained about it, but I look back at it and think, wow, I should have been a little gentler, a little kinder in the way I corrected them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's those kinds of things. My dad's a pastor as well, and I'm able to message him and say, hey, I'm dealing with I'm dealing with this. Can you, can you give me some advice? You've dealt with this before. And so it's neat that you mentioned that, um, a lot of people kind of despise having to be a pastor's kid, but I actually kind of, there's so many things about being a pastor's kid that are helpful.
SPEAKER_00:I was a pastor's kid. My sons are pastor's kids and all of, all of us love it. I love growing up. My dad's son, my sons would tell you that same thing. Uh, and, uh, Even when one of our sons went through a time of bad choices and stuff, he never resented being a pastor's kid. He didn't resent the Lord or the church. You know, he just sort of figured things out. And, you know, one time, I'll tell you this. One time, one of my sons complained to Tanya, my wife, about people's expectations of being the pastor's son. And Tanya said, let me just take that off of you right now. You don't ever need to concern yourself that you're the pastor's son. Don't do anything because you're the pastor's son. It's far greater than that. You're a son of a king.
SPEAKER_01:Amen.
SPEAKER_00:That's awesome. And you need to do everything you do because you're a son of the king. And she just took it. It's not about your dad. It's about your heavenly father. And That really resonated with both my sons, and it still does. They do it with their kids, same advice. And she's exactly right. The fact that you're a Herschel York son is of no real consequence eternally. The fact that you're a son of the Most High God, that matters. And that's the way you need to live.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. Yeah, I really like that advice. As we kind of draw this conversation to a close, do you have any good, funny parenting stories for us? I
SPEAKER_00:got a lot. So, Michael, our oldest, was really precocious. He was a brainiac kid. I'm not making this up. He knew his colors by the time he was 13 months old. He graduated high school at 14, went to college. I made him wait until he was 16 to go to college. He was just way ahead of the curve on that kind of thing. So I tell you that because people don't believe he would be this precocious. But when he was five, actually, yeah, he was five, I became pastor of my first church there in Eastern Arkansas while I was in seminary. And the sanctuary was upstairs and they had this old rickety elevator just big enough really for a wheelchair. Tanya had fallen and like broken her tailbone. And so walking upstairs was really hard for her. We got, we got to church. I was a brand new pastor and Michael and Seth there, you know, and I said, look, mama, your mom and I are going to take the elevator upstairs. And one of our deacons was there, Larry Fowler. I can't forget. I said, you come upstairs with brother Larry. And we're going to take the elevator. Michael said, I want to come. I said, it's too small. And I really wanted them to be our deacons and people to get to know our kids. And I had my reasons for wanting him to go upstairs with Larry. And I said, no, you come with brother Larry. He'll bring you upstairs. We'll meet you up there. And Michael, you know, he knew he'd push it as far as he could push it, but he was pouting and acting unhappy about it. I said, we'll see you up there. We closed the door. Push the button. And this elevator was like the slowest thing in the world. You know, just rickety, rickety bouncing back and forth. And they beat us upstairs. They went up the stairs and were literally waiting for us when finally these doors opened. And Michael was standing there by this deacon. You know, I wanted to make a good impression on my new church. And I just said to Michael, I said, I said, Michael, do you know why I'm so hard on you? And he goes, yeah, because you hate children and you're not my real father. Five years old, he can come out with something like that. And I was like, well, there goes making any good impression on these people. You know, it's like, you're a five-year-old and saying that kind of thing to you. But it was just really, it was funny. And I had such a good time being my dad to my sons. I still do. One thing I learned is you're never done. I used to think when they were little that, hey, when they're 18, you're done. Uh-uh. You're never done. They always want your advice, your counsel. You always worry about them, their decisions, and then the grandkids come along. You want to be there for them as well. So, It's an ongoing thing. I've realized that until I'm old enough that they're taking care of me, I'm still the dad, and that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's really awesome. Well, on behalf of all the listeners and myself, I want to thank you for being able to be on the show today.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's my delight, and I pray the Lord uses it, and thanks for coming. considering my opinion, worth asking.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for joining me. I hope this was an encouragement to you. Please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with the people around you.