Today’s Guest Post is from Jody Hoover. Jody is an amazing husband, father (Daddy) and friend. He blogs at DadsRandomThoughts.com.

One of my favorite expressions is “Anyone can be a father, it takes someone special to be a daddy!”

A Daddy is much more than a father.

Daddy implies leader, mentor, coach and hopefully bucking trends of today, a husband as well. If you are lucky enough to be in this role right now, you have to make decisions differently than you did when you were single or didn’t have kids!

Men are great creations of God and we are wired to go after life one way: aggressively. More importantly, we like to go after things that give us a feeling of measurable accomplishment. The three easy things for all of us men to go after are…

Power, money, and sex.

Pick up any news story and you will find powerful men corrupted by

Power, money, and or sex.

It’s an election year, so there are even more stories of this than normal.  The question is…

How do we take the raw aggressiveness of being a man and turn it into something useful and beneficial to others?

One thing that is really important here, you don’t get rid of the aggressive nature of men, you point it elsewhere. You point it towards who real men are created to be. Read Wild at Heart by John Eldredge if that doesn’t make sense to you.

I am an Eagle Scout and this is adapted from something said there often. Decisions of daddies need to be based on 3 big things: God, Family, Self. Get these three in proper order: this is the difference between a father and a Daddy.

God
Don’t look at Mosaic Law for this one. This test can be broken down much easier. Am I hurting or helping my fellow man in this decision. Helping others is pleasing to God! If I truly love God, my life will show it by the way I treat others.

Family
Daddy, it’s not all about you anymore. Picking up and moving across country because it sounds fun probably isn’t something that should be done without a lot of talking and prayer with your spouse and children (if they are old enough). Buying a motorcycle? You better have life insurance. Taking on new debt for something that you just have to have right now? How is that going to affect your ability to have margin in your family’s budget?

Self
Notice this is the LAST criteria. You shouldn’t even consider yourself until you have satisfied the first two criteria. If you made it to this last criterion, the question should be, does this benefit me to better serve God and family? Shocker, the self-test just goes right back to the first two criterion of a decision for daddies.

In case you missed the undertone of my writing, daddy is an awesome role/position, but it means putting most others people’s needs in front of your own. So don’t just be a father, be a Daddy!

So what do you think? Am I completely off basis about how a Daddy should make a decision? Did I nail it? What do you do differently or the same?