Do I need to be financially set before having kids?
As you are finding a wife and establishing a career, you are building a family. You do not have to have a career making $100,000 at the beginning to have one or two or even three kids. All of that can be incremental. So many people tell me, oh Father, I need to buy a house before I get married. I was married 15 years and in my mid-30s, with I think three kids at that point, when I bought my first house.
You do not have to have everything about life figured out. So many people put so much pressure on themselves to have so many things figured out. Look, you can be poor in your 20s. You can be building your career. You can be having kids. They are not that expensive when they are little. Yes, your wife stays home. Yes, you probably end up working two jobs. At one point I was working three jobs when I had my first child.
When my first kid was born, I took one day off work because I had no paternity leave. With my second kid, a couple of days. That grew with time as my career grew, but I was learning and finding my purpose in life by serving the people around me. Having kids will do a tremendous work in kicking you in the butt and sending you forward into greater and greater responsibilities and maturity.
And that maturity, the way you carry yourself, will be evident to the people you work with, because when they see a young man with children, they know that man is going to be hardworking and devoted to his job, because other people are dependent on him. No matter if you are 21 or 29, these are the things you want to establish in your life, because they are the rocket fuel that will propel you forward for the next 40 odd years: deepening a relationship with God that you keep working at for the rest of your life, building a relationship with a wife who is the one person you are unquestionably devoted and committed to, building a career incrementally over several decades, and establishing a family with children who are dependent upon you.
All of these are responsibilities, but they all happen incrementally. You do not do them all at once. I have six kids now. If I had six kids when I had one kid, it would have broken me. There is no way I could have handled it. God gives us time and incremental children in order to build us up and strengthen us, so that we get formed into the man God desires us to be.
Yes, we have to avoid sin, but we also have to continue seeking to build righteousness and to further our relationship with Christ, to the glory of God.
