Tag: fatherhood

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swimming lessons

(written in summer 2016)

It’s about 4:30 in the afternoon, and the sand piled on the concrete patio is crumbling like brown sugar against the plastic bucket of a tiny yellow bulldozer. The bulldozer beep-beeps its steady way back to pick up another load, then falls to its side as its owner loses interest and runs for the kiddie pool.

We are in the center of summer – a place of fun and exploration – at my parent’s house out in the country.

Nana and Papa don’t have a sandbox. When I mentioned in passing that our sons were really enjoying their new plastic construction toys, Papa immediately set out to devise a makeshift sandbox out of a dusty blue wading pool and two or three bags of Quik-crete. When we arrived and were ooh-ing and ah-ing over it, he told me that Quik-crete is designed specifically for playground use because of its fine grain and the fact that it is both sifted and washed, that even though it’s not as fine as the pool filter sand (that one is really fine) it’s still perfect for sandboxes.

My dad is one to elaborate beyond the answer you look for, but he carefully selected his materials with the kids in mind. When they started digging and it got dusty, he ran for the garden hose to water it down and kill the dust. He purchased a rainbow-striped beach umbrella to shade the box from mid-day sun, and sweeps the patio after every play session. He sits every afternoon of the week with our Percy in his lap, watching the other kids play with the contented look of a well-fed bullfrog on a lilypad (Papa, that is; although our Percy has mastered this zenned-out expression as well).

I often wonder if I will be that invested in such small things, and that content just watching them play.

As a parent, I recognize that my current season is one of embracing insanity. This is why we are all in such a frenzy to capture each moment, because right now there’s no time to enjoy them. That’s for later, when the kids are no longer running around naked smeared with peanut butter. I mean, I hope my kids will stop doing that someday. It’s the glory of the aged to relish grandparenthood. I don’t begrudge it to my dad, and I wish for it someday myself.

However, I have goals for my kids, in particularly my eldest. This summer she is almost five and she’s tall enough to reach the bottom in the shallow end of their in-ground pool. She loved paddling around on the lakeshore back in June, and she’s excited to learn to swim. The pool, mid-July, is at a comfortable 81 degrees, and the sun is shining hot.

My goal is that she can doggie-paddle by the end of the week. So I get in, pick her up, and put her in the water.

The sirens go off, and suddenly she’s clinging like a leech. I’ve never heard her scream this loud, and believe me, she has shown exceptional prowess in vocal intensity thus far. This is the decibel level normally reserved for fire sirens, and my ear is three inches from the source. I attempt to peel her off of me and the scream erupts, louder. My head is spinning suddenly, and being marginally stronger than a four-year-old, I push her far enough away so the sound is at least less directional.

“Nadia. Nadia! Honey, whoa, whoa, slow down.”

(banshee noises)

“Nadia, there’s nothing to be afraid of, I’m here.”

An upstairs window shatters.

I hold her at arms-length, and she is reaching for me with both arms and legs, clinging to my hands, begging me to take her out, she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t want to swim. I’m a little stunned, despite my nearly five years as a parent. This is my path as a parent, to be flummoxed beyond belief, continually bewildered. My wife joins me in the pool and extricates me from the child-leech. I stand there for a second or two, considering what is to be done.

We don’t cave often to our children. I like to claim that this has to do with carefully-curated parenting philosophies, but mostly I’m incredibly stubborn, and I hate being wrong.

My child needs to learn to swim. She needs to overcome her fears. And so help me, she’s going to do it.

When my wife passes my daughter back to me, I let her go.

She buckles her knees, goes under, and takes on water, and my heart skips a beat. I pull her quickly up, but the damage is done. I take her to the side, where she sobs and shakes uncontrollably and runs away, screaming at me. No, I won’t swim, I don’t want to, don’t make me, Daddy, please.

I’m standing, dripping, in the shallow end, watching her get as far away from me as she possibly can. My wife watches me. My dad is silent. My grandma, who lives with my parents and didn’t quite catch what happened besides the screaming, asks if Nadia is scared. I stop the bitterness before it gets out, and admit, simply, “Yes, she is.”

I don’t know how to help her be courageous, because now she’s scared of me.

By bedtime, my daughter has forgiven me, warily, and we talk quietly about trying again, about how I won’t let her go this time. I admit to her that it is scary, that I was wrong to let her go. She tells me she just wants to play, not swim. That’s okay, I say. That’s okay. I still, stubbornly, end the conversation with an insistence that she still try it sometime, that she will love it once she learns how, that if she trusts me she can learn.

Two days later, with our help, she reaches for the bottom, and learns to climb down the ladder into the shallow end, and we celebrate with her. Somehow, my heart expects more of her than that. I hate myself for it. I hate myself when she does it over and over and looks to me, face shining, and I respond by telling her, “That’s great, now try kicking!” I want her to meet my expectations and then move quickly on to the next triumph, and somehow her extended enjoyment of her little triumphs annoys me. And I hate myself again for my cold heart. I hate that I can’t move beyond myself to see her as she is, and love her without expectations, and train her with grace.

I hate that it’s so hard for me to just sit back and rejoice with her during these moments the moments of triumph with her, like Papa the zen bullfrog.

How quickly I lose the grace of parenting in service of my selfish goals for parenting.

As parents we often think that the world is simple. Eat your vegetables so you’ll be healthy. Brush your teeth so you don’t get cavities. Go to bed so you don’t get sick (and so we can have some kid-free evening time). Learn to swim so you won’t drown. All of this makes sense when you’re looking at it from five or six feet off the ground. The water only comes up to your waist. What’s so scary about that?

Well, from three feet off the ground, that water is at your neck. If you’re not careful, it’s in your lungs. How quickly I forget what it’s like to be small.

Thankfully, God doesn’t:

“The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
But from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children—
with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts.” – Psalm 103:8-18

My Heavenly Father asks a lot of me: faith, good deeds that match the newness of the life He gives us, endurance in sufferings and persistence in prayer. In the midst of all of these things — not least of which is the admonition to be perfect as He is perfect — He knows that I am small and weak. He knows that we are all dust. He actually cloaked Himself in dust and grew at our pace to prove it. And He loves us in all our dusty smallness, and gently and patiently helps us to grow. He loves us as the little children we are. He rejoices over us with singing (Zeph. 3:17).

I insisted on Nadia’s growth in swimming not because I wanted her to trust me, but because I wanted her to be better on my time table. I wanted to get the moments of growth out of the way as quickly as possible so that we could celebrate the goal – children who swam confidently, like me. My goal was the end of the matter, not the process in between. God’s goal, right now, is the process in between. Without the process, the goal would have no meaning.

We are not one-and-done creations. We are built in our faith by the moments in between. Of course we look ahead to heaven, of course we look ahead to perfection, of course we look ahead to the prize set before us. But until we get there – and God knows when that will be – we are in the thick of this scary and often overwhelming and sometimes difficult journey as dusty children.

I hurry to get where I’m going. I think little of the real work to be done in the everyday moments God gives me each day.

It wasn’t just Nadia that needed more grace from her graceless dad. I needed more grace from my Father – grace to forgive me for my belligerence, and then grace for the everyday. I needed to extend this grace to myself, understanding my smallness in light of God’s patience. And then I needed to let this grace seep into my hard heart and show Nadia the love and encouragement and patience I have received from God, time and again.

By the end of the week, I’d revised a couple philosophies, eaten a lot of humble pie, and repaired what I could of the damage. She can walk from wall to wall now in the shallow end, kick her feet while holding onto the ladder, and even bounce a little. She puts her face under the water in the kiddie pool with the help of some pink goggles we got for her and a lot of encouragement. But these matter not because of the goals, even as we celebrate each tiny triumph, but because of the slow rebuilding of trust, and a much more methodical form of courage.

I think of my zen bullfrog dad and my in-the-moment children now a little less like they’re just enjoying themselves, and more like they’ve discovered something wise that I’ve forgotten: these things take time, so why not take the time for these things?

My forgetfulness and brokenness will always break me, as it does now, as I write this. I will never achieve the grace and goodness of my perfect Father, and I will break more than this as she grows up – I will probably break her heart, and the hearts of all of my children. The only thing for me in this is the grace that has been, is, and will be, from a Father who knows my faults, how I need to grow, and just how long it will take before I can swim with the buoyancy of the faith that He is near, and He will not let me drown.

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mid-winter thaw

Saturday morning, ten o’clock or so. We are enjoying one of those rare thaws in mid-January that feel like spring and smell like fall, that give us all a glimpse of a sun we haven’t seen for weeks on end. My wife opened the windows in the kitchen, as if for the first time, as a sojourner in a weary land.  Thirsty, she lifted her head in a silent, joyful acknowledgement of the light and breeze that flowed through and around her at the opening. Sun and air – graces in their own right, best enjoyed when they are so infrequent.

I whined a little because it was cold as well as fresh, but it was difficult to argue with how glorious it smelled and felt to flood our apartment with sunny air. So after the requisite disapproving noises I snuggled into my cable-knit sweater and large mug of coffee and kept my thoughts to myself.

We had established a steady routine of Saturday-morning-only cartoons months before. The contract was agreeable to both parties – several hours of their favorite shows on one side of the house in exchange for several hours of kid-free conversation on the other. The habit was a comforting one.

So after breakfast we arranged our 13-inch computer on the coffee table at an approximate distance from the sofa to aid our youngest in the never-ending quest to keep hands off, please, otherwise you’re going in your crib. The kids immediately lined up on the couch, stair-step bedheads in bright pajamas, squealing about Little Bear and Puffin Rock and the Gruffalo and which one was their favowite. Once they’re set, Mommy heads out to pick up some groceries, and Daddy is in the kitchen having his Daddy juice (coffee) and reading, so if you have trouble with anything please figure it out on your own.

The morning goes as planned for a half-hour or so. I receive regular reports of the doings of Little Bear and friends. I alternately bury my nose in my mug and my book, enjoying both all the more because I’m alone enjoying them, and the sun sends beams through the window.

Then, things break.

I hear a call of distress from the living room, not the usual screech of displeasure over a toy but one of actual heartbreak – from, of the three, my oldest daughter. I extricate myself from the plot line and run to the next room, expecting… I don’t know what, blood or broken glass or something. Nadia is standing up, near tears, wringing her hands. Percy is playing with his cars on the floor, and Kai is studiously picking his nose. I relax at the absence of gore (human or computer variety) and take a seat near her to investigate.

“Daddy!”

I ask what the problem is. She is really upset about this.

“I pulled Percy away from the computer! I hurt him. Mommy told me not to do that.” The tears brim over and spill down her cheeks, and she lets it all out. Percy, placid and fully engaged in Jeep noises, is obviously not damaged by his interaction with his sister. Nadia, however, obviously is.

I’ve seen many a cry in my time as a parent, but this is a new variety for me somehow. Most of the time, our children cry because there is injustice – they didn’t get something they think they deserve, or their sibling took their toy, or they’re tired and can’t process any other way. When sin has occurred, to this point, crying meant fear of discipline. Now, it means something different – a deep grief over what she did, a realization of shame – a response that is right and good when we have broken something, as we so often do.

From early parenting days I’ve struggled with the concept of discipline. It didn’t matter too much when the kids were tiny – in some sense, the routines we developed were a discipline in and of themselves. The selfish hearts we so readily perceive now were, at that point, hard to distinguish from pure hangry. What a blessing that these complex creatures come out, usually, with straightforward needs! So we developed routines and schedules and feeding times and tried to be flexible with things as best we could.

I don’t really remember when everything changed, but that might be because I don’t remember much of anything from that sleep-deprived epoch (another grace, to be sure). But one day I woke up and my kid suddenly had a sin nature. And wow, was it a doozy. We learned by osmosis or desperation to identify a rage cry versus a hunger cry. We learned that a quick flick to a hand reaching for a stovetop, followed by a serious “no, hot!” would embed the truth deeply into their psyche – that actions have consequences – without having to rush them to the hospital for second-degree burns. We learned how to clearly outline why they needed to obey, and then seconds later watched them do the exact thing we told them not to do. The first couple of times, they were always watching us carefully to see how we would respond. We responded in ways they didn’t like very much, so they learned truths about authority.

We did not do it well, or consistently, or perfectly by any stretch of the imagination. We still don’t. But our kids know right from wrong, they know what is kind and what is not, and they stop before they enter the street because we shout “NO,” and not because they see the truck barreling down the road. I have hopes that they might be contributing members of society.

A wise friend of mine (parent of four) once told me that discipline got easier when they realized it wasn’t about results. Discipline is about discipline. We cannot hope to change our children’s hearts, and thinking we can do so through discipline is ludicrous. Rather, we can use it as a tool to show them how the world works, to speak truth into their lives. We can show them that we too, require discipline from our Father – that we are all under the same rules, and that we still mess up.

Our kid’s responses now are largely related to cause and effect – the gift of discipline. My little miscreants know that discipline happens when they do something wrong, so they don’t do something wrong to avoid discipline. Or they try to hide what they did with clumsy misdirection. Nadia has become a pro at telling the non-incriminating part of the truth. Kai, though, physically cannot tell a lie. He will hem and haw for a good two or three minutes before changing the subject to train tracks or cookies.

It’s apparent that sin reigns in our children, as it has so often in us, as endearing as its host’s chubby-cheeked attempts to disguise it are. But today Nadia can’t disguise the brokenness, and my heart goes out to her, breaking as it goes.

I wrap her in my arms and let her sob a little bit, soothing as best I can. I ask if she said sorry to Percy, and she reaches for his hand to do so. Percy, the inscrutable monk, looks up at her for a moment with a lordly expression, for all the world appearing to grant her the boon of his forgiveness. He then returns to his trucks.

But Nadia is still in extreme distress, stumbling through sobs to communicate, over and over, that Mommy told her not to push him. When I suggest she confess to Mommy, and tell her we won’t punish her this time, she is vehement in her opposition. She doesn’t want to tell Mommy (regardless of punishment) and she clings to me, and I collect more tears. I’m struck suddenly how real this is to her. This isn’t something that can be cleansed by a quick confession. She is really grieved about what she’s done.

How can we even know the difference sometimes?

For years after I first realized that I needed salvation, I could not understand why certain besetting sins were still clinging to me. If I was indeed changed, why weren’t these sins – that I cognitively knew were wrong and could be overcome – why weren’t they easier to conquer? I struggled through years of fighting to be pure, of pursuing what I thought was holiness, and continually failing, and my sin was still fastened to me like a leech, and my shame grew and grew. I began to think that I was never going to be free of myself, or worse, that I wasn’t actually saved. I grew more and more ashamed, until finally, I broke.

That breaking was the moment that I realized that my sin wasn’t just an obstacle to overcome on my way to perfection. It was something that separated me from my Father. It was something that profoundly broke a relationship that I cared about more deeply than any other. When I turned away from focusing on my sin and looked to Jesus from a place of real grief and total dependence, the hold that my sin had on me loosened, if by degrees. Over time, as I continued to fall and allowed myself to be broken, and learned what it meant to seek His face, the hold loosened more and more. Suddenly, I started to experience days of freedom – more than I’d ever experienced, and a waning desire for my sin.

This was not something I did. This was Someone who broke my will to be sinless, and instead gave me His Son to make me so.

And this is the one thing I can never actually give my child.

Nadia knows the story, cognitively – how God sent His Son to die for her sins, so that she could be a daughter of God and live forever with Him. But the true gift of that bracing, sunny morning was a gift I cannot give, a gift that cannot be manufactured by any amount of discipline or “good parenting” – the gift of a heart that broke a little because she knew, somehow, that she had broken His. I can learn from this, certainly, how to hate sin, how to love my children better. But I cannot bestow the illumination that heals. I cannot speak the Word that saves.

We rocked as she wept out all the tears she could, and fresh batches swam to the surface whenever she remembered the confession ahead. When Mommy returned from shopping, they went alone into Nadia’s room and talked quietly for a short while and cuddled long after, healing the heart-wound with hearing ears and hugs. I occupied the boys. I built continuous train tracks around the living room and they knocked them over and I built them again, all the while breaking up quarrels and reminding them to be kind. We gave Nadia and Mommy privacy while we built our little loops.

We sat there on the worn brown carpet of our living room, with the sun’s warmth outside revealing worn brown grass hidden below mid-winter snows, with the fresh air flowing in and around us. I knew there in that moment that it was good to tell my children the truth: they are loved beyond belief, and they have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and Jesus has made a way for them to be saved.

In the same moment, I was eternally grateful that I was incapable of saving my kids, and that my Gracious Parent was working even now – in secret, in a little heart in the next room.

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the burden of Christmas

For the last few weeks, Christmas has felt less like a meaningful celebration of the Incarnation and more like a giant, hairy elf with terrible body odor strapped to my back. Slowly, agonizingly, this beloved holiday has been driving me into the ground with every step. I smelled it when we introduced our kids to one of our favorite classic Christmas movies and they spent the entire time running in circles around the room and hitting each other. One child, after receiving his gifts, became so fixated on all the gifts he didn’t have that we had to have several Very Serious Conversations. And then there’s those evenings when all I want is a few moments of peace to read one of fifty available Advent devotionals and my two youngest toss banshee screams back and forth like they were playing football. You lay one down and the next just picks up the cry, like some sort of infant relay system.

Of course, it’s not just the kids that get on my nerves around this time of year. It’s everything.

Buying gifts for friends and family becomes a psychotic form of Russian roulette, where our relationship hangs by the thread of dubious knowledge of each person’s deepest longings. In my waking moments, when I could be focusing on the “true meaning of Christmas,” I find myself in a catatonic state, too tired to lift a finger except to push the “next episode” button on The Crown. I feel sick to my stomach half the time from overeating or eating the wrong things or not eating enough of the right things or just because my stomach hates me maybe.

And the music. I’ve invested several months of blood, sweat, and tears in musical offerings for the season’s worship, to come out the end of it sick to death of all the beautiful, meaningful carols I’m supposed to love. (Please know that I love my church dearly, this is just how musicians generally feel at the end of the Christmas season). I’ve been nervous that I might start laughing maniacally at the starting notes of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” or yell “Yippee-ki-yay, $%^&#**&$^#” in the middle of the Advent candle reading. Thankfully, I’ve only heard “O Holy Night” three times this season. The fourth might signal the end of all things good and holy.

the grinch within

To cut to the chase: over the month of December, I’ve been gradually transforming into our favorite snarling bad banana with the greasy black peel. And before you think too unkindly of me, consider how many times you yourself may have thought this exact phrase: “All the noise, noise, noise, NOISE!!”

I can’t be the only person who goes a little crazy during this season, right? RIGHT? But the craziness around me isn’t the burden I’m talking about. It’s the catalyst of that burden.

It’s very easy for me to feel that if we had just done something differently, all of this would have been a very rosy Christmas memory that would have turned into tradition and eventually be recounted by teary-eyed grandchildren at our funerals. If only we had limited the sugar cookies to one instead of three. If only we had played a board game or gone on a walk instead of watching a movie. If only I could focus on all the deep theology of these carols, or take comfort in repeating the sounding joy. If only I was less selfish and more attentive, more patient, more consistent with discipline, more loving, more gentle – all the things I should be as a parent that I am so often, clearly, NOT.

the confrontation that is Christmas

This is the crushing weight of Christmas, for parents and I suspect, to some degree, for all of us. We recognize that traditions and rituals are valuable, but so many of us find ourselves bent low under the heavy load of our own expectations of the season. We’re terrified of missing opportunities to show our families love and make memories. We’re anxious about offending others or not speaking the truth enough at seasonal gatherings. We’re losing sleep over the trajectory of those closest to us, of our church, of our country, of our world, and this season brings all of those things into sharper focus. We’re worried that we’re not doing enough. We’re worried that we’re doing too much.

And then comes the clarion call of Christian culture everywhere, beckoning us to “keep Christ in Christmas.” So often, this is just another chain around the neck. Another burden on the back. Jacob Marley would be proud if he wasn’t dead as a doornail.

I’d love to inject more Christ into my Christmas, but right about now I’m sliding down my sofa, slowly and surely, like a full diaper down a toddler’s bum. A full diaper with a half-eaten plate of cookies propped up on its expanding waistline and a rising storm of child-wails emanating from the next room. The more I strive to keep Christ in Christmas, the more my efforts are thwarted by my own prodigious inability to do that very thing. Christmas confronts me with the fact that I can’t accomplish what I think I should be doing as a good Christian parent.

Every year, I feel the tension of striving and subsequent failing. I know where I want to be, in mindset and action, but I cannot achieve it. Certainly it’s true that the problem is within me, not within these rituals and reminders. It is my obsessive desire to prove myself worthy, to show God how pious I am, to show that I am of great use to Him and a great dad to my kids. You see, the problem is not that I cannot achieve Christmas nirvana because I’m weak, but that I keep expecting myself to overcome my weakness by my own effort.

the comfort of not having to do all that stuff

The burden of our modern Christmas is like the Law: shot through with a better thing, designed for a better purpose. It reminds us that we are weak and dearly loved, and that yes – all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But this is true not because of something we muster up within ourselves as good Christians, but because Christ has accomplished for us what we could never accomplish on our own.

This is why Advent is spoken of so often in terms of peace, comfort, and rest. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak comfort to Jerusalem, for her warfare is ended. Fear not, for I bring good tidings: Jesus has come to save you when you couldn’t save yourself.

All of my struggles and efforts reveal how much I need God. And His response to my need was to reveal His love in the Babe in the manger, the Man on the cross, the Risen Savior. For our Father so deeply loved the world that He sent His only Son to reveal the deep love of the Father to us.

And this only Son longs to give us rest:

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

Matthew 11:28-30

Christmas, ultimately, is another opportunity to let go of my striving and receive the free and glorious gift of Christ. In my fallow, frozen ground, the Seed of the manger takes root, and the Messiah lives within me.

a prayer for those burdened by the holidays

For all the things I have done and left undone – forgive me, Father. But for all the things that serve to bring to light my need of You, I give You thanks. For all the reminders that I am weak and You are strong, I give You thanks. For all the things I don’t have to do, or read, or say, or be in order to be loved by You, the devotionals I don’t have to read, the carols I don’t have to sing, the rituals I don’t have to observe, the wars I don’t have to win, the peace I don’t have to locate, the energy I don’t have to gather: I give You thanks.

And I give You thanks that in freedom, I can partake of these gifts.

For the gift of Christ that requires no commensurate gift, no intentional ritual, no offering, excellent or otherwise, no decoration or tinsel: The gift of Your Son, Who takes away the sin of the world, lifts the burdens from our backs, and gives us true and lasting rest – we give You praise.

May You release us again from these burdens into Your arms, You Who transforms everything. May we see with new eyes and know with new hearts the beauty in all of this brokenness, and make something beautiful of it in the name of Christ.

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golden hour

My wife is taking pictures again, and the golden hour is upon us – in more ways than one, because at the height of summer it occurs immediately after the kids’ bedtime. She is roaming the acreage of my childhood home, kid-free, capturing north-central Indiana with its meadows and sloping forests. The sky is a ripe nectarine, fuzzy orange fading to lavender, and the sun sinks his teeth into it, splattering juice in slow motion.

My mom comes in from the garden, where she has been harvesting early tomatoes and tomato hornworms at the same time. She scrutinizes the former and grimaces at the latter. We set aside one chubby hornworm to show the kids tomorrow; the rest are damned to the smooshy place for their sins against tomato-kind. My wife sets her aperture and snaps shot after shot – Mom carrying the bushel basket, greens and reds, close-ups of marching caterpillars.

Linnea is scrolling through her evening memories on the wide grey porch, swaying on the swing, and I’m tapping away at my keyboard when the epiphany occurs.

Blinking lazily, the first firefly of the night makes its regal ascent from dirt to sky. As I watch it rise and fall, I am aware of others in the periphery of my vision. They rise like mist from the fields until the evening is scattered with their phosphorescence. 

As if responding to an inner call that only the recently put-to-bed can hear, our three eldest children suddenly appear at the screen door, harmonizing oohs and ahhs. 

“Fireflies!”

They’re out the door before you can say “goodnight,” belatedly yelling back to us porch-dwellers, “Can we catch some?” They are skipping barefoot in the grass, disrupting flight patterns. My wife and I glance at each other. The prospect of tired-out kids sleeping soundly until morning is within our grasp. We wordlessly agree to let them romp a little longer. Summer will not last forever.

Nadia and Kai have caught fireflies before, both to keep as glowing night lights on their bedside table, and for the sheer joy of catching something and letting it go free, no strings attached. They have learned to cup their hands to avoid snuffing out any unfortunate soul by this time, although Kai still periodically appears before me, triumphant, with glowing smears on his hands. For Percy, however, this is the first time he’s really been able to participate, and he is so excited he can’t stop shouting.

He clumsily snares one and exults, “I caught one, Daddy!” before it narrowly escapes its doom and zooms into the sky. The ones he catches seem to fly away faster than others. He is unperturbed and trots away after another. Nadia, coltish at six, runs up then. She may have more years of experience with fireflies, but that doesn’t quench her joy in them.

“Mommy, mommy, mommy!  I just saw a firefly…” she pauses for dramatic effect and widens her eyes, “…land on my dress!” This is the child’s prerogative: to be utterly blessed by six little legs clinging to a nightgown. I tend to brush these things aside, adult as I am, with my diminishing capacity to perceive and appreciate true blessings. Maybe I should look closer at the mysteries of crawling things. Or maybe I’ll let my kids keep reminding me of them.

The whole planet is glowing now with the different magic of early evening. The sun is nestling under the covers, leaving only a few streaks of magenta staining his pillow. The march of the fireflies starts to mirror the procession of the stars, appearing one by one. When I focus on one the others wink at me.

A recently-sung (and apparently ineffectual) lullaby plays in my head. 

Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are…

My wife adjusts shutter speed for low light and the camera clicks in slow motion.

Maybe it’s because I’m hopelessly nostalgic on the best of days, but in that snapshot moment, I’m transfixed by it all. Here are my children, chasing insects through the same field I chased insects through twenty years ago, against the same sunset, in front of the same house. The world is repeating itself before my eyes, and I want to record it so I can play it over and over again. I don’t think for a moment I’m alone in this as a parent. We all want to bend time to our wills. How does a single second hold so much weight? 

Perhaps a solitary grain of sand in the hour glass is also infinite. After all, a day and a thousand years are the same to the One who set them in motion. If He takes such care to pack them both full to bursting with purpose and meaning, shouldn’t we weigh them out well? They flit away from us like fireflies, but their fleeting nature only serves to capture us further.

My children are spinning wheels of gold against the darkening green of the lawn, their bare feet shimmering as they traverse the back of the earth in pursuit. I wonder sometimes if angels laugh at us, these inane little creatures that run around catching even tinier creatures just to let them go again. Why are they so entrancing to us, these little glowing things? Why do we love to catch them and study them? Where does that light come from? Look closer, maybe we’ll find out. But if we somehow did, maybe we wouldn’t enjoy catching them so much.

I beckon to Nadia to come and see the tomato hornworm we caught. She clambers up the porch steps and peers over the edge of the terrarium. “What is it?” This is a tomato hornworm. He eats tomato plants, and soon he will make a big fuzzy cocoon, and then he’ll turn into a giant fuzzy moth. She turns inquisitive eyes to me. “How does he turn into a moth?”

It’s like dissolving from the inside out, having all your cells rearranged, and coming out of it alive and with wings. If you cut open cocoons to see what’s inside before they’re moths, you’ll just find goop. Somehow that goop (tellingly made up of imaginal cells) becomes an adult moth within a short period of time. I tell her this in less words.

Her eyes widen. “Wow!” And she flits over to tell Mommy this new secret. Mommy responds with satisfactory amazement. Nadia giggles a little at the response and nods knowingly, then flutters back to the fields to chase more fireflies.

Knowing things seems to be much less compelling than enjoying them.

Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.

The moments, the lights, the stars, my kids, everything is constantly shifting, and the breakneck speed of parenthood allows for little relaxation and less contemplation. When I’m rooted to the porch swing, when I’m stunned into silence, when the world creaks on its axis and the universe winks in my periphery, everything becomes precious and I want to cradle it and never let go.

There are names for this feeling based on which direction you look down the timeline — “nostalgia” for the past, “wonder” for the present. In future tense, Lewis called it sehnsucht, a deep longing for a place we’ve never been to. I see glimpses of it here, everywhere, because this world is only a shadow of things to come. It is mystery and wonder and familiarity all wrapped into one, and it always slips away from us all to quickly, like the golden hour. But it’s here right now, for a moment, as I watch the day fade around my children, who are chasing down illumination in the fields.

I know many who think of this sort of feeling as sentimentality, who believe that it is useless when it comes to keeping up with the incessant demands of the daily grind. How does this wonder fend off the brutality and hatred teeming in every corner of the world, or stop a bullet, or tear down a wall, or advance a kingdom? It would be easy, and it has been, for me to be embarrassed by my love for fireflies and sunsets. What light can a single firefly actually give? What good do any of these beauties and longings offer in a world gone to hell?

Much good, for the faithfulness of God frames each snapshot, the humor of God winks back at us, the mystery of God wriggles out of our fingers yet again, the love of God paints the sky for nothing more than sheer enjoyment of its beauty. We write and paint and sing and dance because we can’t get enough of God. And we long for the day when there will be nothing between us and Him.

Nights like these align our hearts to wonder at Him again, when circumstances and self fall away and the naked surprise is revealed. We see again, through His creation and care for us, that God is involved and present and working for our good and His glory. These nights repeat what my soul needs to hear over and over: “Behold, I am making all things new.” And we sit on the periphery and let the longing to be made new ache within us and our children, and we come away ready to fight again another day.

So my wife and I watch the fireflies and stars and children rising and falling on the breeze for several more minutes. Then we get that familiar twinge of parental responsibility and call to them across the lawn, “Time for bed!” We eventually succeed in tearing them away from it all with the promise of breakfast and more wonder in the morning. Nadia knows the drill by now and is content with the opportunity to stay up later than normal, and Kai is happily thinking about cereal now. My wife, camera dangling in a loose grasp now that the memory is safe, ushers them through the screen door and lingers, languid in the dimming light, watching our younger son. Percy is still utterly transfixed by the fireflies.

“Can I catch one more, Daddy?”

Twinkle, twinkle, little star…

“Just one more, buddy.”

He reaches out to one, chubby toes glinting in the sea-green undergrowth, and his face lights up. He cups his hands, as we’ve taught him, and gently captures the last firefly of the night. He runs to me to show me his catch, and just as he arrives it slips out. It’s been pressed down, shaken together, and now it’s running over his fingers, slipping away into the twilight with a final glimmer.

He looks at us and squeals with laughter, enthralled once more because it escaped him, as all mysteries must. 

How I wonder what you are.

(photography by Linnea Wheeler)

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jeremiah | eyes to see and a tongue to speak

Over the last few months I’ve been digging into the book of Jeremiah.

I’ve read Jeremiah before, but what drew me to it this time was the desire to soak in God’s judgment, to understand more clearly the scope and reality of His wrath. This is part of God’s person that I’ve always known to be true but have had difficulty accepting. I would rather turn away from His judgment and focus on His love — which should be a perennial resting place for all of us. But after spending the better part of the last three months in deep with the weeping prophet, I think God’s wrath is something to rest in as well.

Along the way, I also received something of a surprising side quest in my study — what it means to be a messenger of wrath.

I’m not precisely sure where the idea of artist as prophet came from originally, but it’s not new, nor is it original. For eons poets, musicians, novelists, and other artistic types have been looking closely at their societies and telling them what they see. And because artists are, by definition, good at seeing beyond the surface of a thing, the truths they tell are often discerning, uncomfortable, and eerily prescient.

And Jeremiah was in a position to share some uncomfortable and downright appalling truth.

I believe that for Christian artists, this sort of forth-telling is divinely directed. Or at least, it should be. What are we doing with our art if we are not proclaiming with every stroke, with every note, with every letter, the glories and mercies of our Lord and Savior? When we speak the truth, we are speaking God’s truth. And He has given many of us — and definitely not just artistic people — ears to hear and eyes to see. Would that we also have mouths to sing, hands to write and paint and play, and bodies to dance the truth so that others may also see, hear, and know the truth of God.

So without further ado:

PART 1: RESTING IN WRATH

God’s wrath is righteous.

“Your evil will chastise you, and your apostasy will reprove you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the LORD your God; the fear of me is not in you,” declares the LORD God of hosts. (Jeremiah 2:19)

This might be an obvious statement, but it bears repeating: God is fully justified when He judges, and we have no recourse but acceptance of it.

I think that one of the primary difficulties I face when I try to accept the wrath of God is my own confusion. I don’t have the mind of God, nor do I know the reasons or results of the judgment. Because of this, any cognitive dissonance I’m experiencing at the time might make it seem like God is doling out unjust judgment. I don’t think we can ever overstate the importance of clinging to God’s righteousness. He does not act on capricious whims or petty vendettas. He deliberately chooses what is right, because He is holy and true. If I begin to believe that whatever is happening is an unjust act on God’s part, I must rewind and find a different solution — because God cannot be unrighteous.

If we ever begin to downplay the weight of our rebellious actions, let us read Jeremiah and remember how utterly wrong it is to turn from our loving Father.

God does not delight in hurting people.

Go, and proclaim these words toward the north, and say, “Return, faithless Israel,” declares the Lord. “I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful,” declares the Lord; “I will not be angry forever.” (Jeremiah 3:12)

God spends swaths of Jeremiah repeating His plea to His people: turn back from your sins and come to me. The agony of Jeremiah is clear and unequivocal: the pain God’s people are experiencing is not something that pleases God. He is not vindictive.

Jeremiah states that THIS IS NOT THE WAY IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. This is the right and only response to sin, but this was not what God wanted for us. We should be driven to our knees by the truth that God has opened up another way. Such is the great love of our Lord, that He would rather take on Death Himself than be separated from us forever.

God’s wrath is a natural consequence of our rebellion against him.

A voice on the bare heights is heard, the weeping and pleading of Israel’s sons because they have perverted their way; they have forgotten the Lord their God… “Let us lie down in our shame, and let our dishonor cover us. For we have sinned against the Lord our God, we and our fathers, from our youth even to this day, and we have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.” (Jeremiah 3:21, 25)

When I discipline my children in some way for their actions, I am quick to point out that the reason I do so is to affirm for them that actions have consequences. Right now those consequences hurt in small ways, but it won’t always be that way.

When we turn away from Living Water, we will thirst. When we turn from the Bread of Life, we will hunger. When we pervert our way and forget the Lord our God, we will experience shame, dishonor, and ultimately, judgment. This is the natural state of the universe, which stems from God Himself. To turn from Him is to turn from true life toward death.

God’s wrath is always framed by and injected with mercy.

“I will set my eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up, and not tear them down; I will plant them, and not pluck them up. I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.” (Jeremiah 24:6-7)

Our original rebellion shook the foundations of the universe, as an act of saying “no” to a God who has only ever wanted our good. It is an incredible mercy that He has given any of us a new, whole heart at all, so that we have the ability to say “yes” to Him.

If it was up to us to turn back to Him, we would be utterly lost. But throughout Jeremiah, God is reaching out, wrestling with, drawing Israel in, pleading with her. It is only by His mercy that we can even understand our brokenness, let alone accept Him in faith.

PART 2: SPEAKING OF JUDGMENT

Jeremiah was obedient.

But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’ for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 1:7-8)

The deeper I dig into what could possibly qualify someone to be an emissary of God’s truth, the simpler it becomes. God’s messengers are those who are obedient. God says to go there, and they go. God says to say this, and they say it. God says to sit still, and they wait. This isn’t a revelation or a hot take, friends. God just wants obedient people to communicate His truth.

If you’ve been called to do this with your art, your words, your actions, your life — obey. Stop philosophizing about how to do it and just do it.

I’ve quoted her before, and I’m going to quote her again:

“The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command… I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.” And the artist either says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.” (Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water)

Jeremiah accurately communicated the message.

And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” And I said, “I see an almond branch.” Then the Lord said to me, “You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.” (Jeremiah 1:11-12)

It’s stunning to me that one of Jeremiah’s first acts as a prophet is simply to tell God what He sees. He does so, and God uses it as a window into His truth. Seeing is often used in Scripture as a metaphor for active faith; while the people of Israel “have eyes but do not see,” Jeremiah “sees well.”

And from here on, Jeremiah is communicating precisely what God says.

This may seem obvious, but think about what this means. Jeremiah resolved to share every word — the good, the bad, and the ugly. And God had a lot of very grievous things to say to Judah through Jeremiah, who is not called the weeping prophet for nothing.

The stories God gives us will not always be pleasant or happy or bestsellers. As artists and storytellers we must remain faithful to the truth God has laid on our hearts, not the partial truth that gets us likes and shares. It will not always be pretty, but obedience matters more than popularity and reach.

And consider starting with what’s right in front of you. What do you see? God can use it, and He can use you.

Jeremiah accepted the consequences of speaking the truth.

“But you, dress yourself for work; arise, and say to them everything that I command you. Do not be dismayed by them, lest I dismay you before them. And I, behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, declares the Lord, to deliver you.” (Jeremiah 1:17-19)

Jeremiah wasn’t just saying God’s words. He was identifying with them to the point that he embodied them. He was considered a physical threat to Judah, and the people, false prophets, and leaders of Judah reacted accordingly to him.

Jeremiah went to his family, whom he deeply loved, to warn them about impending disaster. They didn’t listen, and in fact they mocked him and beat him. But he kept coming back, compelled by God and love for his people to tell them the truth, again and again — until he and his people were finally judged.

They never accepted the truth, and yet Jeremiah preached it to them anyway.

How often do we look to how people respond to what we say and do (in our art and otherwise) and either give up or change our message because of their responses? How often do we turn away from saying exactly what the people we love need to hear the most?

None of us are Old Testament prophets; we’re New Testament believers, though, and God has called us all to be obedient messengers to those around us. What a mercy! He doesn’t need us to accomplish His will, but He wants us to be involved. If we don’t, I’m pretty sure the rocks will have something to say about it. But why would we forego the privilege of loving God and others through speaking God’s truth?

See and hear. Believe and obey. Then speak, and speak with hope. For even God’s judgment is righteous, and shot through with new mercies.

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endgame | a war of fathers

[ SPOILERS AHEAD ]

Last week my sister and dad and I trekked out to Linway Cinemas to watch Captain Marvel, the last movie we needed to see before Avengers: Endgame. It was cathartic in the best possible way, watching a character who had been cut down throughout the entire movie finally let loose (and joyously at that!), showing the bad guys the true extent of her power. And, of course, the power of her cat Goose.

I rarely go to see movies in theaters, but I make an exception for Marvel. Besides the fact that I’m a huge nerd, I’ve also come to trust Marvel to produce a story that cares just as much as I do about these characters.

We had just finished watching all 20 preceding movies (from Ironman to Antman and the Wasp) as a family. I think getting my mom, dad, wife and sister to watch 20 movies about superheroes and space aliens was a feat almost as huge as Marvel making all those movies. And the kicker? They enjoyed it! Of course, Mom kept saying things like, “this isn’t logical” and Dad couldn’t remember half of the character’s names at any given time, but they stuck with it. To the point, actually, that when the dust settled on Infinity War, Mom looked at me, stunned, and said, “Wait a minute, they can’t do that!”

It’s very satisfying to me to experience these movies with my family. It’s a testament to the longevity, creativity, and sheer staying power of these stories that my mom now knows who Groot is.

But in addition to the fun of introducing my parents to a talking tree and experiencing the unbridled power of Captain Marvel with my sister, watching all of these movies again brought to light several larger themes I had missed until now. And when I walked into Endgame this past weekend, the capstone to over a decade of storylines, one theme hit home with deep resonance:

What is the nature of true fatherhood?

Thanos

Thanos, the biggest and (in my opinion) the best villain in the MCU to date, is a father. He names himself as such, and we as the audience see a representation of what fatherhood means to him in his relationship with his “daughters,” Gamora and Nebula — and then in his relationship with a universe of beings.

Gamora and Nebula grew up as “children of Thanos,” the moniker given to all those who serve the purple space tyrant in his quest to bring balance to the cosmos by killing half of it.

Over the course of their stories, we learn that Thanos pitted them against each other as a means of strengthening them. Each time Nebula lost, Thanos would remove part of her body and replace it with a robotic equivalent. As for Gamora, she was adopted by Thanos after he killed her mother and half of her people. Not surprisingly, both sisters want to kill their father now.

Thanos is utterly evil, a villain we truly hate. But here’s the problem — he displays typically vaunted traits of a good father.

He is a principled leader who never lies, is devoted to what he believes is right, and is determined to help his children grow up into what he thinks they should be, no matter the test he has to put them through. He was obviously present in the lives of his children, whether that presence wrought anything positive. He believes his quest to restore balance to the universe is benevolent and necessary, and he works with patience and diligence to achieve it, in spite of the suffering it brings him.

This belief is key to Thanos’s villainy. He utterly believes that what he is doing benefits the cosmos, and that the universe will be grateful for it when he finishes. He has chosen what is good for everyone, and he will do whatever it takes — including sacrificing his own child — in service to this belief.

I’ve seen some takes on Thanos that frame him as a not-so-subtle image of God Himself. His choice to give life to some and take it from others resembles the doctrine of election, and his willingness to sacrifice his child’s life for the sake of His quest echoes John 3:16. And in the end, he desires the gratitude of the universe for his actions.

Let me be the first to say this: this is not my God. Thanos is evil because he seeks to put himself in the place of God. His plan for the salvation of the universe is based on dealing death, not on bestowing new life. And let’s not forget that God sacrificed Himself — not a separate, unwilling child — to save the world.

The reason we see the evil of Thanos’s version of fatherhood is because he is the antithesis of heroism, sacrifice, and love represented in a specific founding member of the MCU:

Ironman

(last chance on the spoiler warning, folks…)

Tony Stark is, in a figurative and literal sense, the father of the MCU. It was his 2008 debut that launched the entire Infinity Saga, and he has been there through every single up and down that this growing family of superheroes has been through. He tried to keep the team together during Civil War, he recruited and subsequently acted as a father figure to Peter Parker, and he even teaches Nebula how to play finger football when they’re stranded in space.

Tony himself grew up with a relatively absent dad, and he never had a chance to reconcile with his father or his own drive to be a father… until Endgame.

In Endgame, Tony has actually become a father. He’s doing dishes, tucking in his little girl, making dad jokes. In the five years since half of the population was dusted, he has moved ahead by choosing the life he never let himself have as a superhero.

But it’s his inherent understanding of what fatherhood is that motivates him to put himself in harm’s way one last time.

See, the first thing Tony says when he returns to Avenger’s HQ, emaciated and defeated, is that he “lost the kid.” He and the others are all haunted by what Thanos has done, but for Tony this is a personal loss. He couldn’t save his “son,” Peter Parker, whose primary father figure in life had been Mr. Stark.

Tony is a father in the truest sense of the word before he ever becomes one biologically. He is a father to the entire Avengers team, even in his falling out during Civil War. He tries to keep his family together. He puts himself in harm’s way (albeit in a reckless gut reaction) in the very first Avengers movie for the sake of everyone he cares about and a bunch of people he doesn’t even know.

He’s not the most strategic, he’s not the only smart one, he’s not very good at being present, and he’s deeply, deeply flawed – just like his own dad. He’s had to fight against his self-centered bent since his early days as a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. And the events of Endgame tighten the screws on Tony’s fatherhood to the max, to the point that when he finally gains the upper hand at the end of Endgame, he doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice his very life for everyone and everything he cares about.

But this time, it’s not a gut reaction.

Tony has built another gauntlet for the stones into his armor. He has recorded a last message for his family. When he and Doctor Strange lock eyes on the battlefield and Strange indicates that this is the one in 14,000,605 chance to stop Thanos from killing everyone, Tony is prepared. Ever since Strange gave up the time stone in exchange for Tony’s life, Tony has known that he had this role to play, this sacrifice to make. And he took tangible steps to prepare for it.

He is the antithesis of Thanos, because he sacrificed his life so that others could live rather than sacrifice others for the sake of his ideals. He was motivated not by a higher ideal or vision of truth, but by a flawed yet powerful love for his family. In this way, Tony is a flawed but true image of our Life-Giving Father, and stands in full opposition to the self-serving, abusive, and ultimately proud fatherhood that Thanos represents.

This is why my favorite moment of Endgame was Tony’s response right before he effectively finished the war and ended his own life:

“I am Ironman.”

This is a full and final realization of his true identity as a protector, guide, and loving father to those around him. This is who he is at his core. This is the proof that Tony Stark does, indeed, have a heart. It’s a laser-focused declaration of what matters most: loving those around him to the very last.

being right vs. loving rightly

Recently I’ve been mulling over several examples of people who have placed their ideologies above loving others. I’ve heard of a married couple who couldn’t come to a compromise on infant vs. believer’s baptism, and their response was to go to different churches and then to not have children at all. I know of a family that believes so strongly that their child is making a poor choice that they have cut off all contact with him until he repents. And just yesterday, the tragic death of Rachel Held Evans prompted many prominent thinkers and other evangelical voices to send their condolences, but only after they’d confirmed that they “didn’t agree with everything she stood for.” Or perhaps, they stayed silent to avoid the conflict entirely.

These are microcosms of a much broader tension facing all of us today. We are all faced with this question daily, in our personal, societal, and political conversations: will we love the person, or will we love our ideologies?

God our Father has always and from eternity past acted out of love and care for His Creation. We are his children when, in Christ and for Christ and through Christ, we do the same. This doesn’t mean we don’t have convictions or speak the truth. God forbid that we would withhold the most loving message in the world from those we are called to love! What it does mean is that true love for the other person is our first motivation. We are called to love rightly, not be right.

Fatherhood is a perfect example of this tension, because we as fathers are always vacillating between our ideals for our children and what our children actually become. We have a responsibility to show them what’s right and wrong, to guide them toward true life — but no matter what their response is, we never stop loving them.

When our fatherhood comes from a place of proving that we’re right, we’re obscuring the image of our Father in heaven that we are meant to reflect. We shouldn’t be parsing verbiage or proving our holiness to our kids, we should be giving up our “rightness” and sacrificing everything to love them, unconditionally, to never stop desiring the best for them and acting on their behalf, to never stop giving true life.

“I love you 3000”

Tony Stark’s final message to his daughter reveals this motive:

“Everybody wants a happy ending, right? But it doesn’t always roll that way. Maybe this time. I’m hoping if you play this back… it’s in celebration. I hope families are reunited. I hope we get it back, in somewhat like a normal version of the planet has been restored, if there ever was such a thing.”

Even as a flawed father, Tony realizes that wholeness and restoration — true life — is what matters most, and he makes the ultimate sacrifice he can give so that his children can have it. Little does he know that there is such a thing as a restored version of the planet, and it’s greater by far than any world we could create in real life or on the big screen.

The love Tony and other key characters show will be difficult for the next generation of MCU superheroes to shake. Ultimately, the groundwork has been laid for a wealth of stories tied together by sacrificial love, found in these fathers who laid down their lives for their children.

So then, we have a calling as we wait for the next Marvel movie to come out: how will we as fathers show our children that we love them 3000, and that God loves them an infinity beyond that?

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the struggle is the priority: a birth story

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My wife had our bags packed a month out. If there is anything you learn as a parent of three little people under five, it is to prepare early and often. And if you learn anything as a husband of over seven years (emphasis on “if”), it is that any indication of a nesting mother should not be overlooked as an invitation to vigilance.

Linnea is great with child – with our fourth child, to be exact – and we’ve moved past the happy-cute pregnancy stage to the get-this-kid-out-of-me stage. My increasingly gorgeous and exhausted wife and I have mutually dubbed this phase “beached-whale” due to the immense effort it takes to turn over in the middle of the night. These days are happy, yes, but mostly we’re tired beyond reason. If you’re a parent, you may know what tired beyond reason means, because it starts before the kid even arrives, and continues ad infinitum.

Three knocked us for a loop, perhaps because we were outnumbered. For whatever reason, that adjustment was more difficult than two. We had a girl, our sweet eldest, and then a passionate and tender little boy, and then our serious little baby boy, now a toddler of two with the soul of a crotchety 70-year-old. We have never found out the gender of our kids. We wanted to be surprised. We wanted to take things as they came instead of being totally prepared. This fourth one is no different, except…

“I really want a baby sister!” The wistful expression of my eldest made me cringe to think of how she would respond if her hope was disappointed. She wanted a girl last time, and while she loves her brothers, a third brother would be hard to get behind.

“Well, Nadia, we don’t know. It could very well be a boy.”

“I think it’s a girl.” She is matter-of-fact. In her mind, there is no question.

And then there was the evening we asked our kids at dinner to choose between two girl names we were bouncing around. Nadia was quick on the draw, picking the one we had been leaning toward. My wife and I glanced at each other over our spaghetti, secretly hoping that we would get a chance to use it. Then we asked Kai.

“Kai, do you like Louisa or Jemma?”

Kai thought long and hard, then poked his chin out, squinted his eyes at us, and nodded persuasively.

“I like trucks.”

“Oh, but buddy, we can’t name a little girl Truck.”

“I also like snowplows.”

When we put the question to Percy, he just gave us an emphatic “no” and went on eating.

Linnea eventually got annoyed with my constant lowering of our expectations and just told me to stop. We all wanted a girl. It was simple as that. Even so, my wife, the pragmatist, was diligently packing both boy and girl sets of newborn clothes into her new peach-toned diaper bag when I arrived home one day from work. I read the signs and made a mental note to stockpile iced coffees and a celebratory six-pack.

Less than a week later, on a chilly night two weeks prior to the due date, her water broke and we were suddenly in labor mode. Her last two labors were preceded by an agonizing false march of contractions days before the actual labor, so we welcomed the water breaking as a sign that we were definitely popping this baby out soon. We called the caretakers for our kids, bundled our luggage and the three of us into the van, and zipped off to the hospital.

In the controlled chaos surrounding the transport, the tedium of medical papers, and the business-like rush through hospital corridors searching for ice, I tend to forget the fact that we’re experiencing something totally out of this world. I remember that first birth, knowing nothing and fearing everything, posing thousands of questions to health-care professionals, dead-tired and just wanting the pain to stop for my poor wife. It was awful. My wife and I still disagree, because for some reason every labor she ever had was beautiful and magical and there might have even been a unicorn or two. I decided shortly after that first experience that labor and delivery were probably my least favorite part of having kids. It’s so out-of-control. Even the mother is attempting to figure out what her body is up to and get in sync with that. Nobody really knows what will happen in the end. We only hope.

We are settled in now. The beer is in the fridge and Linnea is still in early stage labor, happy and chatting with her midwife and her doula. We found out when we called the hospital earlier that her favorite midwife, the one who had been there for the labor and delivery of two of our children, was on shift all night. She would be there for our fourth. Linnea was over the moon. I am sleepy and anticipating a very long night, so I doze in the chair while they talk and watch TV for a few hours. When I’m lucid, I attempt to steel myself for the inevitable long haul of transition through late labor. Right now, the delivery is far away, and we’re excited about the prospect of it, perhaps because it is far away. For me, the idea of it is more exciting than the actual thing.

We walk the halls for late into the night, trying to ratchet up to active labor. Our midwife has other births happening at the same time, and twice we see her with a crowd of nurses and doctors, stone-faced, swiftly guiding a laboring mother on a gurney down the hall for an emergency C-section. The goal of everyone here is a healthy baby and a healthy mommy, and perhaps we will all win by the end of the night. It is sobering to think of the violence of cutting one out of my wife’s abdomen. I suddenly feel as though we don’t deserve the three natural labors we’ve experienced, and that this is the one where we will pay our dues. Nothing here is sure.

I shake the thought and stop walking so Linnea can lean against me during a contraction. The labor is progressing, and she is quieter, more intense. She isn’t laughing as much. She focuses inward on what her body is doing to her, trying to get in rhythm. We’re moving into transition, the part of labor where contractions are erratic and we begin to doubt things and get discouraged. We’ve been in transition before.

We were here when I left our daughter in the car for five minutes and it sunk our adoption plans. We were here when we heard of a sibling’s attempted suicide. We were here when our sister-in-law almost died after labor. We were here when Kai escaped out the back door and wandered down the street. We are all in this place too often, a normal stage of the labor of life we’re in, and maybe we only make it through these stages because we can look at them and say, “Yep, that’s definitely transition. That means we’re moving forward to final stage.” I’ve not experienced anything near the amount of pain and difficulty that the people I walk with have, but my life experience is small. With the little that I’ve seen, however, I have started to count our moments as utter miracles.

The word of our world is death – the essence of humankind that we chose ourselves over the good plan laid out for us and God responded with an unconscionable mercy: He shortened our days. Short as they are, they are indeed full of trouble. Death is here, looming over every moment and crouching at the door. We are either experiencing it in various forms or seeing others experience it. So when I realize that the first four instances of uncertainty to pop into my head were all near-misses, I can only think of one word to describe the life we (and these four people) still live: miraculous.

And here, laboring in a small birthing room on a Sunday morning, we are about to usher in another miracle.

Linnea has moved past transition, into the violent part of the birth, the part where her entire body takes over to shove a living human into the world. The contractions are forces of nature, and her instinctual reaction is to fight the urge to push, but we gather around her and remind her of the truth – the push, however painful, is what will bring the baby out. Let the push take over. We help her, in between contractions, to climb into the tub for the water birth.

Our midwife returns with a nurse to aid her, two babies delivered this morning already, both cut out. As she helps my wife find the best position to push, I am stunned again by how violent this process is. There will be great pain in childbirth. When Linnea was in labor with our first, I couldn’t stop thinking of how I could lose the two most important people in my life in one wrong moment. Now I think this again, shove it from my mind, and return with a cold cloth to my groaning wife’s side. The struggle is the priority right now, and the only thing we can think about is getting through it.

Then there is blood in the water, and when I panic like I always do at the sight, the midwife announces that she can see our child’s hair – lots of it. We are so close to the end, these four focused women and one terrified man who doesn’t understand any of it. My wife groans again and again, waves of contractions and waves of the pain of childbirth. The head is out, but the shoulders are stuck, and in one swift movement our midwife physically twists the body of our baby sideways and scoops it out of the womb, out of the water.

In the thirty seconds after birth, everyone is listening. We are all gathered in communion together around this delicate body, willing it to wail, longing for the sound that signifies pain, and fear, and grief, and anxiety, but that will always signify life first. The tiny human coughs, clearing vocal cords that have never vibrated, gasping in the first gulp of oxygen, and then lets loose a vehement screech.

We laugh at the strength in that cry. And then we laugh more and cry some too, because she’s a girl.

At certain points in my life, I have no words. There is nothing here to say that has not already been said, is there? The baby is born, the family is full, and the eye is tired. The writer in me stumbles and thinks, maybe everything has indeed been said, and repeating it has no new value.

But every time, the repeat is revealed as variation, not repetition. I see myself and my wife in our little girl, but who I see is never us, never our other kids, never anyone in the entire world. How can there be nothing new under the sun and this little girl? We could say, in our unimaginative and reductionistic state, that this is just another baby, another human, another soul, another moment like so many others. Blips on the radar. But likeness is not sameness. How can it be? This is our little girl, and she is unique, and she has come through blood and pain and tears and is here, screaming on her mother’s breast, making such an awful racket that the world has no choice but to notice her. And we laugh, and we cry, and we rejoice, and we are in awe of this new noise.

Her name is Louisa Kate, which means “pure warrior,” and in the moments following birth, nothing seems more appropriate.

The day is coming when the struggle will end. However bloodied and bruised and exhausted we are from the wrestling through, however frightened of the passage or even of the light beyond it, however overcome by a reality we’ve never imagined inside our cocoons, this birth is inevitable. My bloody birth was wrought by Christ, my rebirth was wrought by Christ, and my new birth will be wrought by Christ. In this delivery, violent and scary and death-like as it is, the end becomes a beginning with far more promise than we’ve experienced in this dim earth we call home. Perhaps when we get there we will laugh, or maybe we will cry, or maybe we will rejoice – to be finally and fully alive.

(An edited version of this was first published at Fathom Mag as “The Strength in the Cry.”)

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the substance and purpose of affection

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There’s some sort of ruckus in the living room, involving the theft of a beloved toy he hasn’t even been playing with. So I send Kai to his room, all 2.75 years of him, TNT with scabby knees, and the only thing that comes of his exile is more explosions. The bangs and screaming aren’t stopping, so I enter in to do damage control.

My second child is a bruise, all funny colors and tender when pressed. This nonsensical, unfair place we call Earth is just too much for him. I and my peers tend to accept these emotions by crystallizing our skins until we’re more shell than human. The healthiest people I know are those who have either learned to absorb or haven’t hardened at all, but if you haven’t hardened at all, everything else is harder.

Tantrums look cathartic. I can see him releasing toxins with those tears.

I sit on the edge of his bed, bending my head under the blond wood of the Ikea frame. This Swedish furniture took three American hours to set up, and he helped me by spilling the screws on the floor and putting the wrong pieces in the wrong places. When I told him I needed them somewhere else, he screamed that they were his. He stubbed his toe three times and dropped a four-foot beam on his little brother. He hammered permanent dents into this bed when I wasn’t looking. He hammers permanent dents everywhere, come to think of it. This frame, this room, this house, this heart…

I open my arms to him. Sometimes he rejects my hugs, but today he wants one. He curls up under the crook of my neck and dampens my shoulder with snot and tears. I’m always fascinated by how he cries. The tears pop out in perfect drops and cascade down his cheeks as if squeezed from ripe fruit. I never watch myself cry, and as I’ve accumulated the gradual misfortune of adulthood I cry less and less; by redirection and misdirection I channel any rising saltwater into various compartments and communiqués. My son, on the other hand, lets the tears fall where they may. It’s messy, but it’s necessary, and in this moment all his messy necessity bundles and tightens inside me, making me hurt too.

God made children little to inhabit bigger worlds, to fit perfectly in a parent’s embrace. And He made parents big to remember little worlds, to nestle humanity in their hearts for safekeeping.

The tears are good; a release of emotions pent-up and undervalued, and if I were to hold them with more esteem, perhaps I could see this nonsensical world more clearly. How can I forget? Jesus wept when something was wrong, and He wept with passion. Why am I so quick to dismiss my children’s tears?

Kai is much more tempestuous than our other children: tantrum after tantrum, uncontrollable sobbing, paroxysms on the floor at every “no, you cannot have another cookie” that leaves my mouth. I complained about him to a close friend not long ago, struggling to find a way to defuse the ticking time bomb that is my son. Her advice was sound: find the true part of why he’s hurting and agree with him. Is he beside himself that his finger hurts, even after I’ve bandaged it? I should tell him, “I’m sad it hurts, too.” The first time I tried this, it surprised him enough that he calmed down (incrementally), because he felt heard. So often as a parent I overlook the reason for a behavior and punish the behavior, subtly confirming that my child’s feelings matter less than his actions. But doesn’t holiness depend on all parts of us being transformed: feelings, actions, motivations?

We sit for a while on the bottom bunk, rocking. It’s late afternoon, past naps and snacks, past the heat of the day. He’s got tractors and trucks and construction vehicles on his duvet cover. His sister has what appears to be a botanical encyclopedia on hers, but he needs things that move. We trace the designs and talk about each of them: skid steer, excavator, tractor trailer, cement mixer; and their colors: blue, green, red, orange, yellow. He knows more names for heavy machinery than I ever will, but at least I know the colors. The summer sun is suspended outside our window, high above us and tilting westward, casting shadows that will grow and grow and grow as it sets. We just sit and hold each other and call things by their names.

By the ten-minute marker, he’s pushed out most of the tears and left an irreparable stain on my shoulder. He’s still here because he’s comfy. I am too, so I kiss his neck to let him know he can stay. My beard tickles him, and he giggles, pulling his ear to his shoulder. He lifts his head back and says,

“Do it ‘gain.”

I do. He giggles again.

“Do it ‘gain.”

I do, for another fifteen times. Usually I’m too busy and boring for repetitive play like this, and “last time” is always on my lips. But today, there’s nothing taking up brain space but my son. Maybe it should be more like that more often. Maybe it would help us both out.

“Do it ‘gain.”

This is why I grew a beard, I remember now. It’s a perfect dad tool.

“Do it ‘gain.”

There’s something about this that strikes a chord; that children would instinctively crave repetition of affection, of interaction with an adult that’s whole and healing, of touch that’s pure and loving. Too many men I know don’t know how to give or receive physical affection. For whatever reason, from whatever father — who passed the idea down through generations — they received a skewed sense of masculinity, one that didn’t include physical affection. Touch is messy, like the shoulder of my shirt, and it can heal or destroy. But we all need this mess.

I realize, by the twentieth time my beard kisses my son’s neck, that twenty times now I’ve told him that he is loved, that I forgive him for beaning his brother with a block, that he can come to me when he needs me, that he is worthy of love for no other reason than his God-shaped humanity, that I am his and he is mine, that I would lay down my life for him.

All from a couple dozen kisses.

This is the substance and purpose of affection: that through tenderness we can heal hurts instead of deny them, that through gentleness we can weaken the walls we build so readily, that through kindness we can kiss away tears—instead of holding them in until they break us open. The seeing and sensing of another’s sorrow and soul is what makes us strong. Affection, not the withholding of it, is what makes us resilient.

I know people who saw little or no affection between their parents, and experienced little or no affection from them, and now they have little or no ability to give or receive it themselves. Then there are those who had it ingrained in their childly minds that touch is a dirty thing, not by abusive, possessive touch, but rather by experiencing shame-based religion. They were told, “do not touch, do not taste, do not feel.” They received the grand heresy, the great vivisection: part of you will always be evil, and it is the part most palpable, your physical form. Everything you cannot see can be redeemed; everything you see is irreparable and must be shunned. Or in a more lukewarm form: your body (along with your emotional soul) is less valuable than your spirit. A heresy as old as the newborn church, as old as time itself.

God cares about our bodies, and our emotions, and our need for affection. The lie received its ultimate answer in the touchable, kissable, weeping, infuriated Lord Himself, an Incarnate human, who married spirit to soul to body, then allowed all of them to be broken to reach us. The physical acknowledgement of an inner feeling is what makes love real to its recipient. It is what says, more clearly than words, “You—whom I hold, whom I kiss, whom I touch, whom I lift up, whom I long for, whom I weep with—you are a human who is lovely and valuable and broken. And I see you, and I don’t consider you too messy to touch, and I will be here, present, with you so that you will know true Love and it will set you free, to be with Me forever.”

“Do it ‘gain.”

He stops suddenly (number thirty-two, maybe?) and looks seriously into my eyes.

“What’s that, Daddy?” And he nearly pokes his finger in my eye. I take his hand and ask him what he means.

“It’s a red ball in your eye, Daddy.”

I explain tear glands to him, how they moisten our eyes each time we blink. He nods somberly along with my description. This is where tears come from, buddy, when you cry. God gave us a way to keep our eyes healthy in that little red ball, especially when we’re hurt.

So while the darkness gathers outside, my little man and I cuddle on a blanket of heavy construction vehicles and talk about how we all need tears to be able to see.

(An edited version of this was first published at Foundling House as “A Couple Dozen Kisses”)

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she's four, after all.

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“Daddy, I want to show you something,” she crows, skipping down the park path.
About ten minutes ago, they’d both gotten cold and decided the splash pad wasn’t as interesting anymore. Her brother is content to sit, hooded in his yellow-striped towel, and watch trains go by, periodically yelling “TRAIN!” to Mommy.  But she is too excited.  Her shivers are gone, and the muggy weight of late summer is a suitable towel.  There is much to explore.
She clambers up the red sandy concrete of the skate park half-pipe.  The sign says that the walkway is not for pedestrians, but whoever skated here recently is long gone.  My adult mind dismisses any danger and hopes her exploration is meaningful.  I trail behind, soaking in the moment and my clothes.  The splash pad looked like a lot of fun, what can I say.
She wants to show me how she can climb up all by herself.  She is brimming with excitement and fourness. She filled up on the latter yesterday, overflowing with balloons and ribbons and this new purple bike with its white plastic basket.  $10 on Craigslist. We’re proud of that.
She got to choose her cake – pink cake with blueberries on top – and helped Mommy make it in the afternoon.  That is, after she spent a couple hours working on her bike skills.  Bikes are freedom, wild and unrestrained and a little bit dangerous.  Wheels to take to places, baskets to carry your treasures, the open road, the wind in your face.  Am I that different, in my late 20s, stretching the bonds of my 5-year job, sniffing the wind for the next thing?
But she’s back, and will not be ignored.  She slid down the half-pipe against my wishes (she’s four, after all), leaving a wet stripe on the curve.  Scratches?  None, to be sure, but I ask anyway. She confirms that my concern is silly.  I knew it was.  I just wanted to be concerned.
She climbs again, and shows me how brave she is, walking back and forth on the foot-wide ledge without my help (she’s four, after all).  She is brave.  She’ll have to be.  She stops and sits and, finding the concrete warm from the day, stretches out.  She is cozy in her fourness, wrapped in bravery and good cheer and, I hope, the knowledge that I’m nearby. I stand by her and lean on the half-pipe (“Not too close!”) and we talk about things that little girls talk about with their daddies.
Earlier, some teenage punks – daughters and sons reveling in their sixteenness – swarmed the swings right as she flitted toward them.  And she stopped, and considered them.  They were foreign, turquoise hair and flat brims and skinny jeans and ill-fitting boots.  Did she glimpse something of her future?  I was far away when she turned, and my outrage was tempered when she didn’t care.  But I wanted her to ask them if she could swing.  I wanted them to see her.  I wanted them to remember, maybe, what it is to be small in a big world.  My guess is, they know, but don’t talk about it often.
She is so old right now, and so young.  So taken with her world and her self, squealing at spiders and playing peekaboo with the princess in the mirror.  Her name is Nadia too, and they both have blue eyes and curls and a smile that stops my heart.  She’s learning to pray, to listen when I talk to her about Jesus, though it’s clear the Wonder hasn’t penetrated her heart. We pray it will and we walk alongside her. She is so tender, breakable at the smallest slight, fierce in her wrath, tempestuous in her sorrow.
She is four.
There are many birth-days ahead, when we celebrate her being zero before this, and one, and two, and three… We count them with thankful hearts for a safe pregnancy and delivery, which is withheld from so many others for reasons impossible to understand without the mind of God.  We count them with happy hearts for the life coursing in her veins, overflowing in her laughter, and we celebrate with toys and games and sweets to show her she is worth celebrating.
We count them to remember: the coughing cry, the excitement and surprise at a girl when everyone said boy, the squinched-up eyes that opened dark and sweet and perpetually suspicious.  How I hated it when medical punks woke her in the night to poke and prod and test, when we only wanted her to know love, not professional disinterest.
Do these only get harder, days brilliant and sharp-edged and rare, diamonds of summer?  I’m collecting them for my winter years, to uncover and admire – will they be as clear then? – to remind her of her summer when her children are in theirs. In our hearts we all need this.
She wants to sit and watch the sun go down, and I do too, so we linger longer.  Her brother has since given up sitting and is racing up and down ramps, tripping and colliding into everything and bouncing back with skinned knees, unperturbed.  He experiences life differently at two. His sister has time to sit and enjoy sunsets.
All the time in the world. She’s four, after all.