My Son…

I can’t wait for this kid my wife’s carrying around in her belly to get here. I can see the day in my head. It will be a great day, a joyous day. It will be the day that people finally stop asking me if I’m excited about being a father.

Because here’s the deal people. No. No I’m not. I’m not excited at all. I’m terrified.

This is a child. An actual human being. A messy, complicated, screwed up person. And I’m the one who’s supposed to be there for him? To teach him how to live? To give him the cognitive and spiritual tools he’s going to need to succeed as an adult? I’m the one he’s going to look up to and think, “Some day, I’m going to be like that“?

No. No no no NO NO NO.

Screw. That.

I mean, I get by, okay? I like to think maybe I have a handle on some stuff in my life. But I’m still learning, still growing. There’s so much I don’t know about how to be the kind of man I should be. How am I supposed to help my kid turn out okay, when I haven’t even turned out okay myself yet?

And you know the weirdest thing? When I talk to actual parents about my concerns they’re all, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll figure it out. It just comes naturally.”

Are you KIDDING me? Because I’ve met your kids, and let me tell you something, just because they’re not torturing puppies and making bombs in the basement does not mean they’ve turned out okay. (Actually, strike that last one. Bombs in the basement wouldn’t be so bad. I wanted to build bombs when I was a kid. It shows a certain level of scientific curiosity. Also, I wish I had a basement. Basements are cool.)

I want to raise a son with a work ethic, a son with an inquisitive mind, a son with a kind heart. A son that will one day be a good dad when his turn come around.

So don’t tell me it comes naturally. I’m not the wisest man in the world, but thus far in my life I’ve found that nothing worth having comes naturally.

Lately I’ve been reading the book of Proverbs in my Bible, and while I’m in awe of the wisdom recorded there, for me as a father there’s a tremendous fly in the ointment. Because each new section of the book begins with the phrase “My son…”, and I know who wrote the book of Proverbs, and I know how his son turned out. The wisest man on the earth wrote a book specifically to teach his son how to be the man he should, and that son turned out to be one of the worst kings the nation of Israel had ever seen.

And I’m supposed to do better than that?

So no, with all due respect, I’m not excited. And I’m not going to assume fatherhood will “come naturally”.

I’m planning. I’m reading parenting books, and psychology books. And I’m trying to become the kind of man I would want my son to look up to.

I know there are no certainties in life. I know that at some point he will have to make his own choices whether for right or for wrong. But God help me if I don’t do everything in my power to set him on the right path.

The Trying of Your Faith

Over the few short years of my adult life the single most important thing I have learned is that there are only three ways to get good at something: practice, practice, and practice. Unfortunately, just knowing that you have to work hard to get good at something, doesn’t make the actual process of working and practicing any easier.

Which is why, not more than a few weeks ago I was pulling my hair out with frustration at not being the foster parent I really wanted to be. I was coming unglued inside, wondering if I had made the right decision, trying to figure out what had happened to my formerly tranquil life. In short I was in short supply of patience.

Probably my least favourite verse in the Bible is the one that says, “The trying of your faith worketh patience.” It basically means that if you want to have more patience you have to endure lots of things that make you impatient, which is why when I was coming up my dad always told me, “Son, never pray for patience.” And though there were plenty of things my dad told me that I might not have heeded as much as I should have, that one I followed.

And now I’m sorely in need of patience and I’m getting it the only way you can get patience. Practice, practice, practice.

But the good news is, the trying of your faith does work patience. Or, to put it differently, there’s only so much hair you can pull out before you go completely bald.

Which is why I’m happy to announce…drum roll please…the return of my sanity!

Okay, so maybe that’s just a bit more dramatic than necessary, but it’s true. Things have really been looking up over the last few weeks. My nerves haven’t been as frazzled, my patience has not been wearing as thin, and on the whole me and Ashley and the kids have just been happier.

I think it helps too that we’re all finally figuring out our roles in the household. For instance, I am figuring out that I can tell the kids what to do, and the kids are figuring out that it’s really a good idea to listen and obey.

There are still issues to work on, still things I need to strengthen in my life to become the man and the father I would like to be, but at least now I feel like I’m on the right track.

I still worry whether the things I have tried to teach Thing 1 and Thing 2 will have any real and lasting impact on their lives, but I can say without question that they have had an impact on mine. I feel surer of myself, more confident that I can be the father I need to be to nurture my own child into the person he ought to be when the time comes.

Because, like everything else worth having in life, being a good parent doesn’t come easy; it takes hard work and practice.

And thanks to Thing 1 and Thing 2 trying my faith, I’m that much closer to where I need to be.

The Gardener’s Guide to Life

I have a garden. It’s not much to look at really, just a small patch of dirt (and we’re going to be honest it’s more sand than dirt) in the back corner of my yard.

At the beginning of the year I was all excited about this garden. I borrowed my dad’s tiller and dug up the ground, I went to the hardware store and looked at seeds; in my mind this garden was going to be the best.

Then came the waiting time. Let the record show that I am not good at waiting. I mean seriously three MONTHS for this stupid squash to sprout? The weeds in my yard sprout in about three DAYS. Can’t we just eat them?

But I waited. And waited. And waited.

And finally I started to see little buds of green poking up through the earth. If you’ve never had a garden you can’t know how exciting that is, the realization that the thing you planted, that dead, boring looking seed, is growing up through the earth shooting out its tiny green leaves.

And then there’s more waiting. Because those little green sprouts take time to mature and grow.

But finally they did grow and there was fruit on the vine, not very big fruit mind you, but it ripened nicely, and it was truly exciting to slice into that tomato that I had watched grow for all that time and take juicy, delicious bite.

Only then, it seemed like the garden hit a wall. The tomato plants stopped bearing fruit, the squash vines seemed to stagnate, the corn stalks gave us MAYBE two good ears. And I started to get discouraged.

“This dirt’s no good,” I told myself. “I’m gonna have to wait till next year and start over. I’m gonna do it right this time, with lots of fertilizer. But this crop?  It’s done for.”

So I stopped checking the garden every day, stopped watering in the mornings and evenings, stopped thinking about anything but the next year.

And then my wife came to me one day and said, “Have you seen the garden lately?”

And of course I hadn’t, so she dragged me outside, and lo and behold the squash vine had started to take over the whole garden. And not only that, but my tomato plants had started to perk up a little too. And on top of all that, there was another tomato plant in a section of the garden where I hadn’t planted anything, happily growing up thick and green without any help from me at all.

And it was then that I realized that I had been looking at the garden wrong the whole time. See, I thought it was me making all this stuff happen. My water, my dirt, my fertilizer. Without me those pathetic little plants didn’t have a chance.

But then I thought of the verse in the Bible that says something to the effect of, “I planted, another watered, but God gave the increase.”

And I don’t think it applies to just gardens. There are times in our lives when we do everything right, and everything seems to go wrong. And there are times when we’ve all but given up, and suddenly some new blessing appears out of nowhere.

I think writers are in just about as good a position as anyone to understand this principle. It’s easy to get frustrated when we’ve worked so hard getting things right, and someone else who seems like they haven’t put in nearly as much work, rockets to the top of the readerboards.

The truth is, it’s not because the system is unfair, or because anyone is out to get us. The truth is that we simply don’t have nearly as much control as we’d like to think we do.

It’s not an excuse to give up. It’s just a simple fact of life. We can work and struggle as much as we want to get to the top of the pile, but in the end, it’s God who gives the increase.

Unanswered Prayers: Keeping Your Faith when God Says “No”

[Warning: if you couldn't tell from the title this post contains references to PRAYER and GOD. If that's not your cup of Earl Grey, tune back in some other time and we'll get back to writing-type stuff.]

When I married my wife we lived in this tiny one bedroom apartment where the walls were so thin we could hear the neighbors screaming at each other next door, and the plumbing backed up at least once a week. I won’t complain about it too much. As far as places to live goes, it was light years better than what most of the world has to put up with.

But it wasn’t where we wanted to be. So after we got more financially stable we started looking for a house. It wasn’t easy. We were fairly poor, and we didn’t have a lot of extra money to begin with but we found a fantastic real estate agent who was willing to work to help us find something in our price range.

Several months after the hunt began, our real estate agent came to us with a proposal. She told us about a program that was available to help first time home buyers like us get into a brand new house at an affordable price. We were elated about the opportunity and for the next few months we went through the process of signing various bits of paperwork and picking out the colours of the cabinets and carpet. We drove by that house almost every week as it was being built, watching the progress with eager anticipation.

But then it didn’t happen. The builder upped the price and suddenly the house we had invested so much time and anticipation in was snatched out of our reach.

We went on the hunt again, and this time we found an older house that was well within our price range. Again we started the wheels turning on the process to buy the house.

But we hit another snag. The house had a small amount of termite damage which excluded it from being eligible for the type of loan we were able to afford.

We were devastated and started to get a little discouraged. We had been praying hard all through this process that God would help us find a house to call our own, and it felt like time and time again he was slamming the door in our faces. We didn’t understand what we were doing wrong, or why He kept telling us “no” time after time.

But then the day came when our agent called and said, “I’ve got a house you need to see. I think this might be the one.”

And, to make a long story short, it was. In fact it is the house where I am sitting at this very moment and writing this blog post. It was perfect for use in every way.

Now, looking back at those other houses we wanted to buy I can see why God said no. It wasn’t because He was a big meany who didn’t want us to have anything. It was because those places wouldn’t have been right for us. The first house would have cost us so much money we would have been tied up in financial knots trying to keep up the with mortgage, and the second one was so old it would have been a nightmare to maintain.

But the one we ended up with? It’s perfect for us in so many ways. We just couldn’t see it from where we were then.

Today, me and my wife are facing a different kind of difficulty. We’re trying to have a child. We’ve been praying and praying and everything seems like its going against us. Last summer we conceived for the first time, but my wife miscarried shortly into the pregnancy. And just this past week my she went to the doctor and learned that a condition related to her diabetes may make it extremely difficult for her to conceive again.

It would be easy enough to get angry with God about all of this. After all, He could fix it with a snap of his almighty fingers and give us the baby we’ve been asking for. But He hasn’t.

Sometimes I look at people who look like terrible parents, and I want to ask God, “Why have you given them children and kept us from having any?” But I’ve been through this kind of thing before. I know that when God says “No” sometimes it means he has something even better in store down the road.

So now I’m trying be what I ought to be where I am and with what I’ve got. I still don’t understand everything God is doing in my life, but I believe he has a plan that’s better than anything I could ever dream of, and that is what faith is all about.