To
be perfectly honest, I never thought much about it, Fatherhood, that
is. As a young and idiotic adult, convinced beyond arrogance of my
self-worth and pricelessness to the world, being a father just didn't
cross my mind.
I
was a pagan and a hedonist, for the most part, rejecting the values
and morals instilled in me by my own parents, and jaded by life
experience that found me in unexpected and bad places, physically,
emotionally and spiritually.
I
did not consider children important. I came into adulthood during the
inauguration of the Age of Legal Abortion, and bought the “liberated
propaganda” that embryos were amorphous clumps of cells, barely
different from a lesion or tumor – a reproductive parasite that,
until birth, was hardly human, and certainly not worth much of my
time or effort.
That
all changed when I witnessed the birth of my first child. I was still
a selfish pagan, but something about that experience filled me with
wonder and tears, and emptied me of speech.
There
she was, this person
who
I had thought of hardly at all, and when I did, it was in the
biologically ruthless terms of the pro-abortion movement.
Then,
just as I was coming to terms with the thought that I had been
utterly wrong about so many things, she stopped
breathing.
There
are not sufficient words to describe what that brief episode of apnea
did to my heart and mind, but what was left in its aftermath was a
kind of terror I had never before known. I felt simultaneously
sucker-punched and cheated by the depth of my reaction, and the
thought of this person
who had just come into my life leaving it in such a surprising and
mundane manner filled me with horror.
She
quickly recovered with expert care and no damage at all, at least to
her, but I was scarred forever. And more than a little resentful of
the impact... to me.
Fourteen
months later, for a variety of reasons that I could not have
anticipated nor guarded against, I became a Christian. It was all God
working in my life and preparing me for the most rewarding, solemn
and sacred responsibility that can be conceived of for a man: being a
father.
A
father to daughters, all immeasurable gifts beyond price, changing me
for the good forever.
For
me, to be a father is to come face to face with all my own
weaknesses, inadequacies, and fears. It is like looking into a fiery
furnace of potential loss and knowing beyond doubt that this fire has
been irrevocably lit with no prospect of being quenched. It is seeing
an impossible job stretching out before me with no hope of doing it
well, or right in my own strength, and knowing that what's at stake
are the lives and well-being of something unbelievably precious: my
own children.
It
is also the source of my greatest joy and blessing, aside from God
Himself. It is the fulfillment of an ancient, soul-deep purpose that
transcends time.
It
is humbling and humiliating, joyous and surprising, poignant and
inexplicably rewarding. It is the thing that gives meaning and
substance to what I am above and before everything else I might be.
I
would not trade one moment of fatherhood for all the planets in the
solar system. Not one drop of the potential ocean of tears, nor one
ounce of the sometimes unbearable weight of responsibility, that has
altered who I am and am still becoming as life moves me into my later
years.
When
I stand before my Lord and Savior on that Day, and am asked by Him
which, of the many good gifts He has given me, I cherish the most, my
answer will be this:
I
am Dad to my precious daughters. Always and forever. For me, nothing
else in this life compares.
