The Heart of A Dad

The Heart of a Dad – Uncharted Waters

Yesterday (Oct. 8, 2014) my dad would have celebrated his 84th birthday, had he lived to see it. When I arrived in my office yesterday I began to think about what life might have been like if my dad had been with us for these last 22 years. Had dad been here he would have watched his grandson and granddaughters grow into the young man and young women that they have become. The last photo we took of my dad was of him holding Courtney and Nathan on his lap. Courtney was two and a half years old and Nathan was just about six months old. At the time of the picture dad was already stricken with cancer, which would take his life just a few days later. I suspect life would have been very interesting had he been a part of their growing years.

Regretfully, my kids, like I did, will have some uncharted waters in their life. They will never be able to say that they knew their granddad and had the opportunity to bond with him and learn from him. I suspect he would have done the things with them that he did with us and he would have been as generous with them as he was with me and my brother and sisters. I regret that my kids didn’t get to spend time with their granddad and learn from his travels around the world. He had a 9 foot by 12 foot wall map of the world that had push pins in it to represent all the places he had traveled to during his military service. He was a decorated soldier in both the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War. He traveled to Japan, China, Peru, Panama, France, Germany, Italy and Whales, just to mention a few places to which he traveled. I would venture to say that anywhere there was an Air Force base in the United States, he had been at least once. He gained so much knowledge that he was like a walking National Geographic magazine. The kids would have learned so much from him.

The uncharted waters that I want to share with you are those years that I did not get to spend with my dad and how those years impacted the same period of time in my kids’ lives. Mom and dad divorced when I was 12 and dad left, so I did not have a father role model in my life or an example of what a dad should do. In turn, when it came to dating process and evaluating who and when our children should date, I had no model. There was that period of time when I missed the wise counsel that I should have gotten. I didn’t learn from my dad how to navigate through the difficult years of marriage and child rearing. There was not a model to pattern my fatherhood after so I decided I would use the biblical model. So I had to know what that model looked like and how that model played itself out practically.

The biblical model for me started with “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger.” So I spent a lot of time talking through situations with our kids, maybe to a fault. There may have been times when I should have put my foot down and just said this is the way it’s going to be because I said so. However, oftentimes I talked more than I should have. The other thing I did was to look at the lives of biblical characters like the patriarch Jacob and Israel’s King David to see how they managed being a dad to see what I could learn from them. One thing they both did that had devastating effects on their families was they had favorites. In both cases the results were murderous. You recall the story of Jacob and his favorite son Joseph, whose brothers resented him because his father loved him more. So I have done my level best not to have favorites among my children.

I love my three children equally, but separately. Each one of our children is different, therefore, our love for them, though equally felt, is different. I love Courtney, our first born, in ways that you could never imagine. When she was born, she was the apple of my eye and growing up she was a phenomenal young lady. I love her with all my heart. My youngest daughter Tracey was also the apple of my eye, but in contrast to her sister, she was more of a daddy’s girl. Courtney and I would rub noses; Tracey and I would hug. Tracey is independent minded. I love her equally with all of my heart. Courtney and Tracey have totally different personalities, but I love them both the same. Our son Nathan, on the other hand, is obviously different from his two sisters, but it doesn’t mean we love him any less, just different. The girls would often accuse my wife and I of treating Nathan differently, and they are right. We do treat him differently because he is a young man. When he was a boy I treated him like someone who would one day become a young man and when he became a young man I began treating him like someone who would soon become a man. Once when Tracey accused us of treating her brother differently, I explained to her that she could not do the same things he did and still be called a lady. She accused us of playing favorites by allowing Nathan to have liberties that she did not have. There were multiple reasons why he had liberties that she did not have. First, he was older. Secondly, as a young man there were some things I knew he had to get out of his system and trying to hold him back could prove more detrimental to his development into manhood. Thirdly, I decided, particularly with my son, to pick my battles wisely; to major on the majors and minor on the minors.

A couple of years ago I attended a United Way luncheon at an automotive museum to kick off the organization’s annual fundraising campaign. Inside the museum were no less than 40 amazing mostly European classic luxury vehicles; everything from sports cars to high-end luxury sedans. The owner was there and he took the time to share with us some of the nuances about the cars and what made each one special. A man asked the owner which car was his favorite to drive if he could only pick one. The owner responded with his own question and asked the man, “Do you have kids?” The man said he had three daughters. The owner asked, “Which one is your favorite?” The man nodded his head without speaking, because there is no answer other than “they all are.” To my dad, I am confident that we all were his favorite just like all three of our kids are my favorite.

As I entered the period of uncharted waters in the lives of my children I tried to identify what each child needed and how their individual differences required different responses from me. One needed shoes while the other needed a coat and the other one needed a hat, they each had different needs. Their physical needs were much easier to meet, but a lot of the time I was in uncharted waters in certain areas of their development. Because my father was no longer there for me to turn to, I found other models that I could learn from. I looked at some of my colleagues at work and in ministry to see how they did things; some of which I could emulate and some I could not. For example, one colleague told me he spent a considerable amount of money on college exam preparation for his kids. While I was unable to spend the kind of money that he spent, I learned that preparation for the standardized college exams was important; now the question was how to get it done within our means. My pastor, Dr. Lane, provided me with several demonstrations of how to be a dad in these uncharted waters. As his kids became teenagers, like most kids, they wanted to get after school jobs, but he didn’t allow them to until they were older. You see, he realized the money they would make at some fast food joint would not make up for what they would miss academically.