I have one son, so far. His name is Jesse Wolverine. Seriously. His middle name is the byproduct of a vow I made my mother when I was ten. She tried to release me from it, but I strive to be an honorable man. The boy is Wolverine. I call him Jesse, though.
Jesse is a sweet boy. He always has been. I hope he always will be. When he was two, he used to wake up in the middle of the night, kiss me on the lips (my family sleeps together), and say, “I wuv you, Daddy.” He would often do this two, even three, times per night.
As boys do, my son often did things wrong, requiring verbal correction. Sometimes I got a bit upset with him. The moment correction came, the boy was at my feet, repeating the phrase, “Hold you” over and over, arms stretched straight up at me, until I bent down to pick him up. He couldn’t stand to be relationally separate from me. I always held him.
My son turned five the other day. He is a beautiful boy, handsome and winsome. He fell on his face a year or so ago, which seemingly killed his right-front tooth. It turned dark. One day, the tooth came back to life. He uses it to smile at me frequently:
Some days, many days, he tells me a dozen times that he loves me. “Daddy? I love you.” He can pronounce his ‘L’s correctly now. We will be in the middle of a conversation: “Daddy? I love you.” He will be quietly sitting and thinking, or working on a project: “Daddy? I love you.”
The boy is a strange figure in my life. I am not a sweet man. I don’t remember being a sweet boy. The first poem I ever remember writing was in junior high:
My heart is hard,
and small,
and full of meanness.
I meant it. Part of me always wanted to be sweet. It was just like the color of sweetness never looked very good on me. I couldn’t pull it off. It didn’t fit me right.
It fits Jesse. That boy—I love that boy. I love the way he loves me. He holds my hand when we walk to work. He hops on my back when he sees me sitting down.
When he tells me he loves me, I do not struggle to return the love. “I love you, too, buddy.” It isn’t perfunctory. It is genuine and heartfelt. The boy knows he has a hard and mean father. He loves his hard, mean father. His hard, mean father loves him back. I would die for this boy.
Most parents feel this way about their kids. I don’t know many parents who would not gladly die for their children, should the moment require it. The way in which most parents fail to their children is not their willingness to die for them, but to live for them. As parents grow older, get frustrated, get disillusioned, fail, disappoint, struggle, despair…the temptation is to give up on ourselves and put our hopes on the kids.
The problem is that the kids are putting their hopes into their parents. They love us so much. They need us. Yet so many parents phone it in, playing video games or looking at their phones all day, eating garbage food, hanging out with garbage friends, filled with garbage thoughts. Parents lie to themselves about kids being resilient and everything turnout out alright in the end. I don’t doubt that these parents love their kids. They just don’t love their kids rightly. It is tainted, distorted love.
The Christian scriptures help people to understand that true love is matched with a pattern of submissive behavior in the same direction. “If you love me,” Jesus said, “you will obey my commandments.” Love is always met with obedience and submission, trust and hope. My son loves me, so he submits to me. I love him, so I likewise submit to him, in a way.
I submit my continuing to hone and sharpen myself as a man. I tend my marriage, my health, my job, my faith, my chickens, my finances. Painstakingly, humiliatingly, unpleasantly, I allow the Lord to prune me, cut off the parts that don’t bear fruit, so that I might be a fruit-bearing man of God. I let my son see this, so that someday he can likewise pour himself out for others. His love deserves a response.
My Father’s love deserves a response, as well. His love is more powerful than my son’s. It is also harsher. It expects and requires more. And, again, the call isn’t just to die for him, but to live for him. As much as my son’s love motivates me, my Father’s does, even more. Or at least, it should. More, my love for my son is worth nothing until it comes under proper submission to the love of my Father. It is He who has entrusted Jesse to me. Jesse isn’t mine; he is the Lord’s. I have been given stewardship of this precious child by my loving Father in heaven. He has entrusted me with this sacred, sober duty. My negligence in this task will be met with harsh judgment on the great and terrible Day of the Lord.
I worry about many parents today. I worry about parents who think their children actually belong to them and not God. I worry about parents who feel no obligation to serve as a model and exemplar for their children, as well as those who see children as a means to fulfill their unmet needs. Parents who remain the center of their own story, rather than prioritizing their children over themselves, worry me a good deal. It is clear to me that the filial bonds of parents and children in our land are in great jeopardy, clearly in place but also clearly perverted. The consequences of such tainted love spill out in every direction.
Many have sons who are sweet like mine, but their parents are too self-absorbed and narcissistic to see them. Victim mothers and absent fathers are raising a generation of understimulated and overmedicated children who generally have no knowledge of their loving Father in heaven.
There is no curriculum or ten-point plan for addressing this travesty. There is no government program or legislative agenda that can restore that which has been dismantled. There is only the faithful remnant warning this generation of the consequences of their actions, pointing them to the submission that we are hopefully modeling for them and our children. These folks do not need to have a supernatural theophany in order to turn. They need only to look at the love of their children and to feel the natural bonds of duty that rise to meet it. I pray that God would undo the propaganda and prescriptions of this present age and wake folks up before it is too late. Because there are millions of children needing right love, and there are millions of parents who can give it if they can just—wake up.
Great thoughts, well written.
I fear that for many young people (in their 20's & '30's; I'm in my mid-60's now) in Western culture (and some others) there is no desire to even BECOME parents. Our self-absorbed culture has done more to slow population growth than any modern medical technology.
There are pockets of young Christians (couples/parents/families) who are living against this trend thankfully. We could use many more. The church will no doubt find itself overwhelmed trying to help this generation discover God's unique blessings in both marriage and parenting; it's a very counter-cultural "lifestyle" today.
Amen. Getting to be apart of watching Casey's kids grow up and the way they are truly so helpful. A pain in the butt sometimes for sure but they truly are helpful. I'm excited to see the kind of people they grow up to be. Can't wait to see what God has in store for them.