My dad is getting older. My kids are young. I’m in the middle.
Nobody handed me this. My father didn’t teach me how to be one. Not because he failed me. Because no one taught him either, and the line breaks somewhere back before either of us can remember. And everything outside the house had its own lesson. That the things I was made of were mostly a problem to manage. So I’m doing it the way a lot of men my age are doing it. Making it up as I go. Watching what works. Hoping my kids don’t notice the parts I’m guessing at.
Most of us miss in one of two directions. The father who isn’t there, or the father you brace against when he is.
There used to be a third thing. Present and steady at the same time. A father you could lean your whole weight on who would never use his strength against you.
We’ve had the model all along. We turned Jesus into a Sunday story and stopped reading him as a blueprint. So I started reading him as one.
These are field notes. Some I’ve watched work. Some I’ve watched fail.
Some I’m still in the middle of...
1. Provide before you dream.
The world tells a young father to chase his vision. Jesus did the reverse. His father (Joseph) died when he was young. He ran the household for years before he spoke one public word. He cleared the debts. He fed children who were not his own. The work he’s remembered for could wait. The mouths at his table could not.
2. Claim who you are without waiting for permission.
At the river, the voice named him before he had performed a single miracle. He stepped into the water, claimed the name, and spent the rest of his life living into it. He never once asked whether he was allowed. A father decides who he is and then becomes it, on his own authority, before the world has signed off on anything.
3. Settle your code in private before the world tests it in public.
Before the crowds, he went alone into the wilderness and decided in advance what he would and wouldn’t do. By the time he was offered every shortcut, the answer was already set. He settled it when no one was watching, so his kids grow up around a man who is the same in every room.
4. Carry the joy into the room.
Of all the ways to begin, he began at a wedding. His first miracle was wine. He kept the celebration from running dry, served the feast, made the evening run longer by being in it. The father a child wants at the table is the one who is glad to be at the table.
5. Choose your brothers on purpose.
He walked the shore and picked the men he would build with, one by one. Nobody drifted onto that list. A father chooses the men around him deliberately, because he will become their average, and his kids will become his.
6. Know how to summon force, and only use it to protect.
Once, he braided a whip and drove the men exploiting the poor out of the temple. The same man who blessed children could clear a room. A father is dangerous and disciplined at the same time. The strength sleeps until something he loves is threatened. Then it stands up. Then it sits back down.
7. Stay still under pressure.
The boat was filling with water. The men were screaming. He was asleep in the stern. When they woke him, he wasn’t afraid. His steadiness had nothing to do with the conditions. It came from where he was rooted, and the storm could not reach that far down.
8. Earn the right to weep.
In the garden, alone, knowing what was coming, he sweat blood and asked for the cup to pass. At his friend’s grave, he wept openly and didn’t care who saw. Strength before tenderness is a boy who can’t regulate himself. Strength without tenderness is a machine that will eventually break. Strength that has earned its tenderness is a father.
9. Sacrifice without announcing it.
He carried what was his to carry and said almost nothing about it. A father doesn’t announce the price. His kids find out years later, or they never find out, and either way what they remember is that he showed up.
10. Die to yourself before you try to lead.
The man who has let his own ego die is the only one safe to put in charge of a family. He’s no longer leading for himself. A father leads from the far side of his own surrender, with nothing left to prove and nothing left to defend.
11. Teach without humiliating.
When he found the two on the road who had given up, he walked with them instead of mocking them, opening it up mile by mile until they saw it for themselves. A father can be right in a way that leaves his kids bigger than he found them.
12. Restore the ones who failed you.
The friend who denied him three times got breakfast on a beach, was asked three times if he loved him, and was handed his commission back. The man kept no ledger of the failure. A father holds the door open while his kids find their way back from their worst hour.
13. Build men and women who will outlast you, then hand it off.
At the end he gave the work away to the men he had built and walked off the mountain. He had spent years making himself unnecessary. A father measures himself by what keeps standing after he is gone.
None of this is complicated.
It’s only rare because so few model it anymore. Strength and gentleness were never opposites. We were handed the lie that they were, and most of us picked one and lost the other.
Jesus never picked. They were the same strength seen from two sides.
If you’re a father, you already feel this pull. It’s the blueprint, still legible under the dust. Anyone who loves a father has been quietly hoping he’d grow into it. And any child being raised right now is holding the inheritance already, on an ordinary Tuesday, whether the adults around them know it or not.
I’m being the father my kids need. I’ll fail sometimes. But I’ll always try again.
<3EKO
Share with a father you love this Father’s Day.
I love you.
“Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.” – C.S. Lewis
“Having a child is like taking your heart out of your chest and watching it run around in the world. It’s the most beautiful and terrifying thing.” – Unknown
I don't know if anything changed my life more than becoming a father.
Your words resonate to say the least.