Faith Of Our Father(S)

What is it with our infatuation with having kids? Why do we do it? What is that desire, that passion that burns within us that makes us want children?

Is it our desire to see ourselves, literally, in another person? Is it our desire to love and be loved? What is it? Its mysterious to me.

And yet, here I found myself, a few years back as Tiffany and I got married, wanting kids. I couldn’t explain it. I still can’t explain it, but you have that desire deep within you, or at least, many of you for children.

God blessed us with the most beautiful little girl in the world in November of 2006. Nearly everyone in here knows her, has held her, and cares for her. My little girl, Peyton, has been a tremendous blessing to Tiffany and I. We love watching her laugh and giggle. We hate seeing her cry. And we would gladly protect her with every ounce of life we had if she was ever in danger.

How do you explain that except to say it is instinct and mysterious and leave it at that?

I know one thing, and anybody here who is a parent, and there are a lot of you, knows that maybe nothing more in this world will make you appreciate your own parents more than being one yourself. Whether it be the culmination of responsibilities that come along with being at a child bearing age or the maturity that comes along with it all, something makes you realize that your parents aren’t crazy and they weren’t crazy when you thought they were.

I am so blessed that I get to spend Father’s Day with my dad. He and my step-mom, Elaine, were gracious enough to make their way up to Chico from Livermore, where they live so that I could spend some time with them. I’m sure, for them, getting to see their grand-daughter is where the majority of the value in such a trip lies, but I hope that I might be a sufficient consolation prize.

Of course I am kidding, but isn’t it bizarre, this desire to have children?

I remember wrestling with my faith several years ago as I was still trying to figure out who I was as a Christian. I was struggling with some difficult questions surrounding our faith and I remember asking this question to Mike Crowley who is the preaching minister at Davis Park Church of Christ in Modesto.

I asked him something along these lines, "Why would God even bother to create us in the first place if He had the foresight to know that many of us would choose not to follow Him and He would be forced to condemn many of His creations?"

Basically, why even bother; weren’t we better off never to have existed at all?

And you know how sometimes you get an answer to a question that really resonates with you; it really sticks with you as being profound. I can almost guarantee that he has no recollection of what he said or ever even having this conversation with me, but he gave me, what I think is, the best answer anyone could have given me.

And here is the intriguing part, he never even answered my question. He responded to my question with a question of his own. Rhetorically, he said, "Why do we have the desire to have kids?"

What a brilliant answer…or question! He didn’t explain anything at all, but I knew exactly what he meant, and it made sense to me. We were created in the image of God and I have to believe we share a lot of similarities in terms of our personality with Him.

He is other-worldly and yet entirely relatable. So when we try to understand why we were created, we can understand in terms that cannot be put into words by realizing that we have the same innate desires for a creation of our own, if you will. We want kids, we want something that is part of us, to be created from us.

Now mothers have a very special relationship with their children, and with good reason. They grow the children, they feed the children, they provide them with everything they need to physically survive for quite some time. There is no denying the importance of a mother with her kids. It is something that men will probably never understand, but certainly respect.

In honor of Father’s Day, however, I wanted to spend some time to talk about what makes a father very special. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that has really tended to devalue the role of a father in a child’s life.

We seem to have been programmed, if you will, to believe that mothers can do it all. They can work, they can be the homemaker, they can be super mom and no Dad is needed. Just look at the statistics regarding custody battles and we can begin to see just how devalued the father is.