Love's imprint

Yesterday my family had lunch with two other families, one with small children like our own, the other a couple whose children are grown. It was one of those Sunday lunches (we called them "dinners" where I grew up) that reminds me of how I am part of a community and a communion, and that this is a good thing, in spite of my introversion. After we cleared the table, the children ran off to play, the women retired to the den, and we men sat at the table.

Our conversation turned to raising children. I told them that I feel weighted by my past. I am having to learn what being a good father means in the midst of fathering. It's like learning to drive at 60 miles an hour.

It's my great fear that my inadequacies as a father will lead me to scar my children. I worry that I won't show them how fully I love them, or that I will fail to direct their eyes to heaven. "I've got to get this right," I told the men at that table.

"Or," the oldest man there said gently, "you can remember what your Bible says."

"Grace," I said, sheepishly. He nodded. We all mess up, I know, and it's certainly not our righteousness that guides our children to Christ. I suppose I look at my own life and see the seeds -- and often the fruit -- of terrible mistakes, and I worry that I will fail my children, that I won't have the strength and character to guide them. It is Christ who saves them, yes, but we parents can do so much harm with our words and actions and failures to act. Some nights I go to bed thinking I held my own as a father that day; others I lay my head on my pillow, ashamed, and consider how much harm I need to undo when the sun rises again.

I've thought about this as I grieve for my friend Jennifer, who is dying of cancer. She has two daughters, a teenager and a little girl. She worries about whether the youngest, especially, will remember her. She worries over what it will mean for her soon to be absent from their lives. This is the twin to my fear of failing as a father, that I will die while they are young, while they still need me. I grieve because Jen is dying, and I grieve because she is living out that deep fear of a parent.

It occurs to me, though, that the actions of parents have a way of imprinting themselves on a child's heart. Just as we can carry scars from childhood years that are significantly lost to our memories, Jen's children will retain her love, and the sense of wholeness that comes with being unconditionally accepted by a parent, even as their childhood memories fade. She is leaving them, yes, but in a sense she is inseparable from them.

It is a miraculous thing, the power of a parent's love to fill up a child, so that he senses a shadow of his heavenly father's love. I want to believe that even if I mess things up, my children will still have my love imprinted on them, so that they sense, behind my imperfect love, the perfect love of God. I want to believe that, when I get things wrong as a father, God will still redeem my effort. I need for imperfect to be good enough, because it's all I have. I suppose it's all any of us have, isn't it?