Second chances for fathers

I used to believe that a man's performance as a husband could be separated from his performance as a father. I may have messed up a lot of things as a husband, I would tell myself, but at least I'm a good father. I figure not every man's sin looks like mine, but in my case a great deal of my failures are wrapped up in pride and self-deception. Submitting to God in the slow work of having these sicknesses healed has been an occasion for reconsidering all it is that I think of myself. Therefore, I'm reconsidering all the things I've come to believe about myself as a father.

What precipitated this particular bit of painful introspection was the smallest thing: a little snippet of video with my daughter in it. As many of you know, she is dead now. This scrap of video is part of something we shot for my workplace years and years ago, featuring the children of many people I worked with back then. Seeing her face reminded me how I cajoled her to be part of it, to say her small line for the camera. She was sick by then, though we didn't yet know it. She didn't want to be on camera, or to do much of anything else. But I nagged and fussed at her until she did it, because I didn't want to be one of the parents whose child wasn't in the video.

All that came rushing back to me yesterday. It was a small thing, I suppose---who hasn't been insensitive to his children at one time or another? But it made me think of all the other times I've put my wants or feelings over those of my children. This reminded me in turn how that's been my habit toward my wife for so many years. That's when it occurred to me that if a man isn't cherishing his wife, he likely doesn't have the kindness or state of mind or sense of self-sacrifice to lay down his life for his children, either.

So here we are approaching Father's Day, and I'm holding one more broken piece from the edifice of pride I've tended around my ego all these years. My children will give me their drawings, my wife will give me her presents, and I will think to myself that I don't deserve any of it---not in that humble way that we Christians know we're supposed to speak of ourselves. I really don't deserve any of it.

Perhaps pride and selfishness and any other habitual sins are like alcoholism, in that admitting them to others and ourselves is a first step toward recovery. I certainly hope so. Because while I haven't been anything like the husband or father I once imagined I would be, at least now I'm finally seeing it for what it really is. My intentions---your intentions---don't really amount to anything at all in the great accounting, do they? In the end we'll be called to answer for how we've lived. When it comes to being a spouse and a parent, I suppose it's just as much how we die, for we have to lay down our own lives in order to raise theirs up. Otherwise we exalt ourselves at their expense.

That is at least how I see being a husband and a father. Maybe I've always believed that in my head. Now, as that understanding makes its way along the painful road to my heart, I see myself in comparison to it and how far I fall short of it. In that regard, the eyes of the heart see much more clearly than the reason and rationale of the head. The eyes of my heart tell me I'm not nearly the father I thought I was. Mercifully, there is forgiveness. There is as well, for those of us graced with more life yet to live, another chance. There is always a second chance, so long as we draw breath. I know what I'm doing with the rest of my second-chance days. How about you?