Old Man

Holy Shit! My son turned 21 yesterday. Talk about making you stand up and take notice.

I guess life is full of milestones. But adulthood in children in an amazing one. I was looking at a blog friend of mine who posted a picture of his beautiful daughter earlier this week. I remember all of that. I remember the wonder of having a small child that is totally dependent on you.

But since I've got a 21 year old and an 18 year old now, all of that is nothing more than pleasant rememberances.

I wrote him a letter when he was in the 10th grade. I went back and read it to see if I was still on the same page as he enters his senior year of college. I think I am.

So here's the letter.

I hope that you are old enough to understand the importance of the link between our spiritual, emotional and physical lives. I hope you have experienced the correct balance between them so you know how to juggle your life in the proper order. I hope that you understand that to deny yourself and to take yourself out of your routine existence you experience each day is what is needed to help change and mold your perspective. I pray that you understand that there are very few absolutes in life and how you look at things determines how they actually are. You are coming to a place in your life where the decisions you make will affect you for the rest of your life. I have always had enough respect for you and your wishes to allow you to follow your own way. Many times I have not agreed with your way, but I continually tell myself that “it’s your life”. I have been criticized and thought poorly of by some of my friends and family for not taking a firmer hand with you but I have been rewarded time and time again for my faith in you. I believe in you. I always have. You have become a wonderful young man and one that I am so very proud to call my son.

You are very different from me, and that’s OK. I was completely different from my father. He didn’t appreciate that fact until late in his life and that was a huge loss for both of us. He died just as he was sorting out his hopes and dreams. I learned a valuable lesson from that and I pray that you will never have to because I plan to be there for you. I plan to be there for you to talk with and give advice to. I want to guide you but never lead you. When I volunteer advice to you I always try to do it in the manner of telling you what I would do and why, so you could have enough information and experience to make an informed decision. I don’t want to tell you how to do things, but like most people, I have learned the “hard way” and would spare you some of that pain if I can.

Growth and happiness are the key results from a life of exploration and adventure. People who stay safely shut away from all the dangers of life will never be able to experience the ups or the downs that define us. People who are afraid to fly never go anywhere. People who are afraid of crowds never learn what it is like to be a part of something larger than they are. People who are afraid to love because they don’t want to get hurt will never be loved. It is far better to love and get burned than to stay safely on the sidelines and never get a scratch or a bruise. I pray for you the wisdom and patience needed to start on the path that will lead you to happiness. With happiness comes security and fulfillment and a greater sense of how you fit into the world. I pray that you realize that you must take the initiative and venture out to do things to improve yourself. It’s not enough to do what “they” tell you to do. You must do more. You must lift twice the weights they tell you to and you must run farther and faster than they make you. You must swim and stretch and study. When you have gone the extra mile and put your best into your activities, you will find a satisfaction that you never knew existed. A life without excuses. A life in which you do your best, and win, lose or draw, that’s good enough.

I believe in you and I am so very proud of you. You are a much finer young man than I could have ever dreamed you would be. I love you with all my heart and promise to always be there for you.

My hopes and dreams for you are as simple as my philosophy for my own life. I hope that you find the energy to do for yourself what you would do for others. I pray that doing the right thing, no matter what the consequences, will always be more important to you than being right or winning. I dream that one day your heart will guide all your actions. I hope that you will come to understand the nature of God as I have. I pray that money and success will mean much less to you than the satisfaction of living an honorable life. Mostly I hope that you will come to the knowledge that the measure of a man is not where he lives but how he lives. I ask you to remember the five pillars of manhood: Wisdom, Strength, Courage, Honor and Love. Most of all…….Love. If we need to tattoo those on your arm to help remind you, please let me know.

I have never been concerned for the future with regards to you. You are approaching a time when the decisions you make will start you on a path that may last the rest of your life. I will endeavor to help guide you but more than that, I hope to be able to reassure you through trust, self-confidence and love that even if you choose poorly, you can always change directions. This is the dividing line between a good life and a plain old regular life. I will attempt to nurture in you the confidence that will allow you to explore many types of paths without feeling trapped. You are much too young to worry about “the rest of your life” but at the same time, you have to take steps in the right direction every day.

I hope you have been alive long enough to have gained a little perspective on the different types of people that exist in our world. I am now going to ask you to think back to youth baseball, 9-10 and 11-12. I realize that many of your memories will be of kid stuff but think of the larger picture. Try to remember how parents acted and think about what it did to the children. Not right then, but now as you know them. Think about the relationship between having to win, at any cost, and what that cost eventually was. Think about the relationships those young men had with their fathers and how it affects their lives today. I know you are smart enough to see what that type of life offers. Now look at the other side. Look at it from the side of baseball where it is a wonderful sport and it is a privilege to play. Look at it from the perspective that each child will get to play the same amount no matter what the talent level is. Look at how much our teams won with that philosophy and how much more fun and “growth” we had than they did. Did you ever think that because the best players on the team realized that the worst players on the team would be playing the game with them, the best players actually helped the worst players get better. It happened every time. Across the field many times we had teams that only played kids one inning. There was no motivation to improve those children and they eventually quit, which was just what the coach wanted anyway.

That is not life and it is not Christian. It’s sick, and it goes on every day in our world. Christ calls us to reject that kind of life and do the right thing. In closing the baseball argument, I ask you to think back specifically to all the “great” kids you played with. The best of the best players. We all know who they were, but I want you to think about how their parents approached the game. What were the parent’s attitudes towards their children and coaches. Did the parent’s actions affect the children’s sense of self-worth? What does that look life 7 years later? I’m not going to answer those for you, but please draw your own conclusions and learn something very important. That particular baseball lesson can actually be the guiding light of your life if you understand it.

I want you to understand that your relationship with God will be THE defining moment of your life. That relationship is never finished because there is no finish line. It’s a journey not a destination and it will last a lifetime. There will be times in your life when you love and praise God and then there will be those times when you want to curse God. If you pay attention, you will come to understand the nature of God through both of these acts. When life is not fair, God is there. When life is great, God is there. When it is quiet, God is there. When it is crowded and noisy, God is there. You must learn to pay attention, to listen, to see and to understand. Then you will know God and it will give you the confidence that you can only have when we know that someone is always with us. It may not turn out the way we wanted it to, but because we weren’t alone, it really didn’t matter so much. Forgiveness and Mercy are our greatest attributes and those can only come from the presence of God in our lives. Our greatest sin is Pride and that comes from a lack of humility because God is absent in our lives. I say words like the “presence” and “absence” of God in our lives as a way for you to understand these things but in reality, God is always there and it’s our job to know it. For if we don’t pay attention, we won’t know, we will just die. The quality of your life depends upon your understanding of God and developing your relationship with him. God wants us to live life abundantly. He wants us to enjoy ourselves in communion and fellowship with him and our fellow man (and woman, of course).

Scripture is our guidepost but it is never our God. Do not ever fall into the trap of the infallibility of scripture. In our part of the country there is a very odd Baptist belief that what is written in the bible is somehow real and true in all situations. The bible is a book inspired by God and written by the people of God and administered throughout history by the church of God. The beginning of the bible contains two (read ‘em) back to back creation stories. Which one is true? (That will send a Baptist minister into an actual dance if you ask it at the right time). Ask me later and I will explain that and anything else you have a question or comment about. Everything in the bible is a testament of the power and love of God. When you come to a true understanding of that, then the historical accuracy of the book won’t even matter to you. I will endeavor to guide and direct your study so you can be well grounded in your beliefs. You should always know what you believe and why you believe it. If not, it doesn’t count, because there is nothing worse than a person that believes something he doesn’t understand. That is the breeding ground of intolerance and ignorance. The opposite of faith is not unbelief but it is fear. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Indifference means not caring. Not caring means not doing. Not doing is the path that leads to misery.

And that's all I've got to say about that.

So as I look back, I see the lessons I tried to impart to him have taken root. They may not be where I would like for them to be - but they are there.

And what more can a father do for his son?

Life is amazing and we can either work towards something good or just accept that life throws stuff at us that we can't control. I am very statisfied at this point that everything is wonderful.

I'll get back to you on this subject on his 30th birthday!

Peace to you today.