Through Their Father’s Eyes

Before you are ten, he can do anything. Any thing. Beat up all the other kids’ dads. Scare monsters out of the closet. Throw a curve ball, catch a shark, slay dragons, tame wild horses, run marathons bare-footed, even fix a broken down car with one of your mom’s hair pins, a Lego piece and duct tape. He exhales excellence. He is universally competent. And he smells good doing it.

After you turn ten, though, his invincibility begins to waver. His bravery comes across more like bravado. His opinions — and they are legion, for they are many — become offensive. His music is a joke. And he loses his cool — the cool that once made him relatable and fun, the attributes that made other kids say things like, “Your dad is so awesome!” And the other kind of cool as well; the emotional equilibrium he possessed when a crisis threatened, the calm self-possession that made standing next to him feel like being anchored to a boulder bolted to a mountain. That cool went up in smoke one night when your volcanic emotions and his blew at the same time.

And then, probably in your late teens, he even loses his moral authority. You had assumed that all adults were possessed of a certain age-related righteousness, that they lived above the tempest of teen-aged temptation, high, dry and holy. And if not all adults, then certainly your father. But then even he was found to be with sin, no more able to throw a stone than those chumps Jesus silenced in John 8. Along with all the other things, he lost your respect.

You grow up, but even before you graduate from college, you begin to have the vague sense that the answers you discerned between 16 and 20, are not only not correct, but that you weren’t even asking the right questions. You get married and discover that marriage is not the made-for-TV romance you’d imagined. Or the silver bullet that shot the heart out of all your temptations. But you work at it. You get a job you sometimes hate, you pay the bills, you keep the grass mowed, the gutters cleared. And then you have kids of your own.

And they think you can do anything. They think you can surf tsunamis, ride dinosaurs and re-tube toothpaste. And one day, when they are 8-ish, when you are relishing all the awesome that you are, it dawns on you; they will turn ten before you know it. Hairline cracks will etch through your invincibility. Your cool will evaporate like mist on a mirror. You might even lose their respect. Because you are not near as good as they imagine.

That’s when something almost magical happens to your dad. He slowly begins to become bigger than he was when you were small. Because now you realize he wasn’t battling mythological beasts or invisible monsters. The siren temptations that sing to you, sang to him. Now, you know that some of those times when he seemed steady, it’s not because he wasn’t terrified; it’s because he had no idea what to do next. He seems wiser, too, not because he knows the answers or even the questions, but because he knows life. And himself. And a lot more of God than he did when he was your age. And, oddly, he’s regained some of the cool — both kinds. But more than anything, the respect returns. Real respect, not the doe-eyed esteem of an easily impressed child. It’s more muscular than that. Earthier. Truer. It’s the respect that a young man who has been through a battle or two, gives to an old man who has stood his post or stormed a beach a thousand times. You respect him now not because he always did the right thing, but because even when he failed, he was man enough to get up and try again.

Now you know that his righteousness, like yours, wasn’t earned. It was given. You see your father through your Father’s eyes. And you pray that one day, after the sweet savor of sin has turned bitter in your children’s mouths, after they have tasted the goodness of God’s forgiveness, they, too will see you through their Father’s eyes.