It’s Father’s Day, and as I looked back on my week, I expected to remember the gifts I received. Instead, I kept remembering two gifts I gave.
Not gifts wrapped in paper. Gifts wrapped in time, in gas mileage, in interrupted plans. Two ordinary acts of serving my children. Here is the strange thing about them: in serving my kids, I was the one who walked away blessed.
That is not a coincidence. That is a design. It is the way my heavenly Father has loved me all along.
A Tuesday in Pittsburgh
Two weeks before her high school graduation, my daughter Jarah got the word no eighteen-year-old should get a week before walking the stage. Her boyfriend of two years ended it. Out of the blue. It crushed her. I have written about that grief in my last two posts, because heartbreak in our home is not something we hide. We carry it together.
So when I was able to get tickets to Megan Moroney’s Cloud 9 tour, which was stopping at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, I got them. Not just for Jarah. For her and three of her closest friends.
I did not go in expecting therapy. I went in expecting noise and lights and a long drive home. But something happened in that arena that I will carry for the rest of my life.
The songs found her. One of them, “6 Months Later,” takes the sting of being left and turns it into a kind of defiant healing, the realization that the one who walked away will one day wish he hadn’t, and by then you will have already become stronger without him. Another, “Wedding Dress,” names the fear underneath the grief, the worry that the missing might never fully leave. It does not pretend the ache away. It just asks God to hold the ache somewhere it cannot ruin the future. Jarah needed both of those songs. It was as if they had been written for her.
Here is what undid me. There was a moment when those four girls locked arms, swayed, and sang every word together. I caught it on video. Three friends wrapped around my daughter, holding her up while they sang her pain out loud.
I did not say a single wise thing all night. I did not need to. All I had to do was show up and be where my feet were. Presence was the whole gift. Sometimes a father’s most important job is simply to be in the room.
A Saturday on I-80
Then there was Friday. My son Dallas called from Cleveland. He had hit a pothole, and his tire lost pressure on the spot.
Dallas is between his junior and senior year of college, working an internship for the summer. He is about an hour and forty-five minutes from me. His car has runflats, so he was not stranded, but he needed a new tire fast. I have bought my tires from Tire Rack for years, and within minutes, I had filed the road-hazard claim and ordered the replacement for next-day delivery.
The tire arrived Saturday morning by 9:30. So I got in the car and drove it to him.
Now, Saturday is my Sabbath. I had plans to rest. This blew it up. But Dallas also had a bodybuilding training class he could not miss, a discipline he has picked up recently and takes seriously. So here is how the morning actually went. I dropped the tire at the National Tire and Battery in Independence, Ohio. While they mounted it, I picked Dallas up and drove him to his class. Then I went back to NTB, closed out the order, paid for it, and handed his keys back. After class, he grabbed a short Uber to his car.
It was a full morning of driving, paying, and waiting. None of it was on my list, and I would do it again tomorrow.
Because it was not about me. It was about him, and how I could serve him. That is the exact lesson my heavenly Father has been teaching me about every relationship that matters. God first. Others second. Myself third. Love runs in that order, or it does not run at all.
Father Knows Best
Today, the Family Wins Devotional reading for June 21 sat right on top of everything I was learning. It opened with Paul’s words: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33).
There are questions God could answer for us that we are simply not built to grasp, and often the truest answer He gives is the oldest one a good father ever gave: Father knows best. Who understands a watch better than the watchmaker? Who understands heaven and earth better than the One who made both? Moses learned it across forty years of speaking with God face to face: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” (Deuteronomy 29:29).
God is not asking for my opinion on how to run His world. He is asking for my obedience in mine, and obedience, for a father, often looks like a Tuesday concert and a Saturday tire run. Small acts. No applause. Just love poured out in the order God designed.
Two Roles, One Design
This week, I was also reading Fred Rogers, and he reminded me of something our culture keeps trying to flatten. A mother and a father are not interchangeable. Both are essential. But they are not the same, and they were never meant to be. A child needs the particular shape of a mother’s love, and the particular shape of a father’s, and a home is strongest when both are present, and both are doing their distinct work.
I know what that role is supposed to look like because I was shown. My dad showed me, my grandfather showed me, and above them both, my heavenly Father showed me. I could not have asked for better men to learn from. Every tire I drive across two states, every concert ticket I get for a hurting daughter, is just me trying to pass down what was handed to me.
So here is the question this Father’s Day put in front of me, and now in front of you.
Which wolf are you feeding when your plans get interrupted?
There is a wolf in every one of us that says this is my day, my Sabbath, my schedule, my comfort. There is another wolf that says I will lay it down, because that is what my Father did for me. You will feed one of them this week. Your children are watching to see which.
The gifts that blessed me most were not the ones I unwrapped. They were the ones I gave away. That is the great upside-down economy of the Kingdom, and of fatherhood. We find our life by spending it on the people God gave us to love.
So be present in the room. Drive the tire across the state line. Put others second and yourself third, and trust that the Father who designed it all knows best.
Happy Father’s Day.
Feed the Good Wolf. 🐺