Hardcore desire

In my last blog I mentioned that a lot of us dads feel seriously unprepared when we finally confront the reality of day-to-day fatherhood.  This is a huge issue for fathers, this feeling of unpreparedness,  and it’s tied in to other feelings of insecurity and inadequacy that run deep within our masculine souls.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to talk about  this as much as we need to in a couple of paragraphs. But someone left a comment after the last blog asking a question that we all desperately want to be answered.  What is it that keeps us from being prepared?  Why do we feel such a deep sense of inadequacy as dads?

I don’t think the answer to this question can be distilled into a couple of words, or even a sentence. But if it could, I think the answer would look something like this:  Fatherhood is not just a matter of having sex and churning out another little human. As strange as it may sound, just having a child doesn’t make you a father. Fatherhood is something much deeper and more profound than an adult male hanging around the house doing whatever.

Fatherhood is more like a spiritual state of being, like some life-giving energy breathed into you or bestowed upon you that you, then, pass on to your child. It has to be given to you. It’s not just automatically there!

Our own dads are the ones who are supposed to pass this on to us, but the problem with most of our dads is that no one gave it to them, so they didn’t have it to pass on.

So the bottom line is, there’s a huge deficit of fatherhood in our culture.

At the risk of seeming like I’m over-spiritualizing the whole thing, I’m absolutely convinced that the only way we can become real fathers, fathers with a passion for truth, with compassion for our children, with the wisdom and courage to plunge in to this adventure of fatherhood and lead the way for our kids, is to make seeking and finding God our number one passion. After all, that’s the real adventure we’re taking our kids on, it’s the journey we all need to take.

I’m not talking about doing a couple of nice Christian things here and there. I’m talking hardcore, give it all you’ve got, risk everything kind of passion. If we’re going to find fatherhood anywhere, we’re going to find it in God!