Photo taken by Adam Jones.
I put my arms around two younger men
just outside a conference room
early on a Wednesday morning,
before the day got started.
Chris and Philip.
Good men.
Young enough to be my sons.
Fathers now themselves.
I know what kind of fathers,
because I have met their boys.
Chris once handed me the phone
so his son Michael could tell me
about the Home Depot trip with his dad.
Michael had already given me pointers
on coloring and art projects,
so I knew I was talking to a professional.
He walked me through the whole thing.
The lumber.
The paint.
The order you do things in.
I have heard famous speakers.
I have sat under preachers
who could shake the rafters.
None of them ever explained the work of a man's hands
the way that boy did.
He had the voice of an archangel.
I had heard enough of his father
to know he came by it honestly.
Every other sentence was about his dad.
Then he told me the secret to all of it.
"You believe in what you are doing,
like when I was an angel in the parade."
So when Chris and Philip asked me the question
I used to ask older men
and mostly did not like the answers to,
I owed them the truth.
What do you wish somebody had told you?
For a long time I thought being a father
meant knowing what to do.
Provide.
Protect.
Correct.
Keep everybody close enough to the guardrails
and pray nobody drove through one.
I was wrong about most of it.
Not all of it.
Most of it.
Here is what the years taught me
that no book ever did.
One.
Every morning,
slay the hunk of flesh staring back at you in the mirror.
Do it quickly.
Before he starts believing
the whole day is about him.
I know that fellow.
He has my face.
He has raised his voice at a nine-year-old
over a spilled glass of milk.
He has sat in the truck in the driveway
ten extra minutes
because he did not want to walk inside and be needed.
He has wanted his children to turn out well
mostly so people would say he did.
Jesus said deny yourself daily.
Paul said put the flesh to death.
Daily is the word that humbles me.
Because he gets back up.
Every single morning,
he gets back up.
Two.
Then get dressed for a fight
you cannot see.
Not against your wife.
Not against your children.
That distinction took me years.
Paul called it armor.
Truth.
Righteousness.
Faith.
The Word.
And prayer through all of it.
I call it knowing your limits.
There are things a father cannot fix
with a louder voice,
a bigger check,
or a better argument.
I learned that our first nights in Florida,
after we moved the family down from Atlanta.
Every night I tried to fix everybody's hurting.
Every night I ran out of fixes.
In the end it was not me.
It was time.
It was new friends at school.
It was neighbors on our street
I had not even met yet.
God used strangers
to finish what my love could not.
Some nights the only honest thing left
is the floor,
and your knees on it.
Three.
Love the woman God gave you.
Not only the girl you married.
Christy and I dated sixteen months
and have been married more than thirty years.
I have been married to at least four women since then,
and every one of them was her.
Bodies change.
Dreams change.
Certainties you would have bled for
quietly leave the house one day
and do not come back.
There were seasons neither of us recognized
the two kids standing at the altar.
Seasons I was not easy to love.
She loved me anyway.
Some seasons I had to decide to.
So fall in love with something deeper than the photograph.
Her soul.
Learn it.
Guard it.
Keep choosing it.
Your children are watching.
They will forget most of what you told them.
They will not forget how you treated their mother
on the days she was tired
and you were wrong.
I know.
One night I had to tell my grown son
I was sorry
for the way I had acted around his mother.
No excuses.
I had been an absolute jerk.
Then I called my daughter
and let her help carry her father.
Brutal.
It may be the truest thing I ever taught them.
Four.
The children were never yours.
They were on loan.
The Psalmist calls them a heritage.
A gift.
Not a possession.
You get a handful of years.
Bandaged knees.
Aluminum bleachers at volleyball games.
Waiting up past midnight.
Advice nobody asked for.
Prayers whispered in the doorways of sleeping rooms.
And then you start handing over keys.
The old 4Runner, the first time he drives alone.
A Honda Accord, the day he graduates.
The title to the Highlander, the day he gets married.
Three sets of keys.
Each one lighter in my hand
and heavier in my chest.
And the girl I watched from those bleachers
moves to Austin
and spends her days helping other people's children
do what the rest of us never think twice about.
Grip a fork.
Take a step.
Find a smile.
Find a word.
It does not feel like losing them.
It feels like being handed the answer to every prayer
and finding out the answer
has a forwarding address.
They were not made to be smaller copies of you.
They were made to carry their own light
into rooms you will never see.
Parenting becomes the holy work
of opening your hands.
Five.
Then the hardest one.
Let go of the wheel.
I have not mastered this.
I still reach for it.
Most nights I lie awake running scenarios,
a man doing underwriting on his own children.
So I pray instead.
Humbly.
Specifically.
Protect them.
Give them courage.
Put good people in their path.
Correct them when they wander.
Hold them when the world wounds them.
Remind them who they are
when the world tries to rename them.
Make them salt.
Make them light.
That is where fatherhood leaves you.
Not in the driver's seat.
Not standing over grown children with instructions.
Somewhere behind them.
Older.
Hands open.
Praying to the God who loved them
before you ever knew their names.
That is what I told Chris and Philip.
Or tried to.
Truth is, their boys had already preached it better.
Not long ago I ran into young Philip
holding an Allosaurus
the way some men hold a Bible.
I asked him about it.
That was all it took.
He told me how long they lived.
How big they grew.
How the earth was old and wide and full of them
long before any of us showed up.
I stood there listening
and found myself thinking through my entire existence.
How small I am.
How brief.
How long God has been at work
before I ever arrived to help.
Maybe that is the whole lesson.
We spend the first half of fatherhood
learning how to hold on,
and the second half
learning how to let go.
And the whole time
we are somebody's son,
still learning both.
Boutwell Jones
Red Clay Gospel
