Dear Kids

 

Dear Kids,

Along with being married to your mom, being your dad is the greatest of privileges. I love you and wouldn’t change anything about who you are or how we are together. Hey, its’ us! I will not be able to capture all the blessings about being dad to you.

I am thankful that I was able to hold you in the delivery room. I don’t know how your grandfathers could handle pacing in the waiting room until their kids were born, weighed, measured, or even cleaned up. I certainly don’t know how my dad could stand it being half the world away when I was born and not seeing me until I was six months old or so. Being there right then in the moment? Awesome!

All those things listed on the card pictured below? I wouldn’t run from any of them, bring it on. I loved the whole lot of it. Being your coach, from indoor soccer to baseball, basketball, swim meet timer are memories I cherish – being your biggest fan at high school meets and drama gigs – special. I’m not sure I can pick one activity over another. I love walking with you and have having taken you for walks, watching birds, swimming, hiking, rafting…all of it has been a gas, as we used to say.

Mission trips with you to Arizona? A highlight of decades of youth ministry. You demonstrated and continue to demonstrate your caring hearts for others. I must have done something right and that is likely because of amazing grace. I suspect I’ve received far more out of being a dad than I have any right to expect. Just the same, I’ll take it.

Your adult selves continue to grow and mature. You have become outstanding parents and will continue to grow into that role as your kids grow, develop, and change. You are adaptive, creative, and loving in all the ways that are good and right. Each of you has married well and your spouses have grown into excellent parents as well. To see two melded into one and your parenting as a team pulling equally at the traces of the craft of being parents is a real joy.

Your children are a distinct please in every way. They are joyful and I love how they put up with Silly Opa. I love them in unmeasurable quantities just as I do you. Well done children, well done.

This is a glimpse of what it means to me to be a dad on Father’s Day.

Thank you.

Again, I love you.

Dad