About

To my fellow fathers:

You are dying. So am I.

Sometimes you wake up slowly, and sometimes with a jolt. Maybe the sudden death of a healthy high school classmate shocks you from your stupor. Perhaps one day it dawns on you that your lower back has been sore… for the last three months.

As I write this, my youngest daughter (seven years old) is sitting across from me on our living room floor, chin on the coffee table, watching the sand slip through a two-minute hourglass. My middle daughter (eleven years old) is pushing my Kindle Paperwhite into my face, begging me to read them the next chapter in our current bedtime story (not gonna happen; it’s 8:00 AM). And my eldest daughter is sleeping in, two days before her thirteenth birthday. It doesn’t get any more obvious, folks: the time is short.

When I want to solidify my intentions, I write. When I need to clarify my thinking, I write. When I have to deal with my feelings, I write. So I’m writing here, in public, as a sort of accountability mechanism, time capsule, and brotherly encouragement, all rolled into one.

I’m writing for my fellow dads, who are fighting exhaustion and distraction, lust and gluttony, apathy and lethargy. I’m writing for my daughters, as yet another way to give myself to them. And I’m writing for their great-grandchildren, whom I am unlikely to meet in this life.

What to expect

Content

Dispatches from the front lines of fatherhood. Diary entries. Long quotations of folks who said it best. Cheerful rants about philosophy of technology. Links to relevant books and gear.

Tone

This is serious stuff - the stuff obituaries are made of - and yet also frequently hilarious. Expect strong language and the occasional belly laugh. Read every word as if it was written with a twinkle in the eye, because it was.

Perspective

I’m a country boy turned city boy turned country boy, high school valedictorian turned college dropout. I’m an American of Germanic ancestry who’s lived most of his life in the Tidewater region, an omnivorous reader and recovering fatass. I’ve been an ESOL teacher then recovery chaplain then web designer, and am a follower of Jesus who was raised Mennonite, seminary-trained Presbyterian, ordained chaplain, and Anglican church co-planter. If I ever seriously take up farming, I’d be a 9th-generation American farmer. I’ve been happily married for over 15 years to a wise woman who usually addresses me as “Love,” but only ever calls me “Babe” when I’ve exasperated her. And I’m generally referred to as “Daddy” by three rapidly-growing-up young women.

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A Benediction

I’ll leave you with this poem (or whatever it is) from N. D. Wilson, from which I stole the opening line of this missive.

You are dying. So am I. Every second I create more of my past: more decisions, more breathing, more love and more loathing. All of it slides by into the gone as I grab at more moments, at memories just made and already fading.

We are all authors, creators of our pasts, authors of the books that will be our lives. When we race across the wet concrete of time without purpose, without laughter and love and sacrifice, then we fail in our mortal moments.

See the past. See your life as the fruit of providence and thousands of personal narratives. What led to you? Lighthearted tales of neighborhood love, great tales of migrations, epic tales of global wars and comedies, dark stories about brothers and murder, tales of rape and grief and persecution.
You did not choose where to set your feet in time. You choose where to set them next.

Pause. Breathe.

Eyes front. See the future. Do not stare into the fog of distant years. See the crystal choices as they race towards you in this sharp foreground we call now. The future flies at you in a never-ending storm of possibilities.

God says create, God says live, choose, shape the future. Etch your lives in stone, and what you make will be forever. You are dying; so am I. We march from page to page, and it is our living that takes us toward the end.

Children will follow, reading our stories, built on our stories, set in a place and in a time that we helped choose for them. They will be the ones to shut the book behind us. They will dig holes and arrange flowers. They will fill out forms.

Cause of death? Life.

May it be the truth.