The first time I ever saw my son Jacob, he peed all over the floor. And, if you’re a parent, you get how wonderful newborn pee is.
Seconds-old Jacob had apparently been holding back his first trip to the bathroom for weeks, maybe the whole nine months. So the moment his tiny newborn body entered the cold hands of our family OBGYN, the dam broke in his bladder, and Jacob covered the table and the doctor’s hands, before the doctor eventually held him upside down so he could finish his business.
Jacob doesn’t obviously remember anything about that moment, but he retells that story often. We have many of these stories in our house about Jacob—the time he broke his arm; his first rash; strep throat; and, my favorite: the first time he put his Fender mini strat behind his head all “Jimi Hendrix style” and played the pentatonic scale perfectly. I’ve been there for everything. I love my son more than I love the air I breathe. And when we pray together at night, we often put our foreheads together and say secret things to each other. He tells me about the hopes he has for his life, what he wants to do, asking me what I think God is calling him to become. We talk about what it means to have a crush on a girl and who has bigger arm muscles.
I desire so much for Jacob. I want him to be a good man, a good husband and father. I want him to be happy. I look forward to the day when I can look into the grown-up eyes of my son and know, for sure, that he is a good man, whole and happy and complete; Comfortable with his life and yet completely uncomfortable. The thing is, I have no idea how to get Jacob to that place. The answer to such a question is as much a struggle as the question, How did I get into adulthood? How can I understand Jacob’s process when I really don’t understand my own? Mark Yaconelli’s narrative is simply beautiful. Good authors don’t prescribe; they show and tell, demonstrating their struggle in the world of the narrative, taking us along in their journey. The most agonizing aspect of the article, for me, was my own sense of loss at having to navigate the worlds of adolescence and maleness mostly alone.
A Community of Men
Men getting together with other men is a lost art in America. We get together to watch games on our huge TVs. In my community, men get together to hunt. But, other than those two very cultural gatherings, men don’t connect. We do not camp together and, heaven forbid, we never get together to weep about the future of our sons. We flex our muscles to show how dominant we could be, but we’re rarely vulnerable. I think part of that is natural and is God’s knitting together of emotion and psyche so we can be his in his way. Mark has a community of men he’s gathered together, and his sons know that as their community. It’s a community whose DNA is naturally vulnerable. This spirit of reliance is vital for our sons. Other men can teach them things we can’t, or teach them better. Even though I’ve taught Jake the basics of how to use screwdrivers and power sanders, it was our close friend who recently brought a group of boys together (including my son) to make Merry Christmas door signs out of old wood who taught him how to use these tools effectively. Men need each other for their own psyches, but they also need them for their sons. Do you have that community for yourself? For your son?
A Spirit of Exploration
On most spring afternoons, you’ll find my Jake on the driveway practicing ollies. I cringe every time he launches the skateboard off the hard cement, believing he’ll eventually fall backward, crack his head and spend the rest of his life drooling onto a paper napkin while he stares blankly into the distance. My firm belief that Jacob will critically injure himself makes me say no all the time. I say it when he wants to climb a tree, when he wants to ride his scooter down our street or when he wants to try a back flip in the living room. It’s good stewardship and great parenting to be cautious. But it’s unhealthy fathering to create a spirit of fear in my son, so much so that when he grows up, he’ll hear my no echo in his head every time he has to make a business decision. I want my son, with a hefty spirit of exploration, to jump first and look where he’s jumping second.
I’m about halfway through a wonderful book that’s helped my thinking here just a bit. Julian Smith has written a great (and free) book titled “The Flinch,” which outlines for readers both the perils and benefits of living a life that ignores the being-too-cautious mechanism by which many of us operate. Smith boils the meat of his perspective down into this wonderful Emerson quote: “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”[1] I’ve spent a lot of energy creating a son who flinches and stays at the edge of the forest because he doesn’t see a trail. I want a son who sees the forest as an opportunity to create new paths for others to follow. Do you?
The Passion of Patience
If there were the remotest possibility that my son was lost in the woods, I’d be on the phone hiring helicopters. Police would definitely get involved. I’d likely call the governor. This is the part of Mark’s story that made me the most nervous. What father would leave his son in the woods, possibly lost or freezing to death? If I were living that moment along with Mark, I’d definitely be the friend standing right next to him with his finger hovering over 911. This part of the story doesn’t feel safe. It feels unwise.
But I love Mark’s patience and his confidence in his son. His ability to allow his son to take the journey he needs to take feels like a wink toward the Old Testament God, who allowed wayward Israel to make their own decisions and then live with the consequences. It’s a passionate desire to allow a son to take his own chances as he makes paths through the forest, and it’s a patience that says, I’ll be here, even if you make the wrong kind of path, and I’ll wait in the cold for you for as long as I need to wait. This passion doesn’t watch his son over the top of his laptop screen. This passion turns his phone and television off. This passion does not move until he sees his son emerge from the woods.
I hope you (like me) are committing to wait at the edge of the woods for our sons. Can we be fathers who gather other men around our sons, building a visible community for them to rely on? Can we be men who teach them to live with unflinching spirits? And will we wait for them to emerge from the forest of their journeys with a community crescendo like this?…I began to weep—with gratitude that Joseph was safe, with gratitude that God had given me this boy who was now on his way to becoming a man, with gratitude that the Spirit was teaching me to resist the fear of adolescence, to trust that the sons we had raised would grow into men who can carry suffering, who can face fear, who can be trusted to find their way home.
I sure hope so. Today, press your forehead onto your son’s and tell secrets to each other. Show them the best of how you live and encourage them to live into that. Guide them to the edge of the woods and commit to wait there for them.
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