This morning my daughter gave me a card which said, despite how it may appear, she "really is listening."
Each of us, for the vast majority of us, would do nearly anything for our children, work long hours, sacrifice our desires and sometimes let our dreams slip by, so that they might have a better life than we otherwise might have dared. We trade our dreams for theirs, and we don't regret it.
It is said the purest form of unconditional love we can know is the love our mothers show us as we grow from crying infant into young adulthood. Little represents safety to us so well as our mother's loving embrace, or the security we found in our father's deep voice and quietly supportive ways.
Christians like to say that it is this same kind of unconditional love which Christ and God mean for us. The unconditional forgiveness of our being less than we wish we were or see ourselves to be. The constant request to try again, to learn from our adversity and our weakness, and to above all, show that same love that we desire to those around us who need a kind word, a loving embrace, a supportive hand, when the world has them down. In it's earliest days Christianity was known as "The Way", because it was attempting to teach not (only) subservience to God, but truly, subservience to the idea that all of us contain great good, and each of us deserves the unconditional love from US, not just from God.
In the movie, "The Wild Thornberry's", a cartoon movie remembered by my daughter and I for two things, the first a great line where the teenage daughter quips to her somewhat obtuse father who doesn't "get" sarcasm, that he should wait and "Let me get a bucket to contain my joy", the second was a fabulous song by Paul Simon which describes the bond between a father and a daughter called simply "Father and Daughter." The beautiful and poignant lyrics precisely identify the ways in which dads all over the world marvel and rejoice as their little girls grow into womanhood. A line I read said, "I hope this is the song they'll play for the Father-Daughter dance at her wedding." I feel this way too.
And as I feel this way, I also know I'm asked to expand my view, to look past just my daughter to my neighbors, and past them to my city, and past them to my state, and in truth to look at every little girl, as impossibly as that may feel or seem, to care about each just as I care for her. I should not turn a cavalier ear or eye to the little girl's plea in Fallujah, I should not care less about the death of a babe in Mumbai from poor water than I care about my daughter's happiness. It may be an impossible task, but I know I am supposed to love those neighbors near and far with the same love my mother and father showed me.
No one ever said being a parent would be easy, but this Father's Day, there is only one way to do right by her, and that is to have as much concern for everyone as I can, to teach her to do the same. It's what my Father did for me.
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