Skip to main content

A Letter to My Son




This is my grandson (I know. He's pretty dang cute, right?)

His daddy, my son, posted a picture of him on Instagram with a caption stating that he could not love this baby any more. What he doesn't know, what he can't possibly know right now, is that he will...




Just wait, my dearest son, just wait.

When his kindergarten teacher mistakes his inability to sit still for rebelliousness.
When she pulls you aside on a daily basis to tell you all that he's done wrong that day.
When she gives him eleven demerits in just three hours of school.
When she keeps him in from recess day after day, although recess is what he needs most in his structured day.
When he's in trouble so often that you find him lying on his bed sobbing and wondering why God made him, and he says, "I should just kill myself" - in kindergarten.

And your heart breaks.

When his best friend finds a new best friend.
And your heart breaks.

When you walk by his 5th grade classroom, and the teacher is using his name in a derogatory sentence under the guise of teaching sentence structure.

And you are infuriated beyond words on his behalf.

When his heart is broken.
And so is yours.

It seems impossible now to love your son more than you do, but life will happen, and when it does, you'll be there for him, and you will fight for him to believe in himself, to stand tall, to succeed when others can't see success. You will be his greatest warrior, defender, example, and the one who trains him to make his way in this world without you. And each moment, each event, each circumstance will cause your heart to expand and the roots of your love to reach deeper into your soul.

You're right. You can't love him any more. But you will. Unbelievably, you will.

Comments

  1. I hate the choices for reactions. Really, that's all they could identify as a reaction to such an endearing post? "funny, interesting, cool". How about "perfect"!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm humbled by your response. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Believing the Lies

My husband and I recently watched The Help - a story about a group of African American women who worked as maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the '60s. One of the protagonists works for a woman "who got no b'ness havin' babies." This woman, this family maid and nanny, tells her little two year old ward regularly, "You is pretty. You is smart. You is impor'ant." How difficult it is for us to believe that about ourselves - really, to believe anything good about ourselves. I always try to be my raw self when I write a blog post. Today is no exception. So I confess that I've been drowning in a storm of lies lately. My head knows they're lies, and I could easily tell anyone else in the same place that they're lies, but I haven't been able to get a grip. There have been so many of them coming at me at once. It seems that I just break the surface, gulp some fresh air of truth then get pulled back under. One thing I know: the enemy of our ...

More Than Enough

Life is teeming with reminders of our need for God. Take today for example: I'm exhausted. I have this ridiculously sensitive body rhythm, and I messed it up yesterday. I went to St. Louis with a mother and daughter. The daughter is strongly considering an extended stay in Burkina Faso as a missionary. So the mother/daughter team that have been there/done that spent the day with the mother/daughter team in the early stages of going there/doing that. It was a great time. Ami and I both enjoyed sharing our experiences, and by their own admission, the time was profitable for the other mother and daughter; but for me, to talk for a full eight hours is waaaayyy past my conversation limit. "Conversation limit?" Yep. Conversation limit. A previous boss used to cite some statistic about how many words an average woman speaks each day as compared to the average man. He'd see me talking and joke that I hadn't reached my quota for the day. My quota, however, is much lower ...

As A Child

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3 Become like little children? Really? Children are definitely cute and innocent, but that pretty much covers the positive qualities. On the negative side, however, the list is quite a bit lengthier: demanding, dependent, self-centered, messy, often smelly, expensive, and embarrassingly honest. So why? WHY in the world would Jesus tell us to become like little children? WHY in the world would He want that? What was He thinking?! Well, He was a thirty-something year-old bachelor. Maybe He didn't really know what He was talking about when He said that. I mean, if we come to Him like little children, it's pretty much guaranteed to be messy. We're likely to be crabby, cranky. We might be downright angry. Prayer-ADD is hard to control on a good day. If we're not on top of it, if we don't have our list in front of us to focus our thoughts, we...