Saying memorized prayers has its pros and cons. Engaging in any ritual can be an exercise in just going through the motions, in vain repetition.
o be a mere wish for Jesus to come back and clean up the mess we've made of things. And of course, it still is that. My kids and I agree that the most exciting part of God's kingdom coming will be when He shows up visibly and takes us back to His big, big house. We groan along with all of creation for the day when Jesus will come and wake the sleeping dead and carry us home to be with them, to kick it with wild animals, to fly with the angels.
ather.
os los siglos." Ashlyn gets an indulgently tight squeeze. Unlike her skin-and-bones sisters, her solid frame feels like it can take it. And anyway, she'll sleep through it.
My guess is that they ride from the North Pole on an airplane, and then go back to the North Pole on that airplane with Santa. And that's what I want to do."
Parenthood is the most glorious sort of humiliation.Work is so much easier than this. And so much more rewarding.
Yes, more rewarding.
Work yields fast dividends: esteem, results, checks on checklists, unprompted thank-yous, a sense of accomplishment. At work I have an office space I control, where books stay neatly in line on the shelves and tools are my toys. People—nearly grown people—come and go in civilized fashion, wait their turn, say please. Stacks of work diminish in size as I solve problems using high-level mental processes. The diplomas I worked years to earn are on the wall, smiling down at me, stretching out an arm to pat me on the back.
It is really quite nice. A happy sort of limbo where neither glory nor humiliation come calling.
But home is the marriage of heaven and hell. The highs are high and the lows are low.
The question is (as it was for readers of Blake’s masterpiece), which is the real heaven and which the real hell? Is heaven when all is mellow, when the kids are napping or hugging me or playing nicely for a change? Is hell when I’m wiping up blood, urine and tears to the tune of children’s wailing?
Or is something else going on? Are the inconveniences of parenting that feel like hell purging the pent-up inferno of my self-centeredness? Are the quick rewards of work that seem so heavenly sustaining the life of my parasitic ego, the one that sucks dry the God-imaged me? Are the moments of peace paradise’s reward to me, or breaks in the boot camp in which God has lovingly enrolled me?
When did we decide that the best thing to do is the one we find most “rewarding” anyway? Did Jesus wash filthy feet for the rewards? Was
Caring for my children exposes the rawness of my nerves, the frailty of my facades, the poverty of my soul. It catches me red-handed. It brings me to my knees in ways that my rewarding job never could.
I do not like this part of the Daddy gig. It infuriates me daily. I fight against it, I whisper curses. I slam the wall with my open hand, hoping it will knock sense up through my arm into my heavy heart.
I pray desperately. I hug my girls, pressing my cheek in hard against theirs. I breathe in the bouquet of their hair and kiss the blonde curls atop their heads, hungry to be filled with the kind of love they were born to enjoy.
Through the anger of vulgar self-interest—my real hell—I emerge with a sort of peace. Humiliated. Gloriously.
With all this help, it’s a wonder I manage to come up with things to do with my excess leisure time.
Or something like that.
Of course, the well-intentioned help of my dear ones proves to be a routine disaster. It costs me time, money and patience. With three little women at work, less things get done in more time generating more mess and waste than even I in all my advanced klutziness could manage on my own.
Working with their help is inefficiency on steroids.
And it is beautiful.
In one of his videos, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People author Stephen Covey relates his frustrating experience working toward delegating lawn care to his son. All he asked for were two things: green and clean. Simple as that seemed to Daddy Covey, his son consistently let things slide. Green faded to tan. Trash piled up. It was taking Covey more time and stress to supervise the job his son was doing badly than it would have taken to do it well himself.
Days into the experiment, Covey was ready to fire his new gardener. But he pulled himself aside and reviewed his real purpose in the whole process: “Raising boys, not grass.”
The young gardener kept his job.
Having my children help me makes an abomination of my proverbial lawn. I get scratched DVDs, a broken computer keyboard, eggshells in my birthday cake. I take a full 15 minutes to load the minivan while they buckle their own car seats. It takes longer still if I commit the atrocity of starting the buckling myself, because then they have to undo my work and redo it themselves. It makes me crazy.
But what am I here to raise—pretty turf or helpful souls?
I have often wondered why God lets us help Him. He could self-reveal directly to people and circumvent all our human distortions of Who He is. He could feed the world with a couple loaves of Roman Meal and a few cans of tuna instead of waiting on us to share our own loaves and fishes. He could finance mission work using some of His own cattle on His own thousand hills without relying on the fickleness of our generosity. He could realize social justice with His own omnipotent hand rather than suffering the sight of our clinging to the status quo.
It must make Him sick sometimes. You can hear His impatience in the voice of the Old Testament prophets. If I get anxious waiting for my girls to buckle their seatbelts, how much more desperate He must be for us to hurry up and do the right thing for people. He cries with all the victims of all the suffering we allow to go on. This is more than a pretty lawn we’re talking about.
If the Father wants it done right, why doesn’t He just do it Himself?
Maybe this was part of Jesus’ third temptation—bow and enjoy the convenience of having things right in the world without the hassle of having to work one by one, day by excruciating day, with people who are so slow, so stubborn, so immature. Maybe it is a temptation He has to keep fending off. Or maybe He faced it and conquered it on the day He settled on the insane decision to create people in His image.
Whatever the case, I’m sure of one thing. God is definitely much more interested in growing people—with all its steroid-size inefficiency—than in getting things done right or quickly or efficiently or any of those other things I lust for when I’m letting my children help their Daddy.
I need to learn from Him the patience that relishes baby steps in my children despite the mess they make while they are learning. I want to delight in their desire to help without regard for how unhelpful their efforts may seem. I long to celebrate what they are learning to do, even when it takes longer and turns out worse than I could have done on my own.
I am here to raise girls, not grass.
Weeks ago I ranted a critique of "hope" in Hope (part 1). My children, to my chagrin, are frequent flyers on hope's wings. Have I failed to teach them to embrace the present rather than pine for what's ahead? Instead of proactive designers of their destiny, are they learning to be victims, limply hoping for change down the pike?I hope not. (Whoops.)
Maybe I'm the one failing to learn what my children are trying to show me about hope.---
We came home tonight to a jaybird dying on the porch. It lay there, just under the motion-sensitive light, moving too little for me to notice, but enough to give hope to the one daughter still awake.
Brielle wanted to save it.
“It will be just fine if we take care of it, Daddy. What do blue jays eat?”
“Brielle, blue jays eat other baby birds and the eggs of other birds. They’re not really a very nice kind of bird.” I was tired. A smear campaign against the species sounded easier than offering emergency veterinary services.
Brielle was shocked but quiet. The little birdie clawing the air on the porch looked too harmless to be an infanticidal egg thief.
I saw the harshness of my tack reflected in her eyes, felt its sting, and softened my approach. “Brielle, it’s probably the same one that smacked against our window yesterday. It probably is blind and won’t be able to live very long without its sight.”
“Daddy, why are blue jays not nice to other blue jays?”
“Brielle, you know, God didn’t make animals smart enough to know what is nice. They just know they need to eat and they try to find food even if they have to do not-nice things to get it. So they’re not being ‘not-nice,’ they’re just trying to eat."
She liked this. Not guilty by reason of low IQ. “So the birdie doesn’t know it’s not nice to eat other birds’ eggs. I think the birdie ate other birds' eggs and then it thought it would fly and then it hit our house and got blind and now it won't steal any other birdies' eggs."
This wasn't working.
"Brielle, you know, if this birdie dies, two good things could happen. One thing is that another hungry animal will eat it and be happy it found some food." There was that stinging, shocked look again. I hate causing that look in her eyes, even when I do it by telling the truth. "Or, if another animal doesn't eat it, its body will go into the ground and help other plants and trees grow because they will use the vitamins that were in the birdie's body."
”Daddy, maybe we can give it some water. And an egg. Maybe blue jays are not nice to other blue jays. But they are pretty sweet to us. It looked sweet and nice.”
Great.
She was right. It was a beautiful bird. Helpless. Beyond the need for judgment--guilty, not guilty...nice, not nice. At our mercy.
And truth is, resigned as I was to this creature’s place in the food chain, the inevitability of its downward slide on the circle of life, I didn’t like being out there watching it die. Euthanasia was probably the nicest thing I could have done, but even if I’d had the strength to do this, I lacked a way to do it so Brielle wouldn’t know, or a way to explain it to her if she did.
I grabbed an egg from its cardboard carton in the fridge. I filled a ketchup cap with water. Together, we went out to the still bird, set the egg and water a couple feet away on the porch. We found a stick and gently pushed them right next to the bird, urging our desperate offering toward its beak. It fluttered, and settled down again.
“Maybe the birdie will get some rest, wake up and drink the water and eat. Maybe it will fly away and be OK tomorrow,” I offered, wanting this to be true perhaps as much as Brielle wanted to believe I was telling the truth.
We both dared to hope. And our hope moved us to merciful action.
At 11:30 I heard the bird shriek. I ran across the room to see a hungry raccoon finishing the job that I lacked the courage to do. Masked and nonchalant, the raccoon dragged the jay--along with our egg--under the porch and finished off both.
Even if Brielle finds out what happened to the bird (and you BETTER not tell her), I think she will agree with me on this: I am glad she hoped. Because her hope moved me from tired resignation to actually doing something, however small, for a needy member of creation. And that moved both of us from guilt and complicity with the darkness into a place where we offered a sort of light.
Whatever the outcome, we both felt better having hoped, having tried.
This Father’s Day was kind of sad for the ladies in my life. Our family was missing two fathers. With Rachelle’s dad and grandpa both gone, and my brothers still trying to figure out how babies are made (or something like that) it left just my dad and me to get the royal Daddy treatment.Neither Rachelle nor Evonne has a habit of tallying losses, but on a day like Father’s Day in a year as grief-ridden as this has been, it’s hard for the fatherless and the widow not to feel the irony.
These losses make me even more aware of how fortunate I am to have my dad. He lost his father when he was still in grade school. Naturally, he imagined he would follow suit.
As kids, we lived only half-resigned to the dread of Dad’s early death. We feared it but we knew it was coming. It was as real and as expected as other unavoidable certainties like swim workouts or going away to college.
But we dreaded this most of all.
And now, against all prophecies of doom, he has survived. By God’s grace, he is cashing social security checks, yelling at the Lakers, chasing the Four Freshmen around the country with Mom as they celebrate their 60th anniversary (the Four Freshmen, that is), and working 80-hour weeks during tax season. (We still pray he’ll retire. Soon.)
Best of all, he is goofing off with my three little girlies. Listening with rapt attention as Melía t
ells about her prize snails and roly-polies. Making faces. Tickling his way down Ashlyn’s face saying, “Fore-bender, eye-winker, tom-tinker, nose-smeller, mouth-eater, chin-chopper, gully-gully-gully!” and cackling as raucously as she does. Playing hide-and-go-seek. Teaching Brielle how to cast with her new Barbie fishing pole (and dig that visual). Reading about Jesus calming the storm with real sound effects, the wind and waves rocking all four of them in the La-Z-Boy. (They eat this up as much as I did at their age.)
These are all things of beauty that I never imagined. Measures of soul music after movements of monotone. Breathtaking vistas out of miles of fog. They take me by surprise—as heaven will no doubt do when it comes in fullness—because I never dared to think of any of this. My vision was too short to see myself with children, much less with my dad around to enjoy them. It is unanticipated delight. Serendipity. An ambush of joy.
So thanks for sticking around, Big Dada. Life has often been tiring, and survival can be 
harder than its alternative. But we’re lucky you’re still with the program—despite your predictions.
“I’m wrong. I’m always wrong,” you have often lamented. You are far from always wrong. But I’m glad you were wrong on this one, Big Dada. Really glad.
We love you.
On Mother’s Day, we cook or buy mom brunch. We care for her needs, make cards and pictures for her, think of her first when choosing entertainment.
And that is all very special. Because we don’t do these things the rest of the year. Male behavior on Mother’s day stands out like a sore thumb from male behavior the rest of the days on the calendar. And women’s lives on Mother’s Day bear precious little resemblance to how they roll on non-feast days.
Father’s Day, meanwhile, is actually kind of redundant.
I mean, this Father’s Day, I was noticing just how good I have it the rest of the year, what special treatment I get throughout Ordinary Time.
Meals prepared? Yep.
Needs cared for? Absolutely.
Handmade artwork from the kids? At least a couple times a week.
Power to choose entertainment? Well…OK, so three out of four ain’t bad. It was a nice change to enjoy the Lakers game on Father’s Day rather than something involving princesses, puppets or purple dinosaurs.
But other than that, I was mostly aware of how good dads have it almost every day. It reminded me of when I was a kid, asking my parents, “When is Children’s Day?”
You know the answer we got. “Every day is Children’s Day.”
I’m thinking every day is Father’s Day too.
Yesterday Brielle turned five. That meant she ate a cupcake for breakfast, wore her fuzzy pink “Birthday Princess” crown (not that she hasn’t worn it night and day on many other days and nights), announced, “I’m five!” to various strangers and pretty much glowed all day long. It also meant I’ve been a daddy for a half-decade.
This is one of those things that trips me out either way I look at it. On one hand, I cannot believe that a young, free, newlywed such as myself could have been doing the parenthood thing for this enormous span of time. Nearly half of the dozen years we’ve been married, we have been married with children. In a couple months, we’ll be taking Brielle to kindergarten.
No way.
In another instant, I wonder that I have not always been a father. I think about life before Brielle, and draw a blank. What did we do for entertainment before we had live dancing girls? Where did we spend Saturday mornings before we enrolled in Cradle Roll and Tiny Tots Sabbath school classes? What cluttered my back seat before yogurt had bonded Cheerios to the upholstery?
You mean it’s only been five years? A measly seventh of my life?
On a Tuesday not unlike yesterday—a warm morning with the promise of summer vacation on the wind, the dry heat of the mountain soil injecting adventure into the air—I loaded my wife and a strange collection of baby stuff, most of which I could not name, much less use, into our white Xterra. An empty infant carseat was strapped in back (utterly devoid of Cheerios).
Rachelle was ready to have the child out of her abdomen. We had a date with our OB, who had agreed she was ripe enough to induce before the expectant grandparents left for
I played with the camcorder as we got into the car, readying myself to be journalist, cheerleader, Lamaze coach…and something…something else. What was it?
Oh yes, that. Somewhere in the fuzzy corners of my imagination, like a mortal trying to picture eternity in heaven—or hell—I supposed that presently, I would be a father.
We checked in, joked around on the video, and finally got down to business. Pitosin works, but works slowly, I’m convinced, on a child with a will as strong as Brielle’s. She was in no rush to say hello to the cold, cruel world, and Rachelle progressed slowly through the day and into the night.
Knowing my penchant for fainting over finger pricks and blood draws, I left the room when it was time for the epidural. We didn’t need to occupy doctors with more than one baby that night, I thought. It turned out that this was one of the hardest moments for Rachelle, and she wished I had been there.
I remember with dread leaving Rachelle’s room while she slept to correct papers and calculate grades on my laptop from about 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. The school year was over, but my least favorite part of teaching was still in my face. I have always hated the process of turning students’ thoughts, ideas, creativity and hard work into cold numbers, and then adding those numbers up to come up with one of five letters.
Here, as my wife endured holy labor, doing grades seemed especially profane.
I was just exporting all this profanity to floppy disk when the word came that Rachelle was awake and making progress. (Please pardon the Male-ese. She might put it, “I was in agony like never before, turning myself inside out and WHERE WERE YOU?!”)
The contractions came quicker and quicker, and I just wanted it to be over. I put all my energy into rubbing Rachelle’s low back so hard that it would be sore for days after she came home. Finally, the doctor was telling her to push. I was delighted. The end was in sight.
Rachelle’s pain climaxed, and my delight clashed with her torture.
But finally, a terrific cocktail of fluids and tissues began to gush from my wife. Again, I was delighted—this was almost over. I would not have to watch helplessly while Rachelle suffered anymore.
From this nasty pool emerged the most beautiful infant face I had ever seen. The severity of contrast between birth and baby added wonder to the miracle. I have come to regard that moment as a metaphor of our existence in the universe—in the midst of chaos, entropy, decay, our planet is a beautiful exception.
My Brielle. She was beautiful from the moment I saw her. Beautiful and loud.
They cleaned her off, let me cut the end off the already clipped umbilical cord and wrapped her in a hospital blanket. They put the tiny bundle in my arms, and she began to quiet down. Her blue eyes stared up at me, clear and curious, it seemed.
It was all over.
It had really begun.
Remember in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, how at the end when he sees the Whos singing even after they were ripped off, the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes? I am certain mine grew about five in that moment.
Five. I can’t believe it’s been five years already. I can’t believe it’s only been five years.
The stuff of eternity just doesn’t make sense in terms of time.
Happy birthday, sweet big Brie! Thank you for helping God grow my heart every day of your wonderful five years. I love you more than I ever imagined possible.
For a long time, I’ve had mixed feelings about hope. It’s a sparkly idea and all, and would have made a great monosyllabic middle name for our fourth daughter had we had triplets, going nicely with the twins’ “Grace” and “Faith.”
But I have a couple beefs about the whole idea of hope.
Beef #1: People hoping for change too often are people sitting on the sidelines complaining about the status quo and waiting for someone else to alter it. Rather than saying, “I hope such-and-such occurs,” I’d rather say, “Here’s what I want and here’s what I’m doing to create it.” Victims and slaves hope. As a free person, why not act instead?
And here’s Beef #2: When I’m hoping for something better down the line, I’m probably missing out on something great right here and now. C.S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, that in his miserable years of boarding school, perhaps the best thing he learned about the Christian walk was to live by hope—ever looking forward to the freedom and bliss of holiday. But wasn’t every moment he spent fantasizing about what was to come a moment lost on embracing what was? Isn’t every ounce of energy I spend pining for the future an ounce lost on appreciating the present? “Hope” seems like a happy, shiny word for “procrastinating happiness.” I say, why not have it now?
My kids make me think about this whole thing. Though their lives are far less miserable than schoolboy Lewis’s was, they too live by hope, always looking forward to what is next. “When is my birthday?” asks Melía daily. “What tind bir'day party I am doing have?” She savors conversation about an event that is months away, living in regular communion with the ghosts of birthday future. We think this is cute and go with it.
I’m sure I did plenty of this as a kid. But I remember my parents reminding me how precious the present was. They told me that my childhood years were the best of my life, that if anything, our growing up was happening too fast. This kind of talk did give me a certain trepidation about the onslaught of adulthood stress, but it also taught me to seize the day, because tomorrow is not likely to be any better than today. I wonder if I am doing too little of this with my kids.
I motivate my kids through difficult circumstances with hope. But I don’t like it. Last night I took the three girls to a former student’s graduation, a boring prospect even for people with attention spans longer than a Dora the Explorer episode. We swung through the evening like Tarzan from bribery to bribery: ice cream sandwiches if they got out to the car quickly, McDonald’s if they behaved during graduation, Blue’s Clues if they refrained from fighting my pajama-donning and tooth-brushing efforts. It’s embarrassing to write about. But it worked.
Is hope just something the powers that be, whether good or evil, use to manipulate us?
I have stories to tell about my kids’ hope that are making me question my questions about the value of hope. I’ll share a few next time….
Lord, help.
raining on the parade of their God-given joy? Shoot, how do I even get through a modest-length bedtime prayer without sending someone to timeout or sounding like a self-interrupting idiot?
Everyone knows kids say the darnedest things. But only parents know how often kids lead you to speak, pause, review what you just said, and wonder at the improbable language required for childrearing. We say insane stuff every day.
I would love to read other weird things parents have said in the line of duty. Maybe I can work them into my random Daddy-talk generator someday! 
This is hardly an aberration. But usually it happens because they’ve fought more, kicked the pajamas off an extra time or two, gritted the teeth harder than normal through tooth-brushing time, and come up with more creative excuses to keep us waiting on them once they’re in bed.
But this time, child and parent both lost an hour of sleep just because I could not resist lingering with Brielle for the sublime conversation she had to offer.
The twins were down, and Mommy was down the mountain at her women’s Bible study, leaving just Daddy and the girl who first named me that. Kneeling by her bed, I had just told the parable of the talents, and had broken down how God shares so much good stuff with us, and wants us to use it, not bury it.
Brielle was pensive. “We use a lot of God’s stuff,” she observed.
“Verdad, Brielle. All the stuff we have is God’s, and He likes when we use it for good things,” I agreed.
“Yeah.” She laughed and stared ahead, lips pursed, her deep thinking evidenced by the tiny movements of her cheeks and jaw. “And God is even a girl too.”
I smiled. “Yeah, Brielle. God is way too big to be just a boy or just a girl. He is everything,” I chimed in, delighted that she had already surpassed most of the Christian church in her thinking on the gender of God, but wondering how.
Somehow the topic turned to the Second Coming of Christ, more popular than ever since losing two Papas and a kitty. I said something about the nonlinear growth we would experience when Jesus came and completed our ultimate transformation. Only I think I told her we would not do bad things anymore or have ouchies anymore because Jesus would do magic on us.
At this, her eyes glowed, cheeks swelling the way Ashlyn’s do when she is imagining herself to be a bride. “I can’t wait for God to do stuff to us. He might even give us wings, I think.”
“Maybe He will. Or maybe He will teach us to fly without wings, like Jesus can.” I have this irrational burden to prevent her from disillusionment if heaven’s transformations do not include wings.
Presently we were on to angels. She pointed at a spot on her pillow about six inches from where she sat. “Our angel is RIGHT-THERE,” she said, the last two words running together. She grinned—“RIGHT-THERE,” and giggled. “Our angel is right next to us and God is in our heart. And God is everywhere. God is even in my shirt.” She pulled her pajama top away from her and spoke through the neck toward her belly button. “Hi, God! Where are you? God! Where are you?” She giggled some more, and then turned back to a more sober question.
“Why is God everywhere but we can’t see Him?”
No response from Daddy beyond a mystified sigh.
“Daddy, why is God everywhere but we can’t see Him?”
I wasn’t going to get away with pleading the fifth. “I don’t know, Brielle.” I searched my heart for what I really believe about this, and realized that to this question I have no satisfying answer. Another sigh. “Maybe it’s because God is so big and strong and bright that it would scare us if we really saw Him. It would hurt our eyes. We can see God in people when they love like Jesus does. But sometimes I really do wish I could see God more right now with my eyes.”
“I think when we go to heaven God will give us eyes that are strong so we can see really bright stuff and it won’t be ouchy.”
“Sí, Brielle. I think He will. Jesus even told us that if our eyes are good, our whole body will be full of light. But if they are bad our whole body will be full of darkness.” As cool as that verse is to me, it was kind of a non sequitur here, I realized, so I didn’t bother preaching it further.
Brielle offered me another paradigm. “I think God is like electricity.”
I liked this. “You do? Why?”
“Because electricity has power and God has power.”
“Yeah, Brielle. That’s right. And even though you can’t see electricity, it works—just like God.”
“Uh-huh,” said Brielle, relieved, I’m sure, that I was catching on.
Somewhere around 10 p.m, the back door opened and Rachelle walked in. Sheepish about how late I had our daughter awake, I moved toward prayer.
Actually, we moved our prayer on to its next breath.
When I think of all the things I could write about—things that have been so busy happening that they never bothered to materialize on the computer—I am overwhelmed. Every day my kids say and do things that are so cute, so disturbing, so hilarious, so instructive, that they demand being captured. Before beginning this blog, these things flowed like a waterfall, a steady stream that could be enjoyed but never caught. Beginning a project like this, I imagine myself cupping hands under that waterfall and hoping to catch it all. This, of course, would miss the point of enjoying the flow. When I am in the mode of documenting important moments with my kids—ALL of them—I feel like Jesus’ friend Martha, so eager to get the carrots chopped up and into the soup that I neglect to be with my Guest. “Michael, Michael,” I can hear Him saying, “You are worried and upset many things [that you have missed writing about in the last several weeks]. But only one thing is needed.” (Apologies to Dr. Luke....)
I do want to spend more regular time here, where the rivers of childlike inspiration and parental desperation flow together, cupping hands, yes, but not to capture so much as to feel its shocking c
old, to gawk at its transparency, to wonder and be refreshed. Much more will flow downstream than I could ever hold.
Today, despite all the unwritten stories begging to be documented, what I want more than anything is to pray for my kids.
God, please help them to be safe from all dangers—especially those more dangerous than loss of life. Deliver them from materialism, from the claustrophobia of self-absorption. Save them from the compulsion to please the audience of their peers. Rescue them from fear and its addictions: being right, looking good, coming out on top.
Make them citizens first of heaven, second of Earth, and third of their communities; may their contribution to our nation flow from these three loyalties. Teach them to value the differences in people, to crave new viewpoints and savor stories from less-heard voices. Help them to open their eyes and ears and hearts to the weirdos of the world and see, hear, love—Jesus.
Give them joy. Teach them to live for what they really want, beyond what they feel like, to set their course by the deep, silent yearning You have given them rather than the hollow cravings that shout for their attention. Help them acquire a taste for satisfying labor. When lesser options are more numerous and more obvious, instill in them the habit of choosing happiness.
Love them in ways they notice, or better yet, help them to notice all the ways You love them.
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