'Pretty much just talking,' she said

Brielle wanted to read her Bible tonight. Cool.

Being who she is, she wanted to start right--from Genesis 1:1. So we read the story of Creation--at least the first story, the one about the six days. God says, "Let there be light...and it happened. And it was good." Day 2, God pronounces that there should be air to separate waters below from waters above (and thankfully she didn't ask what that means). It happens again, and it's good again. Day 3, God speaks and dry land, plants, trees and their respective yummy fruits all happen, all good. Day 4, and God talks a moon, a sun and the rest of the stars into existing. Day 5, God's mouth opens again, and now we've got seas and skies teeming with life, blessed with the command to reproduce. Day 6, a few more words from God, and the land is full of creatures wild, tame and creepy-crawly.

And then He makes human beings.

He can quit while He's ahead and save Himself eons of headaches. But never one to leave well enough alone, He goes ahead and makes us anyway. But not just any way--in His image, after His likeness. Brielle and I took a few stabs at what that might mean before getting to Day 7, when God creates...

Nothing.

It's my favorite anticlimax. After lighting a universe, molding a planet, populating its liquid, solid and gaseous spaces, and topping it off by fearfully and wonderfully making two mini-Me's, God's grand finale is stillness. Silence. Rest. Pretty much the kind of day He might have had before all the creating began, except with more company.

It's holy. It's good. Very good.

"Do you think God was tired after all that work, Bubby Brie?" I asked.

"Um, 'all that work' was pretty much just talking," my firstborn replied, patient with my denseness yet figuring I should have known better. "And I don't get tired from talking unless I talk and talk for like a whole day without stopping."

I don't think she would get tired of talking even in that case, truth be told.

And God probably didn't either. But the reminder that a work so humongous can happen with such relative ease when Creator God speaks is Sabbath-rest to this tired, laboring Daddy soul.

'God knows a lot of stuff, but...' she said

Elbow-to-elbow in the Sentra today, questions floated forward, a merciful diversion to savor before the inevitable backseat brawl.

"Daddy, do animals go to heaven?" asked Ashyln.

"I don't know, Ashie. A lot of people think so. The Bible doesn't talk about that at all." My real hunch is that whatever is on the other side will bear little resemblance to what we know here. I suspect that we will live as we never imagined possible, more ourselves and less all about ourselves than ever. And in the midst of that mind-blowing aliveness, the presence or absence of pets will be the least of our worries, if we have any worries at all.

"Hannah's daddy says no," Melía offered. More chutzpah than I've got, that Hannah's daddy, I thought, wondering if my waffling over the pet cemetery question was more about tact or timidity.

"But he doesn't know," said Brielle. She attacked the unsubstantiated rumor as eagerly as I slap scary chain emails with Snopes-linked replies-to-all.

"God knows," Ashlyn said.

"That's right, Ashie-lu," said I.

"God knows a lot of stuff, but he doesn't want to put it all in the Bible."

No joke, Ashie.

Somewhere in late childhood I came to realize that God was bigger than my little brand of Christianity, that all that could be said of the Divine was far more than any single denomination could articulate. Sometime later it became clear that God was bigger than Christianity itself. How could anyone see a Gandhi or a Dalai Lama and say such a soul was godless? Even more recent has been my acceptance that not even a tome as remarkable as the Bible can be the final word on a Being who ignites and inhabits universes.

OK, so maybe I'm a little bit slow.

Certainly, much slower than Ashie.

Quote of the day - What did you learn?

Tuesday nights a buddy or two and I hang out at a coffee shop to catch up, read a few verses from Matthew and pray for each other. Sometimes I get home in time to hug and kiss daughters before they crash. Melía is always one of these non-sleeping beauties awake to greet me after Bible study.

"Daddy!" she squealed when through her cracked door she saw me walk down the hall.

I plopped on her bed, squeezed her tight, kissed her hair, and said, "I love you so much, Melía."

She asked:

"Daddy, what did you learn about Jesus tonight?"

"What?" I asked, incredulous.

"That's what Mommy told me, that you were learning on Jesus."

I only got a short ways into my response about the greatest commandments in Matthew 23, how the first was to love God with all my heart and soul and strength, and the second is to love my neighbor as myself.

But sitting there looking into those big blue eyes staring out from under those self-cut bangs, I think I felt--if but for a second--how good that twofold command can feel to live out.

Golgotha to Netflix

Brielle was standing by the tub from which she’d just emerged, an angel burrito there in her white towel, hair soaked, when she launched her latest theological-epistemological inquiry.

Brielle: Daddy, how do so many people know that Jesus died but they didn’t see it?

Daddy: Well, the people who saw it told other people about it and they wrote it down.

Brielle: Oh, they wrote it down. (nodding) That’s how they know. (obviously—writing is becoming a bigger and bigger part of her world every day).

Daddy: Yeah, and then the people who wrote those stories down gave them to other people who made them into a book—the Bible. And other people gave that book to us.

Brielle: And then they also gave it to Netflix.

Daddy: (unable to restrain a giggle) To Netflix?

Brielle: Yeah, Daddy, because they made a movie about it.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Since college I have been bothered and intrigued by the story of how biblical stories were recorded, preserved, crystallized into a canon and passed on to readers. It is our greatest leap of faith as Christians, I think. We trust that a transcendent God wanted to reveal Himself and relied on human storytellers to set down the truth about Him. Then he counted on history to keep the stories intact, and translators to render them accessible to the common soul. It’s quite a story.

I just failed to take it all the way to DVD.

Fathering fears, then and now

Before I had kids, I was scared of many things. Here are the top six fears I nursed:

1. My children will grow up to be mass murderers.
2. Even if they aren't mass murderers, my choice to give new souls existence will lead to the world being worse in other ways, such as overpopulation.
3. I will "screw my kids up" with my own imperfections.
4. If Bible greats such as David, Jacob, Abraham, Adam and even Creator God Himself had such lousy records as dads (think Absalom's rebellion, Joseph's brothers selling him as a slave, Ishmael and mom having to flee, Cain killing Abel, Adam and Eve finding the only junk food in an otherwise perfect garden), then I am SOL (Surely Out of Luck).
5. My relationship with my wife will be over once the kids come.
6. I will no longer have a life.

A few years into parenthood, I feel a little less melodramatic about these fears, but most are still there in altered form. These days, the fears above look more like this:

1. While my paranoia that they'll be homicidal has pretty much tapered off (and what's more, we parents beat the infanticidal temptations of those sleepless nights), I do still fear that my kids will pick up a habit of killing people with unkind words, gossip and contempt.
2. I believe now that by grace, my children will actually make the world better than it could have been without them. I continue to fear that growing up in a materialistic society will give them a sense of attachment and entitlement to more than their share of resources, that they will be wasteful and careless.
3. I am grateful for the ways that grace has diluted the "sins of the fathers" in my generation, and hopeful that the weaknesses I pass on to my kids will be watered down even more. Still, I abhor the thought of my girls apologizing some day to their kids for their anger, moodiness, pessimism, procrastination, criticism, messy house, etc. with the explanation, "Sorry, but it's something I learned from your grandpa."
4. When Rachelle and I were expecting Brielle, I expressed fear #4 to my friend, Tracy Gunneman, like this. "When I look to the Bible for hope as a future father, I keep seeing that all these spiritual giants really sucked as parents." Tracy's inspired response? "And you know what, Mike? You're going to suck at it too." Beat. I giggled, checking to be sure I'd heard him right. He nodded. "But by God's grace, they're going to be OK." This prophetic utterance was the breach in the dam of my parenting perfectionism. Nothing goes perfectly, not then, not now, not ever. But God still does His thing. And it's going to be OK. (I do still fear that Ashlyn will take after Great-grandma Eve and eat poisonous fruit.)
   
5. Did you ever have a friend move away, and somehow you created more quality time and intentional communication than when they lived across town? Kids have been like that move to Rachelle and me. We have to plan more carefully, but we actually have weekly date nights and quarterly overnight getaways, things that we never got around to before the kids came. The luxury cruise ship of convenient time together has gone the way of the Titanic, so we cling to these couple times as our life raft of intimacy, and it's cozier here. What's more, the common focus of our kids brings us together with a less egocentric focus than before kids. Rachelle's commitment to our couplehood as top priority has all but eliminated this old fear.
6. I have redefined, "have a life." My old definition was pretty narrow, anyhow. I'm actually just scared of what sort of life I might have lived had I limited myself with all these fears.

---

Questions I'm asking myself:

• If "perfect love casts out all fear" (1 John 4:18), to what extent does the persistence of these fears reveal a lack of love in me? To what extent might these fears interfere with my love of my family?
• But it seems like responsible parents must be somewhat fearful. Doesn't God fear what might become of us? To what extent should I seek to purge my heart of fears for my kids?