Cultivating Fatherhood is a space made for the dads among us who love their kids and yet know that the adventure of parenting, with all its joys and beauty, can also be a perilous one. Make no mistake, showing up for your kids is beautiful, rewarding, hard, holy, brave work. My efforts are here intended to provide encouragement and understanding that equips us for our responsibility to the amazing beings who call us “dad.”
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13.12 NIV
In the decade-plus that I’ve been a father I have seen my children experience longings of various kinds. Their infant cries express a longing that they cannot quantify themselves, and as their parents, my wife and I must find a way to “crack the code” for them. Is this cry for food, for a diaper change, or is it the overall discombobulation they experience from being “abducted” from the only world they ever knew and being dragged kicking and screaming out of the warmth and safety of the womb into this “alien planet”? As my children age, their longings became more tangible—a desire for toys and trips to the playground and special time with their parents. But even then, those longings are applied to the things that can be seen and touched. The more they grow, the more they grapple with the world outside our home, the more their longings become more existential—the longings for deep friendship, security against children who treat them badly, and the ever widening of the eyes that comes when they grow more and more aware of this strange, beautiful terrible reality. Physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of existence revealing themselves as they awaken to them at each new phase. Our children will perpetually be pulled out of the world they thought they understood into a new one, and this transition is accompanied by longing.
A longing for the simplicity of the world they “left” and their adeptness at navigating it; a longing for when they may “figure out” how to navigate this new world and shed the terrifying sensation of not knowing all the dangers or how to deal with them. And then the longing that the world they were pulled into will be somehow a better one, one that may answer as-then-unanswered pains of the previous plane of existence.
As fathers it pulls at our hearts in a particular way, and at times in my experience my children’s longing becomes my longing—not just for the physical, emotional, and spiritual things they long for themselves, but that I as their father might somehow be able to give those things to them. We have the internal drive to provide good things for our children, to provide safe and nurturing environments that will be conducive to their wellbeing and happiness. And when we cannot, there can come a strange alchemy of shame—where our identity becomes wrapped up in their longings and that little ancient malevolent voice worms into our brains. Where our own longings are not just a recognition of the difficult, discoverable, or imperfect nature of a fallen world, but rather the beating of a spiteful drum that defines all our children’s unmet longings as “my fault.”
And then a darker voice can float in like a specter that drags our spirit further down. A cackling voice that our ego hears best—“If your children were not so discontent, you would not feel so bad. Your longing is because of their longing, and if only they would not ache so, then you would not ache.” We may perceive their aches as disloyalty and their sorrow as a threat. A resentment can creep in and a divide begins to grow. And a relationship meant for blessing and love, for walking through life hand in hand—a teaching, nurturing love—is in danger of becoming one defined by bitterness and resentment and, tragically, rejection.
If we cannot guard our hearts against the fear of experiencing longing, it can take us to a very dark place indeed.
Perhaps we all would do well to learn to be content with longing.
A strange concept, no? Aren’t the two opposites? Irreconcilable? Mutually exclusive?
Perhaps this will sit better—even as parents with a desire to provide for our children, we must be grateful for the times when our children experience the natural longing of this life, for longing itself can be a gift. Not needless deprivation nor papering over negligence with false righteousness, by any means. We don’t need to go looking for longing; it will find us and it will find our children on its own. But when it comes, we may do well to take the posture of gratitude.
C.S. Lewis himself was one well acquainted with longing but saw it as a herald calling from beneath our surface desires for possessions, power, and comfort. Exploring it in his work The Weight of Glory, he writes:
“I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.”
Surface-level longings, when seen through the divine lens, are a holy innuendo of the deeper, most true longing our souls have at their core. As Lewis continues:
“These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
The longing for something we might enjoy is a foretaste of the longing for ultimate eternal pleasure. The longing for stability calls to the ultimate security in Christ. The longing for relational wholeness is the heartbeat given to us by the maker of our beings who made us to know and be fully known in Him. And our longing as fathers is ultimately for our children to know and love and experience the deep, abiding, rapturously parental love of their Heavenly Father.
In the topsy-turvy way that Christ followers view this upside-down world, we as fathers have an opportunity to invite our children into their longings in a deeper, truer way. To show them that the longing itself is something to be grateful for.
The featured image is courtesy of Aaron Burden via Unsplash. We are grateful for his generosity.
Adam Nettesheim is Director of Fellowship for The Cultivating Project, and a columnist for Cultivating magazine. Through writing and illustrating, Adam seeks to pull on the golden thread that leads us Homeward. Adam is a ‘Multi-Media Specialist’ by day at a municipality in Colorado but his most important (and favorite) work is husband to his wife Sarah and father to his 3 children.
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