Cultivating Fatherhood: Fix Our Eyes

Cultivating Fatherhood will be 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.”

        “The waves keep crashing,
                  and we can’t see you.
                          You seem to be napping,
                    so it’s hard to believe
             your lack of concern
         isn’t a lack of care.”
― K.J. Ramsey, The Book of Common Courage: Prayers and Poems to Find Strength in Small Moments

In chapter 4, verses 35–41 of Mark’s Gospel, we find the remarkable story that inspired this prayer by K.J. Ramsey. Our hearts may resonate with what the disciples must have felt as their boat was being tossed around the Sea of Galilee. Though many are experienced watermen, this is no longer a comfort as all their training and human strength is no match for this storm. Even as their bodies strain against the oars and ropes, their hearts assume they’re as good as dead. And then their despair briefly turns to bewilderment at the sight of their teacher sleeping like a baby on a pillow in the back of the boat. Even a boat rocked by the crashing waves is as comfortable as a cradle to the Creator of the sea.

The disciples cry out, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?” So Jesus wakes up and puts the stormy sea itself back to sleep by speaking to the wind and the waves (and perhaps the disciples too), “Peace, be still.”

I think what frustrated the disciples about Jesus is what sometimes frustrates us about Him too—Jesus cares about our storms but isn’t concerned. This idea hits no closer to home than in the story in John 11 as Mary and Martha mourn over their brother Lazarus’ death. Jesus could have arrived in time to heal their brother from his fatal illness, but He chose not to. It was only after Lazarus had died that He stepped across their threshold—and they knew it.

“Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Both sisters say this to Jesus. And Jesus weeps with them. The other mourners see and correctly ascribe this loss of composure to the depth of His care for Lazarus … but if Jesus cared so much, why didn’t He drop everything to get there in time? Why wasn’t He concerned?

C.S. Lewis wrote about his own wrestling with God’s apparent lack of concern for the passing of his wife:

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think.” [1]

Those of us familiar with the story know Lazarus will walk out of that tomb at the command of Christ. We know the disciples in the boat will get to the other side safe and sound. We as readers have more information available to us than the people who are living these stories in the moment. Mary and Martha weren’t reading it, they were living it. The disciples on the sea were living it. And, though Lewis believed in the resurrection to come, he still wrestled with God as he tried to look into eternity from the outside. The story of Lazarus is wonderful, but I assume anyone reading this has not received a loved one back from the dead like that. I sure haven’t. As Rich Mullins prays in his aptly titled song “Hard to Get”:

You who live in eternity
Hear the prayers of those of us who live in time?
We can’t see what’s ahead and we cannot get free from what we’ve left behind

When we are bound by time and place in the presence of a God who can see all time at once and inhabit all of space, we might be troubled deeply by God’s apparent inaction in the face of the chaos we find ourselves in. But this inaction is not because the Lord doesn’t care. It’s because He is outside of time and He can see how the story is ultimately going to end. When our family reads a story with a particularly sad chapter or watches a movie that contains some intensity, sometimes my children will insist I tell them how it’s going to end. We long for that assurance and want to know how it all will end. We think that if it ends well, it will help us to endure the difficulties in between. This is what is so difficult for us to grasp: God cares, yet is simultaneously unconcerned; in His timelessness, He already experiences the happy ending we cannot yet see.

As fathers, we may sometimes identify with God in this way as the worries of our children seem small. We may see their lack of life experience clearly, and we may know it just might be impossible to explain something to them at their current stage of life. We care for our children in these hurts, but we might not be concerned because we have lived a particular experience before and know it will turn out OK. Or we may have the fatherly desire to “fix” the brokenness for them like we might (attempt) to fix a broken toy, but there is so much in this life that we just cannot fix (or shouldn’t). Despite our best efforts, our children will likely go through their own “dark night of the soul,” a time where their heart is broken because God is “just plain hard to get.” [2] But we can help them build fortitude for these future trials by how we train their gaze in their youth.

When you are experiencing sea sickness (as I expect many of the disciples on the sea of Galilee were), one way to mitigate it is to fix your eyes on the horizon. In changing seas, doing so gives us a sense of stability by setting our gaze on that which is unchanging. We see this principle at work in the third book of The Lord of the Rings. Samwise Gamgee sits in the stinking, smoldering wasteland of Mordor, unable to go on and unsure how to try if he could. But in his “storm,” something catches his eye:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. [3]

Sam saw that which was beyond the troubles he was stuck in. He saw these “momentary afflictions” in a grander context than the moment. And he knew that though all around him was darkness and death, light and life would still go on, even if his eyes would soon darken and close.

In our storms we too must fix “our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith … so that (we) will not grow weary and lose heart.” [4] And though we may not be able to “fix” life for our children, we can teach them to fix their eyes on the one who, from His eternal view, has already fixed it all.

Faith is bringing our unanswerable questions (or rather the questions we couldn’t possibly comprehend the answers to) before a loving God. Faith is wrestling with the silences. Faith is even earnestly and tearfully asking God, “Don’t You care?” When we cannot see how any of our circumstances could possibly have a happy ending, faith is fixing our eyes on Jesus, trusting that the God who numbers our hairs and keeps our tears in a bottle does indeed care. And though He may not be concerned, the God who can raise dead bones to new life and blow the stones off of tombs does love us. Trusting this and accepting that, because of Him, death is not the end of the story enables us to believe that all the sad things, every one of them, will someday come untrue.

Though we cannot fix everything that will break throughout our children’s lives, we can teach them how to fix their eyes on Jesus in the storms that will come. And though they may not hear an answer to their deepest, most tear-stained questions, in the meantime may they hear the voice of their Heavenly Father speaking over them, “Peace, be still.”

[1] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

[2] Rich Mullins, “Hard to Get,” recorded September 10, 1997, disc 1, track 1 on The Jesus Record, 1998, Myrrh Records, compact disc

[3] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

[4] Hebrews 12:2–3, NASB

The featured artwork, “Fix Our Eyes,” is courtesy of Adam R. Nettesheim and is used with his kind permission for Cultivating.

Adam R. Nettesheim

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. His writing (and a few other things) can be found at https://adamrnettesheim.com/.