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.”
My dad and I carried the grandfather clock my grandpa made through the same door that his body was carried through after he passed away several years earlier. The clock, generously bequeathed to the next generation, had been wrapped in blankets and its working mechanisms removed to ensure their safe transport. But as neither my father nor I are horologists (someone trained in clock repair), we cannot reunite the carefully crafted wooden shell with its inner workings on our own. So for now, though it stands in our living room, the beautiful but lifeless clock doesn’t tick.
This clock kept me and my grandpa company on the last night that his body and soul remained united in this world. He lay on a hospital bed in their living room under sedation and I sat in his favorite chair, keeping vigil until morning. Chimes marked the passing hours and the ticking of the grandfather clock rhythmically marked the passing seconds as his life slowly left him.
Tick-Tock
Tick-Tock
Tick-Tock
The last time our eyes met was around two in the morning during one of his very brief emergences from sedation. He recognized me and with a smile said “Oh!” before falling back to sleep. His earthly “clockwork” finally ceased to function around noon, witnessed by family who loved him dearly, and his body was wrapped and carried out the front door by the employees of a funeral home.
My grandpa spent decades learning woodcraft and had his own wood shop in his back garage. He worked in that shop until the last year of his life. Often, he would restore treasured pieces of furniture for family and friends at little-to-no cost, simply because he loved his people and he loved the work. He would bring life again to pieces that were once broken and separated from their intended use. But eventually he could not stand long enough and his hands were not strong enough for that work, and he had to lay his tools aside.
That final night, I left the living room for a few minutes and went into that wood shop, remembering the times he brought me in to teach me some basic woodcraft. I took a piece of scrap mahogany and cut a crude cross on the bandsaw, rounded the points with the disk sander, then brought it back inside and laid it on his chest. Whatever our differing practices, both Grandpa and I believed our ultimate hope in this life and in the next was Christ Jesus. We both believed in a God who could make all things new again.
Watching someone you love grow older is a discombobulating experience at any stage of life. If you walk with anyone for any length of time, you will witness changes in them—both the external changes of the body and a sense of the internal changes, too. For those of us given the great gift of fatherhood, we witness the very embodiment of time’s relentless progression in our children. How fast they grow, moving quickly from infancy to adolescence. Just like the hands of a clock rotate onward while remaining on the same face, we see the faces of our children mature and change and become. Like clocks, we tell each other the time, too.
A clock is a mechanism of attempted understanding of the world around us. The earth does not rotate because a clock does, but a clock attempts to bear witness to the earth’s rotation. Our bodies bear witness to mortality, certainly, yet, like a clock with a misaligned sprocket, they don’t bear a complete witness to the whole of our reality. Something is happening on the inside that runs in reverse. As the Apostle Paul writes,
“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” (1 Corinthians 4:16–17 NIV)
Though our bodies show the passage and decay of time, our souls somehow become more and more everlasting. My grandpa bore witness to the passage of mortal time, but as someone who trusted the One who could make all things new, he also bore witness to a truer reality, a counter-time.
We as fathers see a foretaste of this counter-time as we marvel at the maturation of our children, while they may be disquieted by our eventual decline. The growing wrinkles, the spreading of gray hair, the gradual loss of capacities, and ultimately, our removal from their lives in death. As much as we wish it were not so, we are but travelers just ahead of them on this journey “through the valley of the shadow of death.” But as we must equip our children for the day that our—and one day their—clockwork stops turning, we grieve but do not despair. We have been called as rejoicing witnesses that show forth our internal becoming. And when we pass, through our example we will have bequeathed to them a priceless gift. For each tick-tock of their time as told in their bodies and on their faces will help them smile all the wider. They will know of the becoming that is now and yet to come for them too, for we will have taught our children how to tell time in reverse.
Tock-Tick
Tock-Tick
Tock-Tick
The header image, “May Rain on Kilns Pane,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith; the image of the grandfather clock is courtesy of Adam R. Nettesheim. Both are used with permission for Cultivating.
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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