A Reflection for Wednesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger,
but bring them up with the training and instruction of the Lord.”
I’ve often wondered whether my dad was handpicked by God for the role of “father.”
He lounges horizontally on the couch to watch the Yankees play after a hard day at the office. He owns a belt phone clip and wears 20 different baseball caps collected from 20 different golf courses, all of which I steal.
He does that dad thing dads do when you tell them about a new favorite snack, and you open the cabinet one morning to find 10 boxes of Nutrigrain bars. He wears brown leather loafers, a closet staple since the 90s, and Ralph Lauren cologne, known to 5-year-old me as “Foo Foo Juice.”
Tim Lenahan rhymes with the model and make of a “conventional” dad, though I am aware there is no such objective standard. To me, much about him feels “classic.”
And somehow, much doesn’t.
He consumes crushed pretzels, apple slices and Diet Coke every day for breakfast. He taps the steering wheel like a rock drummer to “The Bridge” radio in his car. He thinks blinkers have become optional since he turned 65, and since the dawn of time, he has used the edge of the kitchen door frame to scratch his back like a cat.
Recently, he has woken my family group message up—daily—with a text at 6:00 a.m. that reads, “LET’S GOOOO!” And so, we go.
But why am I telling you all of this? Well, the older I get, the more I think I understand my dad. How the tyranny of choice is the perfect motivator for owning exclusively black exercise clothes. How “real music” is supposed to sound—like Jackson Browne, America and Carole King. How, on Sundays, it’s smart to wear a monochrome gray Nike sweatsuit when you’re cooking, cleaning and reading about the Second World War.
But I’ll never understand the total, cosmic way my dad loves his children. Today’s reading reminded me of this fact.
Today’s Scripture deals with obedience. Children are told to obey their parents. Slaves are told to obey their masters. And all of creation is essentially told to obey God.
But the special line of Ephesians 6:1-9 deals with modeling behavior. Fathers are told to be good fathers so their children can be good people. “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up with the training and instruction of the Lord.”
The sheer volume of inspired care my dad pours into making sure his children are “brought up with the training and instruction of the Lord” would knock an unsuspecting person out in one week. Yet he has loved me like this all of my life, every day, every hour.
One day, he said, verbatim, “Having kids was the best thing that ever happened to me” as we sat in two wooden chairs on a cold Sunday morning in my kitchen in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was January 15th, and the hardwood floor stung my bare feet. Half-awake, I sipped my coffee as he drank his Diet Coke.
Outside, the engine of my car hummed to life in the snow. He had started it before I had even awoken. He eventually woke me up at 6:30 a.m. with a medium cold brew with almond milk and one pump of caramel, as he always did before I made the 5 hour drive back to Boston for school.
Staring back at me on the brown marble countertop was a stack of hot pancakes, eight silver-dollar-sized circles with semisweet chocolate chips inside them. A famous treat saved for special occasions (sometimes unspecial ones), they let off a white steam which levitated from the blue paper plate up to the whirling ceiling fan above our heads.
It’s no surprise to me that my father loves me; I have seen his love play out in real time through his inspired care, his attention to detail, and his ability to predict our needs. But I had never heard him say having kids was the best thing that ever happened to him until this day. So naturally, I had to ask him why.
When he told me having kids changed his life, I asked him, “What specifically did it change?” He went on to describe having kids as the great hinge of his life. There is only a before and an after.
Before he had them, he was someone else. Now, he was our dad.
How my dad loves his kids is how I imagine God loves the world: so consistently that he would never forget to fill your tank with gas in the morning before a long drive; so creatively that he would invent a 5-year-long bedtime story about a mouse named Mickelobe to delight you and your sister after he got home from work in order to spend quality time with you; so carefully that he remembers your coffee order, a medium cold brew with almond milk and one pump of caramel syrup; so tenderly that he invented a secret code for communicating during quiet moments in church, with three squeezes, meaning “I love you.”
Paul’s instruction to fathers today is to bring their children “up with the training and instruction of the Lord.” To me, this means Iove them, so that they may love the world. In order to do this, you have to model your life in the way you’d like your kids to live.
A good starting point: Be lucky enough to know someone like my father. After that, be dedicated enough to live—and to love—like him.
