In observance of Father’s Day 2016, this week’s blog is dedicated to all the dads out there.
Many of you know I am blessed with a wife, five daughters and no sons. In fact, for much of my life this has been my primary sense of identity: I am the guy with all the girls. I mean that in the best way possible. As most dads of daughters, all my girls have me wrapped around their little fingers and I wouldn’t trade any of them for a son, nor would I change any part of my life.
One would think that growing up with a mother and four sisters should have equipped me for the estrogen avalanche that would befall me in my adult years. I don’t know if it’s because I had a brother and dad to share in the wealth, or if being a brother to girls is less of a focus than being a father to girls, but MAN, was I unprepared for five daughters!
I have had more cold showers than I could possibly count, and I don’t mean the kind you take on purpose. There just isn’t a big enough water heater for six women in the same house and it seems I always got last dibs on the bathrooms. I recall a former boss bragging on me that I had not called in sick to work in several years. He wanted to know my secret to great health. I told him, “I get sick all the time but I have to come to work to get in the bathroom!” This is probably not as big of an exaggeration as you might be thinking.
WARNING! If you are uncomfortable with the subject of undergarments, please skip the next paragraph.
For perhaps my first fifteen years of fatherhood, any time there was occasion to discuss my underwear, my girls called them panties. “Daddy, Mommy said your panties are in the dryer.” “Daddy, we have visitors so Mommy said don’t come downstairs in your panties.” “Daddy, do you like the panties we got you for Christmas?” Each instance I would emphatically answer, “THEY’RE NOT PANTIES!!!” One day I was getting dressed and I yelled to my wife who was somewhere else in the house, “Amy, do I have any clean panties?” I caught myself immediately and started to issue a correction, but then I got a sinking feeling of defeat and thought, what’s the point? They had finally beaten me down. And to beat all, due to my girls playing sports for Barboursville and Cabell Midland teams with red uniforms which faded on my stuff in the clothes washer, I was not only asking for clean panties, but for clean pink panties. Sigh.
As Christians, we all have situations where we feel outnumbered by the worldly forces around us. It isn’t easy being the only pro-life person among your coworkers or being called a bigot because you object to your teenaged daughter sharing a public restroom with grown men. Take comfort, my friends. There are numerous examples in our Bible of folks facing seemingly insurmountable circumstances and prevailing in the end, people such as Noah, Joseph, Moses, David, Jonah, Esther, the Apostle Paul, and of course, Jesus on the cross. Remember, as long as we have God on our side we can never be outnumbered.
“…Don’t be afraid. We have more forces on our side than they have on theirs” (2 Kings 6:16).