Fumbling Through Parenthood: What Becoming a Dad Has Taught Me About God

“I love you, buddy!”

If I wrote those words in a note to my 4-year-old son, they would be meaningless. Not because they aren’t true, not because I wouldn’t mean them, not because he wouldn’t believe them—but simply because he can’t read.

He would recognize the individual letters. He could point to each one and tell me its name. But he wouldn’t know what those specific letters in that specific combination were supposed to mean.

How could he? He hasn’t learned.

Yet.

On the cusp of understanding

The written word is a gateway to all kinds of experiences and knowledge. What we read in the pages of a book can fill us with curiosity or horror. It can inspire us, sober us, transport us to worlds that no longer exist (or perhaps never existed at all), impart knowledge and perspective, take us on a journey, equip us to try something new—all this and more.

And yet, if we can’t read—if we can’t put the letters together and decipher their meanings—then that whole world is closed off to us. We can hold a book in our hands, open the pages and look at their contents, and still be completely powerless to extract what’s inside.

My son is on the cusp of all that, and he doesn’t even know it. He can’t know it, because it’s the sort of thing that can only be understood through experience.

Oh, he understands that words exist and that it takes letters to make them—but there’s no way for him to truly anticipate the vast ocean that’s waiting for him. No collection of letters has ever changed his mind or taught him something new or made him laugh or cry.

But they will. One day, they will.

This isn’t a parenting article

As a general rule, I don’t write articles about parenting. My wife and I are still very much in the thick of it with our three kids, and that doesn’t make me feel particularly qualified to offer advice.

Do we have ideas and theories about parenting? Absolutely.

Do we have strong opinions? You bet.

Are we seeing some positive fruit from the choices we’re making? We think so!

Do we still spend an inordinate amount of time scratching our heads and feeling woefully inadequate to the task? A thousand times yes.

Strong opinions don’t amount to a hill of beans. If the proof is in the pudding, let’s just say dessert is a long way from being served.

That’s why this isn’t a parenting article. It’s an article about something I learned while parenting.

God created the family to be a spiritual microcosm of a bigger picture. We learn to relate to Him as “our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9), which means—for good or for ill—our human fathers play an outsize role in how we learn to see God.

But I’ve also discovered that becoming a father has changed how I see God.

A God who doesn’t have to guess

As my children grow, I find myself with opportunity after opportunity to wonder what things must be like on His side of the relationship.

For starters, it’s given me a lot of appreciation for the reminder that “your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Until Mary and I set out on this journey together, I didn’t realize how much of human parenthood is guesswork. Guesswork that does its best to incorporate the godly principles laid out for us in the Bible, sure—but still guesswork.

There’s a lot of hoping and praying we’re making the right choices as we seek to train up our children in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6).

But God doesn’t have to guess.

He knows—in every instance, in every moment, without hesitation, the exact right thing to do for literally everyone on the face of this planet. My wife and I are trying to juggle three kids; God the Father is capable of giving His full and undivided attention to 8 billion without missing a beat.

What’s more, He has a plan for inviting each of them into His family at just the right time and in just the right way—He’s “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

He knows what each of us needs, when we need it and the most helpful way to provide it for us.

He’s never distracted or overwhelmed.

It took me just five minutes with my firstborn to realize that I am none of those things. And now, after six years of parenthood, I am more in awe than ever of the God who can do all of that without ever having to second-guess Himself.

What’s it like to know what’s ahead?

You may be wondering what all that has to do with my son’s inability to read.

Very little, dear reader. Very little. But I’m getting there.

Watching my son take the first steps toward learning to read has given me something else to wonder about God the Father:

What’s it like for Him to be watching us learn?

Kids don’t start out knowing the alphabet. That’s something they have to learn, letter by letter.

My wife has worked hard to help my son learn to recognize those letters by their sounds and their shapes. And now those letters are about to become the building blocks for something far bigger. One day soon, those letters will coalesce into words, and those words will coalesce into meanings, and those meanings will coalesce into thoughts and ideas and concepts, and his little world will explode outward into something more vast than he can possibly imagine.

He doesn’t know all that is ahead of him. But I do—and I can see a pretty clear pathway of how he’ll move from here to there.

It’s something I watched happen with his older sister, and it’s something I’ll watch happen with his younger brother too—and not just in reading, but in everything.

Crawling leads to walking leads to running and jumping. Babbling leads to syllables leads to words leads to sentences leads to conversations. Recognizing letters leads to recognizing words leads to reading entire chapters of a book in one sitting. Learning numbers leads to adding numbers leads to multiplying numbers.

Each of those steps is more than just head knowledge—it’s a new way to engage with life itself. As each of my kids takes those steps, I’m excited for how our relationship will change and deepen as those new concepts offer them new ways to interact with the world around them.

One day, I’ll be able to leave my son a note that says, “I love you, buddy!” and he’ll know exactly what it means.

The thoughts God thinks toward us

I wonder how often God feels that about me.

I wonder how often He looks at me and thinks about all the things I don’t know yet—all the things I don’t even know that I don’t know—and thinks about how things will change once I get there. How the relationship He and I have will change once I get there.

I can’t conceive of it (how could I?)—but God can. Just as I can look at my three children and get excited about how learning and growing will transform their lives, I have to imagine God looks at me and feels a similar excitement. And again, not just at me, but at the billions and billions of human beings who have the potential to become part of His eternal family.

God has plans for us—big plans—and even though we can only see that future “in a mirror, dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), we can be confident that our Father is expertly guiding us toward a future more incredible than we can fully grasp.

As He promised the Jewish captives in Babylon thousands of years ago, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:11-13).

We’re all a bunch of kids leafing through books we can’t read yet—but we’re learning.

How exciting is that?

If you’re interested in taking a closer look at what God shows us “in a mirror, dimly,” be sure to spend some time with our seven-day Journey on “The Plan of God.”