I said, ” Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will harvest a crop of love. Plow up the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the Lord, that he may come and shower righteousness upon you.”
Hosea 10:12, NLT
You may not be a father right now.
You may not ever become a biological father.
But that doesn’t mean that you will never be a father figure in some way.
And it is never too early to prepare.
Nothing can fully get you ready for this kind of experience, but I don’t think it’s ever too early to start thinking, planning, and trying to get some idea of what you’re in for.
Once again, you can make all the plans you want, but they’ll get destroyed in the first moment of parenthood.
Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try!
A blast from the past…
I’m currently re-reading the book Tender Warrior by Stu Weber.
Amazon tells me that I bought it in 2009, and that makes sense.
Because I remember that the first time I read it, I wasn’t married nor did I have children.
But I was not far from getting married, and I hoped that children would follow not far after that.
So I was deep in a quest for Biblical definitions of manhood.
So, just like now, I was reading books that I thought might help me on that path and this book was one that came up.
I like this book, it has a good amount of Biblical wisdom on manhood (just the stuff that I was looking for).
However, much of that (obviously) involves the man’s role as both a husband and a father.
Marriage was looming, so I was grateful for any information that I could get there (though, I clearly should have paid more attention!)
But the reason that I stopped to write this (in them middle of three chapters on fatherhood) was because a memory came crashing back into my head of the last time I read the book.
An embarrassing memory…
I’m ashamed to admit this now, but when I got to the chapters on fatherhood back in 2009, I think I skipped right over them!
Whether I skipped or skimmed them, I remember clearly the thought that went through my head…
“I don’t need to read this right now. I don’t even have kids. I’ll come back to these chapters someday when I am a father, and they’ll have more meaning.”
Too busy to devote mental energy to being the dad that I wanted my future-self to be, I guess!
But now, as I read these chapters with an 8, 6, and 2.5 year old, I realize that it was foolish of me to think that these chapters didn’t merit my attention at the time.
After all, I wanted to be a dad (and I wanted to be a good dad!), so what better way than to saturate my mind with lessons on fatherhood from a Godly author?
But I didn’t.
And now, with all the wayward years I’ve had in between, I think it was a mistake.
Don’t put it off…
I get it.
We’re all busy.
It’s easy to look at something that doesn’t seem to apply to your current situation and brush it off as not important enough to deal with (or at least put it off until later).
That’s exactly what I did.
I was thinking that I’d get back around to it later.
That somehow, after I had children, I would take some time to go back through this book and absorb the lessons on fatherhood that Stu had to share.
But here it is, 11 years later and I’m just getting back to it!
Also, how much sense did that really make?
I was already reading the book… How much effort would it have been at the time to just read through those chapters with the same level of attention that I gave the rest of the book?
Maybe an extra hour of my life, at the very most.
But anyway, all that is to say to you: if being a Godly father is something you aspire to, whether you have children now, or you can’t even see them in your future yet, don’t put off preparing for it.
Put this information into your heart, mind, and soul, and God will remind you of it when the time comes.
It’s not too early to “plant the good seeds of righteousness” in your own life… even when you don’t know exactly how God will have it play out in your life.
