Any moment now, mine & my wife’s lives will change forever. We will adopt new titles that, for the entirety of our lives up to this point, have been reserved solely for the moms and dads tasked with raising us. My wife will now no longer just be “wife” and I will no longer just be “husband”: she will be known, for the remainder of our brief and temporal days here on earth, as “mom”, and I, as “dad”.
It’s normal in these days leading up to the delivery of your firstborn for most of your friends to ask you how you’re feeling. More than anything, they ask you whether or not you feel ‘ready’. My reply is always the same: “Ready as I’ll ever be.” It’s a typical reply, of course. But there is something buried deep and implicit within my response that I reflect upon often in these moments leading up to the arrival of our boy. Namely, that I am about to embark on one of the greatest adventures of life.
Yet, to many, “going on an adventure” sounds a bit trite; perhaps a little too sentimental. But the rub is that I never mean it in the sentimental sense, as if it were just another disposable cliche. I mean it technically.
Adventure is exactly the word I mean to use, because becoming a father is precisely that: an adventure. By definition, all great adventures involve unlikely men who were never “ready” for the journey they were to set out on. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo”, Gandalf said, “going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” And so one of the greatest adventures ever recorded was set into motion with a single step of courage from the most “unready” of all creatures: a hobbit.
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” (Gandalf, ‘Lord of the Rings‘)
It took me a long time to understand something fundamental: namely, that great adventures are not things reserved for fiction. Quite the contrary. Just as numbers represent concrete realities in the world, all great stories do the same. They are not mere fancy or fiction. They are not merely imaginary tales we conjure up to escape reality (that’s only the bad stories). The good stories are the ones which beckon us to see reality for what it really is; the ones that do not call us out of this world into others, but invite us further up and further into the one we already inhabit.
So when I say that becoming a father is one of the great adventures of my life, I do not mean it with a shred of sentimentality. I mean to be precise. Becoming a father is a dangerous business, and if you don’t keep your feet, a lot could go wrong. After all, like every adventure, it is a world full of unknown and uncharted territory.
In light of that, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that, whether active or dormant, in the heart of every man there resides a longing for a true adventure. Yet, for most of my life, I never thought of getting married and becoming a father as an adventure. Like so many other young men, I was subconsciously submerged in the cultural narrative that suggested becoming a parent meant missing out on life’s greatest adventures. It looked like nothing more than sleepless nights, less money, less vacations, less nights out with friends, more relational conflict, and more diapers. In other words, I was convinced it was a burden.
And, in a sense, I was right. But it was my inability to see past the difficulties that showed my real ignorance. What I did not realize as a young, naive, selfish, and immature boy, was that there is no great adventure in life that does not require great sacrifice. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the adventure.
For a long time, being the boy I was, I assumed that I could somehow get a great adventure out of my life without having to sacrifice anything. I did not understand what made a story great or what made a hero a true hero. I naively assumed that I could get the girl and the treasure without paying any great price; without having to slay any dragons or face any battles myself. In my ignorance, I acted as if adventures could come by easy. I thought I could change the outcomes without great cost. I did not realize it would have to be myself who needed to change. I did not know the hero’s journey.
In large part, it was because I did not know Christ. It was only after I came to know Christ more deeply that I started to understand what the call to adventure really meant. It was only after peering at his life, death, and resurrection that I started to discover the meaning of my life; what being a man was all about. I started to see that it wasn’t about making lots of money or having lots of free time or dating lots of girls. I tried that for a time, but it was empty and meaningless. My heart longed for a real adventure.
When I found Christ, I saw the cross–both the one he had to bear in his life and the one he had to die on. But I also found what was on the other side of his sacrifice: resurrection. I saw what was on the other side of dying for those whom he loved: new life. And I came to realize that freedom was on the other side of sacrifice; that meaning was on the other side of responsibility; that becoming something new meant leaving behind something old. Ultimately, I discovered that life was on the other side of death. Christ showed me that receiving the greatest blessings often require enduring the greatest burdens.
So, am I “ready” to be a father? Of course not. Who is ever “ready” to die to themselves and take up their cross? What could possibly prepare you to lay down your life? Nothing can, of course. It’s a dangerous business to step out of your door. But, it is the adventure of your life.
Colton Banks 