Where the rubber meets the road.

Anyone can take a kid up to a mountain top, but it’s what he does in the valley that counts.
I’ve been struggling with fatherhood lately. Truth be told I’m just not as good at it as I had always imagined I was.

I remember being on a Men’s Retreat with church and a guy was telling us that we should make a timeline for our lives, kind of like we were going to write a story and the story would start with, “On a cold Baltimore morning in March Illustrious Brendar was born and subsequently dropped by the attending Obstetrician.” From there we would go through various mile markers of our lives; things that stood out for any reason, good or bad. Most people used mountaintop experiences and great tragedies in their lives for these mile markers. We had long pieces of paper on which to lay out the unfolding stories of life and were supposed to project into the future as so many magic-marker wielding prophets.

What I found interesting, as a few bold men shared their story boards with the group, wasn’t the future projections but the past. Most men had more mountain top mile markers than valley mile markers, but it became clear to me that these men were forged into who they were by what they did in the valley.

One man was on the crew of an airplane in WWII and, as he put it, “We got shot up, caught on fire and had to ditch her in the Pacific.” He did not want to elaborate on this event but was obviously moved by it. All he would say was, “We got through it…most of us.” If you added up all of his achievements of life, his enduring marriage, his wonderful family, his success at work, nothing had as profound an impact on his life that his experience that day in the drink.
At the time, the exercise seemed corny but looking back I’ve learned from it. A friend recently told me that parenting is often more about enduring than enjoying. This might mean walking through the valley with a child instead of coaching them from the high ground. I’m sure that when my kids and I look back on our lives together we will want to focus on the mountain tops. Those will be highlighted on our story board, but when it comes to character and who we are as people, it’s slogging through the dark valleys of life and not giving up on each other that has made us who we are. And we will be able to say, “We got through it…most of us.”