Look forward!
Dr. Roberto Miranda
SUMMARY: Fatherhood is a difficult puzzle that teaches us humility, mercy, and dependence on divine grace. It's impossible to be a perfect parent, but we can strive for growth and improvement while trusting in God's grace. We should focus on being healthy, confident, and positive for our children while looking to Jesus as our model. By accepting our imperfection, we can be better fathers. God will ensure that our efforts bless our children, and we should give Him the credit and honor.
Fatherhood is a riddle that God has given us, so that we learn many things in the process of solving it. Through this exercise we learn humility, mercy, generosity, self-denial, and a desperate dependence on divine grace and provision. It is also like one of those mirrors in amusement parks, which are designed to present a disfigured person who stands in front of them. No matter how much you look at yourself, you try to straighten yourself, you will always come out crooked.
The problem is that there are too many elements to take into account in perfect parenting, as there are in perfect holiness or any other striving for perfection. There are tens of thousands of seasons that have to enter to make that perfection possible. And in this world it is not possible to achieve it. Inevitably, we are all going to sin and we are going to offend, and we are going to warp, and we will look back at our past and see things that were not right.
It will help a lot to entrust ourselves to the grace and mercy of the Lord, keep looking steadfastly at the Word of God, and give ourselves therapy and comfort. We have to move on in the name of the Lord, trying to be the best we can be. Our children need us to be healthy and confident, positive and optimistic, resting in the grace and provision of our heavenly Father. While we recognize our imperfection, we must always keep looking fixedly at the model of Jesus, the Shepherd of shepherds who teaches us how to be ideal fathers and mothers.
And then, by being free to recognize that — that we are already doomed to relative failure, that we cannot be perfect parents — we are free to continue growing toward perfection, which we will never achieve. I believe that when one abandons the ideal of being perfect that enables him to carry out a better performance of the task of being a good father.
We have to relax and know that we already have his approval from the Father. Even if we don't get a 100, the Father up there gives us a 100, because "as the father has compassion on the children, the Lord has compassion on those who fear him." The Lord ensures one way or another that along the way his nutrients bless our children and they get to where they need to go. And then God will always have to take the credit, and we will have to give Him the glory and honor over and over again.
The problem is that there are too many elements to take into account in perfect parenting, as there are in perfect holiness or any other striving for perfection. There are tens of thousands of seasons that have to enter to make that perfection possible. And in this world it is not possible to achieve it. Inevitably, we are all going to sin and we are going to offend, and we are going to warp, and we will look back at our past and see things that were not right.
It will help a lot to entrust ourselves to the grace and mercy of the Lord, keep looking steadfastly at the Word of God, and give ourselves therapy and comfort. We have to move on in the name of the Lord, trying to be the best we can be. Our children need us to be healthy and confident, positive and optimistic, resting in the grace and provision of our heavenly Father. While we recognize our imperfection, we must always keep looking fixedly at the model of Jesus, the Shepherd of shepherds who teaches us how to be ideal fathers and mothers.
And then, by being free to recognize that — that we are already doomed to relative failure, that we cannot be perfect parents — we are free to continue growing toward perfection, which we will never achieve. I believe that when one abandons the ideal of being perfect that enables him to carry out a better performance of the task of being a good father.
We have to relax and know that we already have his approval from the Father. Even if we don't get a 100, the Father up there gives us a 100, because "as the father has compassion on the children, the Lord has compassion on those who fear him." The Lord ensures one way or another that along the way his nutrients bless our children and they get to where they need to go. And then God will always have to take the credit, and we will have to give Him the glory and honor over and over again.
