I am blessed to have an amazing earthly father who loves Christ first, his family second, and everything else falls in behind it.
He wasn't just a great dad because his love for God and family were spoken, but because his values were live out through personal holiness, by strength, and role-modeling for me what it means to be a Christian man. It may be the single greatest spiritual influence on my life. It inspires me to want to be a good dad to my kids, and to remind all us dads what a blessing fatherhood is.
Tomorrow is "about us," I suppose--we dads that is. So, let's let people say thanks to us. It will bless them to do so. Let's enjoy it, too. But let's also spend some time thinking about what a blessing it is to be called dad by anyone, and let's honor that blessing by being the best dads we can. Oh, and don't forget to call your own dad :)
Here are a few of my favorite quotes on Fatherhood...I'd love to hear yours:
- "By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong." -- Charles Wadsworth
- "The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan." -- Garrison Keillor
- "The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat." -- Robert Frost
- "A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station." -- Bill Cosby
- "I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example." -- Mario Cuomo
- "A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be." -- Unknown
