Heroes
Life is hard, Heroes are needed. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Life is filled with treasures and joys and rewards and accolades. These each come with a cost of thought and struggle and effort and working at things we often would rather not do. One of the most difficult tasks I’ve observed is that of being an example others will admire and emulate. It is the art of being a leader, a mentor, even a hero.
In my book Ripples, I use short stories of real life events along with poetic applications of principles and events which have touched and molded our family and those around us. One of these is called “Bestest Hero”. The tag line says:
How do I spell hero, it must be D-A-D
For he’s the bestest hero there could ever be.
Sometimes made up words fit best in a situation and this is probably one of those times. A couple of reasons might be because it is kind of “kid speak” and it is informally fresh. Spelling out Dee Aaa Dee for dad emphasizes the close emotional bond between children and their dads. The poem characterizes the differences you might see between someone who is just a father and one who has discovered how be a dad. It has been said that just about any male can be a father but it takes a man to be a dad. You can be a father without love but being a dad means you are giving someone love. A couple of telling refrains from the poem clue us in to the uniqueness of dads.
A band-aid for my scrape, Comes with a funny joke;
Not a messed up scolding, Like some un-hero folk.
I recall when I was 10 or 11 and had split my head open running into a metal pole in the basement at a Cub Scout meeting. My father rushed home from work to spank me for being careless before going to the hospital for stitches. I remember the blood squirting into the sink with every swat. I learned from that though. I learned not to do that. In my children’s home spankings were reserved for rebellion. Accidents and carelessness need another kind of attention. I am not advocating beating children or life without consequences. I am saying that when I have been angry with my children it usually has been because my ego felt threatened by the potential consequences of their actions and that is not a valid reason for applying the “board of education” to the “seat of knowledge”. (If you didn’t get that, ask a grandpa) Children desire to know what their boundaries are. They feel secure in their relationships when they know they can safely live within well defined parameters. They will rebel and be frightened by constantly changing rules.
My Dad is the very best, Hero in all the lands,
And there’s no better time, Than when we’re holding hands
It doesn’t take a lot to win a child’s love. Not a lot of money, not a lot of promises of great entertaining or exciting things are needed to develop close father child bonds. In the 1960s the Beatles sang “I wanna hold your hand”. It was a simple truth about emotional intimacy. There is no better way to show your child how much you love them than by being there, available to hold their hand. As our children grew we spent a lot of time just being there. That also means when we went places they usually went with us. And we held their hands. Sometimes for safety and at others just to cement the bond that God began when they were conceived by His love. Some of that comes out in the Ripples. I still hold hands with my thirty something daughter.
I hope you’ll take the time to read Ripples and be encouraged by the realness of the living it describes. Bestest Hero is probably more about the kind of dad I would like to have been than what I am.
So whose hero are you?
Do you know a hero?
Or maybe you are about to become one.
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