Today my first-born son gets married. I started writing these Bright Spot articles near this date fifteen years and 782 columns ago. (Thanks to all who’ve read and commented over the years.) I’m acquiring a peach of a daughter in law with the same name as my daughter. That has made for some confusion and fun.
The old proverb goes: “The son is a son till he takes a wife; the daughter’s a daughter all of her life.” Joyce and I will do all we can to make sure the negative aspects of this don’t come true.
Much research has been done on “father love,” and what is missing in a child’s life if he or she doesn’t have a father who is present to love and guide. On a game preserve in Africa they were having trouble sustaining the elephant population, so the herds were “thinned” of many of the adult males.
A few years later they found many rhinoceroses had been brutally slaughtered. They traced it to a gang of teenage elephants who had never been properly taught what good elephants did, because their fathers had been some of the ones “thinned out.” One adolescent elephant actually had to be euthenized he was so unmanageable. Not until a giant bull elephant was brought in who could “manhandle” the punk-acting pachyderms did their unruly, unacceptable behavior stop.
The research on humans shows the same.
Does this always happen when father love is missing? No, but it often does. Does God have a solution so this happens much less? Yes!
“A father to the fatherless…God has set the lonely in families…For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name” (Psalm 68:4-5; Ephesians 3:14-15).
When we come to God through Christ, He becomes our Father in ways that are practical, powerful and personal. He then sets us in His big family, “Family of God” called the church. It is there men should rise up to be surrogate fathers to the fatherless, and women, mothers to the motherless, etc. That is God’s plan.
The research shows that there is so much more to being a father than providing the seed. Good dads are life-givers in every sense. Just like Jesus promised to give life to us, and gives it to the max, dad’s add value to their children’s lives in every way, with Christ’s (and mom’s) help.
So I’m not losing a son: he’s gaining a new dad: his new father in law. The more dad’s the better in today’s world, I say. And I’m blessed more than I deserve to have had great parents, a loving wife, a fantastic daughter and son in law, and two wonderful sons. Now today, a new jewel is added to the setting, Katherine Elizabeth Horning.
We love you, Katie and Eric. I remember staring into your baby blue eyes, son, when you were a baby and praying for this day and this one who you would cherish forever. May this be the start of a great new family under our Heavenly Father, that Father who always knows best and loves most.
