Not Just Another Number

It is, once again, September 6. Thank you, that did take a lot of hard work to put together.

This day is also my birthday, number 38 to be exact. I have heard people say that after 21 it's just a number. Or maybe it's after 25? But what about 30 and 40? And some people have their golden birthday after 25, so what about that?

Any way, 38 is not just another number for me, it's a very meaningful number with a bit of stickiness to it. Sticky as in messy, because my dad was killed in a trucking accident when he was 38 years old. I was about five weeks from turning 4 years old. My oldest son, Sawyer, is 6 years old. And so I write, through trembling hands, knowing that he has had more from me than I had from my dad.

And I'm just getting started. I'm only improving, growing, and learning how to be the best dad I can possibly be. I better be because I have a third son on the way, and boys, especially my nutty boys,  need their dad. In fact, our society needs to be fathered into becoming a new kind of society, but that message is for another day.

My dad didn't choose to die when he did, his life was taken, so I am not speaking with arrogance when I say that I am just getting started. I say that because God is fathering me into becoming a new kind of dad each day. Every day. So I feel like I'm just getting started. And although I don't like to think about it or talk about it much, my mom and dad were divorced when he died. Some of his choices kept him from seeing me and raising me in the short years he had with me.

So, without going into more detail here about all that, I'll just stick with saying how incredibly grateful I am for this day. I am blessed beyond imagination with a strong, beautiful wife who has the strength to climb a mountain, while drinking tea and changing a diaper, yet she has zero interest in manipulating that strength to go it alone. She chooses to walk with me, committed to raising these Harrison boys together, which of course includes raising me at times. She's impressive. Don't act like you're not impressed ;-)

Sawyer Dale, Eli John, and boy number 3, you have a dad. A goofy, bald dad who loves you so much that sometimes I hug and kiss you until you're thoroughly annoyed. Deal with it.

With much Grace and Peace.

Beginning Again

So, a new blog for a new season of life. This new beginning is with the hope and intention to write more, and to write from a place of wrestling with God.

Because we all wrestle. And my life, up to my 38th birthday, has been an endless wrestling match with God. Wrestling can be invigorating and it can also be exhausting. There are times when I have embraced the struggle, my adrenaline pumping, and I felt like I was up for the fight. And there have been times when I have felt brittle, near lifeless, and I was convinced that the battle would destroy me. It didn't and it hasn't. Apparently God knows what I need, what I can handle, and when I can handle it. Apparently. Because I haven't always seen eye to eye with God. Shocking, right? And I have had other plans and other ideas about how my life should go. And so we wrestle.

Over the last couple of years I have become enamored with the story in Scripture about Jacob wrestling with God. Jacob tried to go it alone, to live a way of selfishness, and to chase a life of comfort and ease. Jacob tried and he failed. Because God wrestles.

The battle is never wasted and the victory is often in the struggle.

I feel a new gratitude for God wrestling with me, changing me, and shaking me into not settling. That's a gift, the struggle. God wrestles. God engages in the fight to keep me from always choosing, well, me.  God wrestles to keep me from wandering aimlessly.

So I will continue to wrestle, and I invite you into the ring, into the struggle. Because it's always better to have others in the ring with you, to not go it alone.

Grace and Peace.

In the Beginning...

God spoke and the world came into existence. God designed, shaped, and crafted, but it was when He spoke that everything gained texture and physicality. It was out of wild and waste that God created order and harmony. Out of darkness God spoke light. It was out of dust that he breathed life, fresh new life.

So today, I begin with thanks for life, this fresh new life. It is out of wild and waste that I exist, and out of chaos that God begins to restore order and harmony, in me. For this life, this gift, I begin with a simple thanks.

Moving from Grace to Peace.