This year, I became a father.
They say that becoming a parent changes everything — and I agree. In the first moments that I held my son after he emerged from the safety of his mother’s womb, I thought to myself, “My life is over.”
When I take for myself, I flourish. But when I give up myself, my family flourishes.
But that is good — and for that, I am thankful.
Western culture today prioritizes self-actualization and the liberation from external influence. Subjectivity, personal feelings, and internal perceptions of identity are propped up as chief goods. And the dominant narrative we are told is this: I am the author of my life — and the story is all about me. My happiness is the most important currency in my life. If anything hinders my version of the good life, which I get to define, then I must immediately erase it from my life.
To have children is the ultimate way to fight back against this poisoned worldview. It is to embrace death of self.
Parenting, as I have experienced in my short 3.5 months and as I have witnessed in the lives of my friends, requires an identity shift. Parenting is not something that I do. Rather, I am a father.
But I am not a father in the margins of life. I am first a husband and father — and the rest of life is crafted around those vocations.
The compass that guides me is not powered by my personal feelings and desires. Instead, I am motivated to provide for and to protect my family, to serve and to lead them, and to pour myself out for them because I want them flourish.
When I take for myself, I flourish. But when I give up myself, my family flourishes. My self loses — but my family wins. Self-sacrifice and others-centered love is the name of the game.
In parenting, this is intuitive. The survival of our children requires us to spend years meeting their every need, sacrificing me for them. They would literally die if we did not prioritize them. The journey of parenthood, therefore, is an invitation to death.
But there is good news. Not only will embracing the death of self lead to a more fulfilling life — one in which we discover that true joy is found not in self-indulgence but in self-giving love — but it leads to life itself. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, “Whoever pursues after his own life to preserve it will lose it; but whoever loses [his own life], he will be given life” (Luke 17:33, my translation).
Ultimately, it is my faith that motivates me to embrace the death of self. To be a Christian, after all, means accepting Jesus’ invitation to follow him into death and through it to resurrection life.
This thanksgiving, I thank God that he called me into fatherhood and gifted me the end of adolescence. He has trusted my wife and me to embrace the death of self to care for His son.
There is no escape hatch, and there is no going back. And for that, I thank God every day.
Fatherhood, Death of self, Children, Parenting, Christianity, Christians, Thanksgiving
