And so this is Christmas...

The spirit of Christmas to come...

As I sit here typing this Christmas post our house is filled with the scent of fresh baked cookies and rock and roll carols. Felicia is giving Micah a bath after his teething cookie. The lights are low and the Christmas tree is aglow with twinkling lights. It looks and feels like the holiday in our home. We are lucky to have it so good.

This has been a year of great contradiction for me. I’ve been blessed with the addition of my son and the continued celebration of love that is my life with Felicia. Truly, no man has been given any greater gifts than I. My little family is the most wonderful experience of my life and I cherish every moment we all share together.

I only wish the world was as warm and filled with love as my home. This has been a year filled with such terrible sadness around the globe. We are all suffering through a war that shows no sign of ending. We are all suffering from the effects of global warming and its affects upon the environment. I worry for my son and can’t help but wonder if the world he grows up in will be as lush and green as the one I knew as a boy. Will he be able to journey into the woods and swim in a pond? Will he be able to poke turtles with a stick and watch them withdraw into armored shells? Will there be any honey bees left for him to watch pollinate wild flowers in the fields?

Will my son’s future be as a soldier in a faraway land fighting a war that did not end by the time he turned eighteen? Will he fight for a people who view him only with hatred never knowing the wonderful little boy he was as a child? Will he die on the sand instead of at side of a loving wife who shared the same joy of marriage as Felicia and I have enjoyed? I worry about his future and therein rests the crux of my current angst. I am so afraid that I waited too long and that my son will know only a world as it dies and fades into a bleak world of desolation. Did I bring my son into a world devoid of hope and a real future?

I worry that I will not have enough time to prepare him to deal with the challenges I know he will have to face. He is not yet one year old and I am already fifty-three. I am diabetic and towards the end of this year I’ve felt the disease weighing upon me more than I ever have before. I’m tired and soul weary. I am afraid Micah will grow up not even remembering who I was. I love him with all of my heart and soul and I’m afraid that he’ll never really know that.

Fatherhood has proved to be an incredible experience so far. It has created feelings inside of me that I never imagined possible. I just want to do the best possible job at it that I can. I love every moment I spend with Micah and I’m trying to get as many photos of him as I possibly can. I hope that someday he’ll look at them and see himself as I saw him through a father’s loving eyes.

This has been a very interesting year for me. I hope next year is as amazing as this one has been and that the world will settle down a bit and we’ll all spend more time fixing our broken planet than we spend killing each other over stupid theological differences.

Merry Christmas to you all. I hope you and yours are safe, warm and filled with every possible joy. Cherish each moment with your families and for God’s sake put aside whatever small grievances you have with anyone and use this season as a reason to make peace with those you love and miss. Our lives pass so quickly, time spent fostering ill feelings is wasted time we can never reclaim. Be the first to reach out and embrace, you’ll be glad you did.