A Short Lesson I Learned

"We are what we believe we are."

This new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what exactly Further Up & Further In is. Is it a newsletter to keep folks updated on my current WIP¹? Is it a place where I express my thoughts on the craft of writing? Is it a collection of ramblings about being a new parent? Or maybe a place to work through my faith and how it shines through every day?

Turns out, it’s sort of all of these things! Whatever takes us further up and further into this mystery we call life, that’s where we’re going to be.

For A.D. 2024, I’ve committed to at least one Substack post a month. Like last year, this one is going to be full of incredible changes and challenges for our family. Most of them will be good, but all of them will be hard. The other night was a hard one, and the short musing I’ve written below is the result of having worked through a tough situation with my daughter, and an even tougher one in myself.

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I am not a perfect Father.

That’s an easy thing to say, but can sometimes be hard to admit.

Being a parent isn’t easy, of course. I’ve been told it only gets harder from here. While I do not doubt the truth of that statement, it can sometimes be difficult to believe while we’re in the thick of it.

Right now, our daughter, the affectionate Little Miss, has been undergoing a nasty sleep regression. For hours on end, she struggles to soothe herself to sleep, despite knowing full well how. Now that she’s in a floor bed, she will even walk to the far corner of her mattress nearest the door and cry (or scream) until either her mother or I arrive to soothe her.

It’s exhausting, but more than that it can be infuriating.

I recently had two separate conversations with two separate dads my age who live on opposite coasts. Both of them have been good friends of mine for many years now, and they’re solid husbands, fathers, and friends. One is a father to boys, the other to a girl (with another baby on the way). In both cases, each of these men has struggled with an irrational bout of anger when their children scream incessantly in the night.

Unfortunately, I can relate.

We hypothesized that maybe it has something to do with our own mental or physical exhaustion, or possibly even our inability to nurture in the same way as our wives. These things may be true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Upon further inspection, we dug right down to the root and all concluded that our sudden and shocking (not to mention strangely intense) fits of anger towards our children ultimately stemmed from an inability to effectively communicate with them.

On the one hand, our children (who, mind you, are all under two) are unable to clearly explain what they want or need at any given time. Those wants and needs can vary depending on the hour. We don’t know what they’re saying, and since we cannot help, we get frustrated. Likewise, we cannot communicate to them the lateness of the hour, or just how exhausted we are after a long day, or that (at least in my case) there is a young boy in the apartment below us who also needs his uninterrupted sleep.

In talking this through with my friends, I was encouraged to know that I am not the only dad who has been left angry or weary by these long and torturous evenings. It turns out, many have already been where I am and lived through to tell the tale. Thank God.

This evening (at the time of writing this), I was forced to go in and attempt to comfort the Little Miss to sleep after her mother had already spent hours doing so herself. I was tempted to be very angry with her since she should’ve been asleep by the time I had gotten home from being out with a friend. In fact, I walked into her room with quite a temper before feeling immediately convicted.² Instantly, I took a step back. And after laying still beside her for a good while, it was finally time for me to leave.

Of course, she wasn’t overly thrilled.

It turns out that, from what my wife was able to gather, the Little Miss is going through one of the worst sleep regressions on the list, one that can last anywhere from two to six weeks (please pray for us).

When the Little Miss sat up and started walking towards me, I couldn’t help but stay a bit longer. With a softened and tender heart, I held her in my arms tightly as she rested her sweaty head on my shoulder. I had held her this way when I’d first walked in and upon doing so recovered a gentleness and patience that I hadn’t had only a moment prior. I could no longer be upset with her.

This time, now at the end of our evening, I didn’t want to let her go.

I did, of course, and thankfully she fell asleep soon after, having laid back down as I slipped away. She was satisfied, and it was as if it were I who was supposed to learn the lesson this evening, not her.

The lesson, of course, being that anger doesn’t solve anything. That patience is indeed a virtue. That kindness and incredible restraint should both be a part of one’s daily life, especially as a parent. These simple lessons seem obvious, and indeed they are, but in moments like these, they feel transcendent, out of reach from the way that we, well, feel.

There are no perfect fathers here. No matter how hard we try, we will always come up short. But we can still be better dads than we were yesterday, and the day before that. As long as there’s breath, there’s still time.

I hesitate to go a step further here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t pursue the deeper truth (or, “deeper magic” as C.S. Lewis might call it) behind my own experience. After all, our life here is only a mere shadow of the one that is to come, and if we are to grow in righteousness and truth we must do so through lived experience, looking deeper into the meaning behind it all.

As I’ve mentioned before, we may not be the perfect fathers, but for us Christian men putting in the work, we are being sanctified and transformed into a clearer image of the Everlasting and Eternal Father. We must decrease so that He might increase in us. As He works mightily in our hearts and minds to mold us into a perfected work of art, we will begin to exude even more love and patience and long-suffering (a more old-fashioned term for “self-control”) than we ever could before.

The more I am willing to trust God in the day-to-day, the more self-controlled I become. Some days—and all sleep regressions—are hard, and oftentimes I fail. Many days seem impossible. But perseverance, and a steady hope that Christ will one day make all things new, can work amazing wonders.

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Thanks to all who tuned in around Christmas for More Than Friends, my official epilogue to The Beast of Bear-tooth Mountain. Those who read it might even see that it also serves as a little teaser for what’s to come next in the eventually upcoming sequel, The Curse of Bear-tooth Mountain…

An extra thanks to all of you who grabbed your FREE copy of The Middle-Night: A Christmas Ghost Story this holiday season! There will be more Bear-tooth Mountain Archive short stories like this in the future. If you didn’t get The Middle-Night for free, it’s still available on the Kindle Store for $2.99!

Another project I’ve been working on is a supernatural Western called A Standoff at the Gates of Hell. This short story is its own standalone thing and clocks in at around 8,000-something words. I’m excited to share it with you all, but you’ll have to wait a bit for reasons I cannot yet disclose…

I’m also working on a new television pilot based on a supernatural thriller from the 1990s. I’m mostly working on it for fun to stretch my scriptwriting muscles (that is what I went to school for, after all), but there may be some actual interest in it. I’ll keep you all updated if there’s any progress!

Speaking of writing, my wonderful wife got me C.S. Lewis’ On Writing (And Writers) for Christmas, and boy is it inciteful! This is one I’m going to slowly walk through, and will probably end up reading more than once this year. Don’t be surprised if a future edition of Further Up & Further In centers on a quote I read in the book. I already have an idea…

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This month’s Petty Picks are as follows…

WHAT I’M READING: On Writing (And Writers) by C.S. Lewis - Considering what I just said above, this one shouldn’t come as a surprise. But I genuinely love this book. Lewis was my most frequently read author last year,³ and I wouldn’t be surprised if he made it to the top of my list again this year. I don’t have a lot of Lewis on my reading list just yet, but On Writing might be read more than once throughout A.D. 2024!

WHAT I’M WATCHING: Heroes - Season 1 - I had to write about Heroes recently, and when I thought that the show should’ve ended. If you’re a fan, then you’ll likely agree that Heroes was a “one-season-wonder,” and as I’m halfway through rewatching the first season, I’ve got to agree. It’s exceptional, and barring some suggestive content⁴, it’s a fascinating look at the concept of “ordinary people with extraordinary abilities.” Thankfully, Season 1 is a fully complete story; you don’t need more.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Long Story Short: Willie Nelson at 90 - I haven’t been listening to much music or podcasts lately, but what I’ve heard of this album has been amazing. The Avett Brothers, Chris Stapleton, Charley Crockett, Lyle Lovett, Tyler Childers, and so many others coming together to perform Willie Nelson’s greatest hits (with Willie himself), is pretty great. I may prefer Johnny Cash, but there’s no denying that Willie Nelson has had an equally impressive career.

FURTHER PETTY RECOMMENDATIONS:

Literal Word - An app you can get on your phone that shows you what the original Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic words we translated the Bible from actually mean. It’s pretty awesome, and features the KJV, ESV, LSB, and NAS95!

What If…? - Season 2 - Besides Loki, What If…? is the best thing that Marvel Studios is putting out right now. Only a few episodes into the new season, but it’s been great so far.

The Loner - A short-lived Western TV series created by The Twilight Zone’s own Rod Serling that stars Jeff Bridges’ dad (Lloyd Bridges). It’s really good, and pretty “adult” for its time. Wanna learn more? I wrote all about it HERE.

The Forgotten King by Kenneth Padgett and Shay Gregorie - We love this book. It’s a picture book for kids with some immaculate illustrations and medieval flair to keep things interesting (check it out HERE). It’s beautiful, theological, and highly recommended.

1. Work In Progress, of which I have several. Maybe Works In Progress would be more accurate.

2. Aside from the Holy Spirit, I attribute this to the book we’ve been reading in our small group at church called Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate by Jerry Bridges.

3. I finally made my way through The Ransom Trilogy (also known as The Space Trilogy), The Abolition of Man, and re-read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Aside from revisiting The Chronicles of Narnia, I’d say Perelandra (the second Ransom story) was my favorite. There are some wonderful illustrations about eternity, the fall of man, pre-destination vs. free will, etc., and I cannot help but want to reread it already.

4. There’s some violence and sensual/sexual content, but it’s all stuff that’s very easy to skip over. It’s also never done in a way that glorifies it (at least in the first half), which is encouraging. No doubt, Heroes aired on NBC, so broadcast standards and practices wouldn’t let them get away with anything, but they do come pretty close at times. If you have VidAngel or other content filters, you should be fine.