Let me tell you about how my dad saved my life, and a few lessons we all can learn from the story.
When I was around 10 years old, my friends and their dads got together at a local park to play street hockey on roller blades. We played on two adjoining tennis courts.
Unlike Wimbledon, these tennis courts had a concrete surface.
When we arrived, my dad told me that I needed to wear a helmet due to the concrete. I looked around. No one was wearing helmets. I did not want to wear one, and I let my dad know how silly I thought this idea was.
“Don’t you see? None of my friends is wearing one. I’ll look like a loser.”
Nevertheless, my dad insisted that I wear a helmet or not play at all, and so, begrudgingly, I put it on.
The game was going great, and we were all having a great time. At one point, I went to retrieve the ball that had rolled next to one of the tennis nets. As I approached the ball, I began to lose my balance. To help stabilize myself, I grabbed the tennis net.
Instead of stabilizing me, the net acted as a slingshot. I was holding on to the net, but my feet swung underneath it. Instead of just losing my balance and falling, the combination of holding the net and my feet going under the net caused me to be whipped down at a much more rapid pace than a normal fall.
Crack!
My helmet slammed onto the concrete surface, cracking in multiple places. This surely would have been the fate of my head had I not listened to my father.
What would have happened to me is impossible to know. Would I have a lasting brain injury? Would it just be a concussion? Would it have been my death? Although the answers to these questions will forever be unknown, I do think my head would have cracked in multiple places had I not listened to my dad.
Allow Dad to be Present, and Listen to Him
The importance of having a good dad is widely understood. We know that the presence of a father helps reduce many negative outcomes in a child’s life, and fathers are especially important for boys.
The helmet and hockey story also teaches us that, while it is important to have a dad around, it is also important to listen to him. It can be quite easy to be dismissive of dad’s advice and wisdom, especially as we get older. But we should, at minimum, give great pause to what our
dads have to say. Even if we do not agree, we can listen and give their words careful and serious thought.
When you have kids of your own, it is not uncommon to begin to see the wisdom in your father’s choices, including choices you disagreed with as a child. A little humility comes knocking, and you understand that fatherhood isn’t easy. There may be times when you have to tell your son to wear a helmet when he doesn’t want to, and when it might cause him to be humiliated (in his eyes) among his friends. Sometimes, only hindsight allows us to see the wisdom of our father’s choices.
It is not just enough to have dad around. We should value what he says. After moving out, we do not need to agree or even do everything he says, but we should esteem his words.
By honoring our dads’ advice and counsel, our dads will not just be “around,” but they will have a reason to be present and involved in our lives.
Allow for Protection
A key part of being a father is providing protection for your family. Yet the effectiveness of this protection is at least partially correlated with how much we allow Dad to protect us. In my hockey and helmet story, if I had played the game without allowing my dad to protect me, my life story could have been quite different.
Of course, there is the problem of overprotective and helicopter fathers. Yet even in these instances, when Dad seeks to protect us from something, we should ask ourselves: Why does my father want to protect me from this? Why do his years of accumulated experience and wisdom think this thing is a threat to me? I do not understand, nor do I see the wisdom in his protection now, but will I understand and see the wisdom in 10 years? Even if we do not heed our father’s advice, answering these questions will allow us to increase our understanding and wisdom about the situation.
We should let dad be dad, which includes allowing him to protect us. And even if we reject his protection, we should do so in a way that is honoring to him by thinking carefully through why he’s trying to protect us.
Become a Leader
The next time we played street hockey, many—if not all—of the boys were wearing helmets. They had seen what had happened to my helmet and did not want the same fate to happen to their heads.
Just by listening to dad, I had become a leader by example. I did not even have to say anything. I was initially worried about my perception because I perceived myself as the weird one wearing a helmet. But I quickly became the “cool” one, the one who helped others see the wisdom in wearing a helmet while rollerblading over cement. (Looking back, I do not see why everyone was not wearing a helmet from the start!)
By obeying my father, I was not just a leader for my friends, but I was also a leader to the dads of these boys, for surely some of these dads had insisted to their sons that they wear helmets in future games. Thus, by listening to my dad, the effect was that I was a leader horizontally toward my friends, but also vertically toward their dads. The application of this is that listening to dad may cause not only one’s equals to listen to you, but also those in a position above oneself—perhaps one’s boss—to listen as well.
Of course, there are many cases of horrible fathers for which this lesson does not necessarily apply, or at least not in the same way. For those with evil fathers, I pray they get the help they need and that they experience the love of their Father in Heaven.
But for those who had a good father, or even a halfway decent one, we should listen to him, allow for his protection, and let the byproduct of our father’s advice help us become better leaders.
I am thankful that I was able to write this short piece because my brain does not have multiple cracks in it. And I can thank my father for that.
Photo Credit: Unsplash
