I want you to know how proud I am to be your father. You have brought so much joy into my life with your humor, passion, your hunger for knowledge, and your love of life. I hope that you will remember this night as a time when I gave you my blessing. Always know that your father loves you and prays for you as I will until I die.

This is your life.

May you find that the only true friends are the ones that will tell you the truth even when it hurts.
May you run toward God because in the end- He’s what this life is all about.
May you seek wisdom above everything else.
I pray that you will have fun. Fun is good. But I pray that you will run away from foolishness. Remember that you can ruin your life in 60 seconds of wrong decisions.
I pray that you will treat women with dignity.
I pray that you will be true to yourself and be uncompromising.
I pray that you will not be caught in the snares that are everywhere around us.
I pray that you will learn the power of relationships.

This night is special too. This night I am giving my first father’s blessing. Tonight I speak blessings upon you and I release you. As much as I would like to keep you under my wings, the truth is you are now the caretaker of your destiny.

I release you into the world. As much as I am able I will continue to invest in your future but from this night on I will become more and more a prayer warrior and a spectator as your choices.

Tonight I want to challenge you to step fully into manhood.  It’s not something that happens instantaneously but manhood is about choices. I’ve learned the hard way in my life. Manhood is not an age but a choice.

A boy is selfish.
A man is sacrificial.
A boy speaks easy lies
A man speaks hard truths.
A boy has a foul mouth relying on a few vulgar words to communicate a myriad of messages.
A man uses a robust vocabulary to solve a myriad of conflicts.
A boy refuses to listen with an open mind.
A man listens much and talks little.
A boy is controlled by anger.
A man channels his anger to create Godly change.
The pleasure of a boy is unbridled and thoughtless.
A man is lives for a cause which ultimately brings him more pleasure than anything a boy could even imagine.

Jesus said: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

I can tell you this one thing that I know for sure:  Life is difficult. And once you accept that life is difficult you will find that it’s not too difficult to handle.

You’re likely to meet your future wife in the coming 4 years.  Choose wisely. Whoever finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor of the LORD.

Marriage is learning how to serve.  It’s God’s invention so that men like us could learn how to be like Jesus.

There is no woman on the face of the earth who will be able to make life worth it. It’s got to come from inside you.

Your success will be measured by your ability to do the hard work first and then the fun stuff. Every successful man learns that skill.

Christians will let you down.  It’s a fact of life.  Christ won’t.

You are going to face temptation greater than any you have ever faced. But I believe you have the character to handle it.

Sitting in front of the class will do more to help you succeed than any other college tip I can think of.

I have known five friends that have died from alcohol related deaths- binge drinking, alcoholism, killed by a drunk driver.  Please don’t be the 6th.

Your metabolism will slow down tremendously over the next 2 years. It’s just how a man’s body works.  Exercise and eat right.

You are loved, accepted and celebrated.  Tonight, I regard you as a man. Now it is your turn to change the world.

May your head be full of dreams.

May your heart be tethered to truth.

May your path be narrow and challenging.

May you fight for nobility.

May you never take alliance with fools.

May you run toward God.

May you find romance in life.

And may you seek the approval of God more than the approval of men.

Being a parent is the perfect metaphor of “two steps forward, one step back.” It’s just the way things work in parenting. I thought about that as my youngest son wheeled out of the drive in his ’99 Subaru, loaded to the gills with his belongings to venture from the nest and into the great unknown. Parenting is uphill both ways. It’s not a race to the finish line. There is no finish line, and many days it’s a slow slog.

It’s like those moments when you get your kitchen so clean that you could be considered obsessive compulsive, and then you walk into a family room flooded with the chaos of matchbox cars, action figures, building blocks, and dinosaurs (some of them slathered with chocolate pudding cups). Two steps forward, one step back.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had to jump through all the hoops of getting the guys to bed, but now that we’re past that stage, I’ve realized that hoop jumping was my superpower. A certain number of pages must be read, teeth need to be brushed, prayers must be said, and covers need to be adjusted. And just at the right time, they’d crave water like a Labrador Retriever in the Sahara Desert. It seemed like my boys were never tired until they collapsed. Darlene and I said what all parents say from time to time: “It’s not about how tired you are, it’s about how tired you are making us.” After our last son, we relaxed as parents. We were so busy with the schedules of Upward Basketball, birthdays, carpools, parties, and science projects, we’d find him sprawled out on the family room floor with a half-eaten fruit roll-up in his little hand. Two steps forward, one step back.

We’ve missed a lot of adventures because we had kids. We’ve never been to those luxury resorts with crystal blue waters and not a stroller in a hundred miles. But we’ve been to a few amusement parks and wrestled a wild, squirming five-year-old for thirty minutes to administer amoxicillin. We found these moments both traumatizing and, I must confess, somewhat exciting. Sometimes they get so dirty, the bathtub was out of the question. They were backyard, spray-them-down-with-the-water-hose dirty. We found parenting a rewarding rollercoaster ride of sound and fury, signifying a whole lot of stuff. Two steps forward, one step back.

I’m not a perfect parent, and we didn’t raise perfect kids. Becoming a good father has been two steps forward and one step back. I said, “Maybe” when I was really thinking, Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. For years I’ve stolen peanut butter cups from my sons on November 1^st. I’ve made stuff up when the answers to their questions would require more wisdom and intelligence than I have at 5:30 in the morning. But now that they are gone, we still hear their voices echoing quietly through the house in our memories. They robbed our peace but stole our hearts. And that’s for good. We treasure the days they return as adults for holidays and celebration. Our roles as parent have changed. We made progress even though it was two steps forward and one step back.