It didn’t strike me until Ms. Christmas said, “I’m going to pick up our one kid from school.”
“Can you believe it?” she asked. “We only have one kid!”
I’m getting a little slow with age. A few ticks of the clock went by before I caught her meaning. We have two children, but the older one just turned 18. He’s no longer a kid. This is where I’m supposed to say, “It went by so fast”.
Well, there it is; I just said it.

The dizzying speed of my son’s ascent to adulthood becomes a little easier to swallow when I think on the fact that his existence didn’t begin eighteen years ago, nor did it begin in his mother’s womb. Samuel’s life began more than a year prior to his birth, with an idea: Ms. Christmas telling me God had spoken to her, and she was ready to be a mom. When we learned she was pregnant with a boy, we named him Samuel, which means “gift from God.”

I assumed at the time I was ready to be a dad, but I was made a fool by that assumption halfway through my second sleepless night, while trying to soothe an inconsolable newborn. His mother’s nights were equally sleepless, but being a mother, Ms. Christmas has an elemental super power that defies sleeplessness. As fathers, we have to fake it. That goes for a lot of things, particularly while our children are young.

We used to marvel at our friends’ babies sleeping peacefully in their strollers in the sanctuary of our small church. All those babies snoozing, while I or Ms. Christmas stood at the back of the room, bouncing and patting our fussy boy. It wasn’t until Samuel was a few weeks old that his mother and I said to each other, “There’s nothing wrong with us! The problem is him!”

I wish I could recall the name of the woman who approached me one day after service, while I paced the halls with Samuel blubbering on my shoulder.
She said, “My son was exactly like yours when he was a baby. I thought there had to be something wrong with him. It wasn’t supposed to be so hard! That difficult baby grew up to be incredibly smart, energetic, and creative. He’s a world changer.”

As we approach the heart-wrenching moment when we’ll drop our son off at college, I’ve been thinking a lot about what that woman told me, how accurate her words were. This is a time when a parent tends to dwell on his failures––all the things I should have taught him, the lessons I learned the hard way that could make his way less hard. The fact is, there is no way that’s “less hard.” The only meaningful path through life is a difficult one.
I am encouraged by the fact that Samuel has a head start; he is much smarter than I was at his age, something he demonstrates whenever we go walking. We’ve covered many miles together, going deep, attempting to talk about things that are impossible to talk about––things of the mystical kind that defy words. In those moments, I can feel that he gets it in a way very few people do. Our son is incredibly rare. My younger self could not have known how much so.

My own mother said to me some years ago, “As your children grow up, you love them more, not less.”
That didn’t seem possible to me at the time, but now I know it’s true.

Of all the lessons I might have taught my son, this is one I will reiterate:
Samuel, you truly are a gift to me and your mother, and also to the world. You have challenging times ahead of you, and it’s important you remember that difficulty is not something to be avoided. It’s something to engage with, to work through, to be strengthened by. You taught me that, when you were only a baby, and I am reminding you now––do the difficult things. Be the world changer I know you are.