‘Direct your children on the right path, and when they are older, they will not leave it’ – Proverbs 22:6 (NLT)
This past Sunday our church’s Band of Brothers (an intergenerational group for guys) took a hike along the Batona trail in the South Jersey Pine Barrens. Our destination was a fire tower (pictured above) atop ‘Apple Pie Hill.’ In our company of men were several adults and boys at various stages along the masculine journey, among them my eight year old son Caleb.
Caleb is an adventurer if there ever was one. He is pure energy, always ready to take on the world. A force to be reckoned with. A few months back he attended a week long parkour camp during the hottest week of summer. His class met in an old a warehouse with no air-conditioning, a real oven. Each night, after a grueling eight hour day, he bounced in the front door and shouted, ‘Dad, let’s go play soccer!’ That’s Caleb. I go to the gym mainly for two purposes: (1) so I can eat more ice cream; and (2) so I can keep up with my son.
We had a great time on the hike, talking and sharing as guys do, and eventually arrived at our destination: Apple Pie Hill. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the tower. It was much taller than I thought it would be, and the stairwells were open – no caging or fencing. True confession time: I’m more than a little afraid of heights. I didn’t used to be. When I was a kid one of my favorite games was ‘what’s the tallest thing I can jump off of without getting seriously hurt’ (answer – it’s a house, and trust me, you’re better off not finding that our for yourself). But as I’ve aged I’ve developed a sense of vertigo. Like Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock film, I freeze when it comes to heights. But there she was, Apple Pie Hill, complete with the tower that everyone, including Caleb, wanted to climb. I would just have to man up and give it a try.
We could only go up in groups of four, and Caleb and I were in the first group. Two stairwells up my concerns began to mount. The openings on the sides of the stairwells were even bigger up close, certainly big enough for an eight year old to fall through if he became careless. In spite of my own fears, my concern, at least at the conscious level, was all for Caleb, and an event in the not too distant past wasn’t helping matters. A few months earlier, Band of Brothers had gone canoeing in these same pine barrens. The river was a fast, and at one point our canoe flipped. I popped up out of the water nicely, but Caleb popped up under the canoe. He was safe, but for two seconds, I could not find him. It is amazing what goes through a parent’s mind in such a scenario. Those were without a doubt the scariest two seconds of my life. And now here I was, climbing a tower overlooking those same barrens, filled with Jimmy Stewart-esque visions of my son falling through one of those openings. There was no doubt in my mind: this was too risky. I told Caleb as much, and as soon as I did, his bravery vanished. It’s frightening for a boy to see his Dad frightened. He agreed that we should go back down. We did. We had only made it up three of the eight or so staircases that led to the top of the tower on Apple Pie Hill.
Let me ask you: what do you imagine when you hear the word, ‘deflated?’ A balloon that’s lost its air? A blown out tire? For the rest of my life, whenever I hear ‘deflated,’ I will picture my eight year old son sitting on the ground at the base of the tower on Apple Pie Hill. He watched as other groups of four made their way up the tower and felt like a failure. I tried to explain things to him. I said this was like those signs at the amusement park that say you have to be ‘this tall’ to go on the ride. We were just being responsible. That sort of thing. I foolishly thought he would understand. He did not. As I watched Caleb sit in his frustration and failure, he almost appeared to shrink in size.
I struggled for a few minutes. What should I do? Was it too risky to climb that tower with Caleb? Was the fear I felt for him just a projection of my own? I almost convinced myself that the risk of falling was too great. But then it hit me: there are some things more dangerous than the risk of falling. There is the risk of a boy learning that he doesn’t measure up. John Eldredge says that the primary question every young man asks, and needs his father or a father figure to answer, is ‘do I have what it takes?’ There are crucial moments when a young man needs to hear his Dad affirm that he does. If this happens, he will grow to be a man. If it doesn’t, he may very well limp through life as something less.
Caleb was asking himself that question. More to the point, he was asking me. And suddenly I knew that I was failing him. I knew, as well as I’d ever known anything, that there was only one thing for me to do. I had to man up, for real this time, and lead Caleb up that tower.
So up we went. I won’t say I wasn’t a little scared. I was. But I knew what was at stake. And you know what? No one died. We, along with two other young boys asking similar questions of themselves, made it to the top. The views were spectacular, all the more so for what we had overcome to enjoy them. The ranger at the top showed us amazing pictures taken at night that made it seem that from that tower you could reach out and touch the Harvest Moon and stars. The look on Caleb’s face was priceless (the other boys too). When we made it back down there were high fives all around. No conqueror of Mount Everest has ever been more proud. Caleb looked at me and said, ‘Dad, this is the best day ever!’ and I could see in his eyes that he knew the answer to his question.
Fathers have a sacred trust. In his beautiful novel, Chasing Fireflies, Charles Martin writes about the importance of fathers in the lives of their sons: ‘I know this about boys: we are all born with a dad-sized hole in the center of our chest. Our dads either fill it with themselves, or as we grow into men and start to feel the emptiness, we medicate it with other stuff.’ Which is why we must keep the trust that has been given us. Our boys lives depend on it. This will require that we man up. That we overcome our fears. That we deal with the wounds we ourselves have experienced. We need to do this so that, when the important moments come (and they come every day) we will be able to fill the hearts of our boys, and show them that they have what it takes.
I shudder to think what might have happened to Caleb’s heart had I failed to see what was happening within it at the base of that tower. I hope that in the future, I will more quickly realize what is at stake. I pray that every time my son’s heart is on the line, I will have the courage to do what is necessary. And I pray that every man out there who is reading this, and every woman too for that matter, will do the same, for both our sons, and the sons around us.
Because every boy needs someone to show them they have what it takes. Every father needs to show every son the way to the top of Apple Pie Hill.
Under Christ’s Mercy,
Brent