A Father

Last night my youngest son woke me at around 3:30 a.m., he had to go to the bathroom...again. He's in the midst of learning how to use the toilet, and he had an accident, his whole bed was soaked, pillow, comforter, sheets, everything. I have not been sleeping well lately, but last night, I was sleeping better than I had in a long time. I did not want to get up.

My son usually wakes me at around 3:30 a.m., he needs help going to the bathroom still. His nightly entrance consists of turning the hallway light on, slamming my bedroom door open, and shouting,"Dad, I have to go." Sometimes I get up, and sometimes my wife gets up, but last night I knew it would be me.

As I lumbered out of bed and stomped to the bathroom, I tried to suppress my frustration. When would this end? When would I be able to sleep through the night without interruption? It felt like never, and the eternal task of cleaning up fed my distaste for the moment. After ripping the soaked sheets off the bed, and grabbing new jammies, I met my son in the bathroom. "I hate this," I thought to myself as I pulled his little shirt off.

It was then, in the midst of my sleepy frustration, halfway through redressing my small son that the words penetrated my thoughts as if they were whispered by unseen lips directly into my ears, "Whatever you do unto the least of these..."

Immediately, in an instant, I felt my selfish wants and desires leave as new energy and compassion filled me, filled me so completely that I saw, more clearly than ever before the implications of my action on my son, and on how my son would see his God; his Spiritual Father.

As his earthly father, I am the most powerful being my son knows. I am in essence, an image of God to my son, and what I do every day, what I would do in that situation would help to form how he looked at his spiritual Father. Would I represent a God who loved the fact that he came to me for help in the midst of a small meaningless mistake, or would I represent a god who resented the interruption, a god who would have preferred that he lay silently in his urine until morning?

This time...I chose the former; to represent the God who was glad to see this little man in the middle of the night, happy at the chance to spend time with him, delighted that he chose to seek my help rather than trying to fix his problem alone.