Lately I’ve often found myself thinking about fatherhood. Wondering what kind of dad I’m going to be someday.

Honestly, I’m terrified. Terrified that I don’t have what it takes, that I never will.

I know a great many people who grew up similar to how I did. They were raised by religious parents. They put on little suits or frilly dresses, buckled their little shoes and sat in a pew each week with their family. They were taught stories about Jonah and the whale and Noah’s Ark. They didn’t have an understanding of what sin was, never grappled with lust or arrogance or greed or laziness. All they really understood was that there was God that loved them, that he always would love them, and that he wanted nothing more than for us to spend our lives enjoying being with him, falling in love with him.

But eventually a cloud entered the picture. Maybe it was the death of a grandparent or a loved one. Maybe it was the first realization that there were cool people and uncool people, and that being a part of the in crowd was extremely important. Maybe it was a parent who showed their humanity by neglecting us when we needed it, or outright hurting us. Maybe it was a boyfriend or girlfriend who treated us badly. Maybe it was financial hardship after our father or mother got laid off. But something, perhaps multiple things, happened in our lives. The world got the better of us for the first time. We discovered that life isn’t full of sandboxes and pretty dresses and pigtails and a picture book with a white Jesus and his beard.

For many of us, a dryness set in, an emptiness we couldn’t fully describe nor would care to admit. Our hormones began to rage out of control and we began to long for that cute girl or guy in the biology class, wondering why they didn’t feel the same way. We dealt with schools telling us that we can’t really do whatever we want with our lives, and that we need to fall in line if we plan on surviving. And all the while, our hearts were desperately trying to figure out what our lives were about, trying to understand why we felt so lonely.

And for many of us, our parents were there watching all of it. And I bet for most of them, they felt completely helpless.

Imagine being a parent of some thirteen year old girl or boy who’s discovered that the world is hard, has been hurt by friends and boyfriends and girlfriends, even by us. Imagine dealing with the fact that the little kid that used to look up to us now thinks we’re hopelessly clueless about the real world. Imaging trying to counsel them through their lives at this point, how futile it probably seemed. Imagine driving them to school or to practice, trying to connect with them, knowing full well that they would do just about anything to be as far away from us as possible. Knowing that they felt humiliated that they were in our presence and that someone might see them.

Imagine having a son or daughter who was virtually guaranteed to do the opposite of what you counseled them to do, never thinking about how you really were just like them growing up, never considering that you might have gone through pain so real and unimaginable that it made you question whether there was a God worth loving, a life worth living. Imagine knowing with absolute certainty that the decisions your teenage daughter was making with her new arrogant, famously unfaithful boyfriend were going to cause serious scars for her that would last for years. Imagine watching your son simultaneously reject anything resembling authority (authority earned through decades lived under significantly more adverse circumstances than their own) while blindly following the leadership of any kid who was deemed by his peers to be cool.

Imagine watching all of this, knowing the likely consequences, wanting more than anything in the world to be able to stop them from happening, and being powerless.

I haven’t the foggiest idea how one prevents this. I’ve seen kids raised by amazing, wonderful parents who made the decision that they were going to “learn their own lessons the hard way,” not realizing entirely what they were saying or what they were asking for, and making decisions that hurt them tremendously. I guarantee it broke their parent’s hearts to watch it happen, but they couldn’t do anything to stop it.

All of this isn’t to say that kids don’t provide the parents with tremendous joy – of course they do. And it also isn’t to say that those errors in judgment leave permanent damage – most of the time they represent small hiccups on the path to maturity and wisdom.

But thinking about what it would be like 20 years from now to watch my daughter go on her first date with some guy I know to be of questionable character…thinking about what it would be like to have her come home sobbing…thinking about what it would be like to have her close her door, not wanting me to console her, to hold her, to tell her it would be okay…

I don’t know how our parent’s did it.