“Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” (Matthew 7:9-11). Despite the mistakes they've made and the hardships they've faced, fighting off the pangs of inadequacy and isolation, suffering in silence, stretched too thin, burdened with the baggage of cycles of abuse and neglect that they have inherited from a thousand generations of fathers that were not as perfect as they could have been, despite, as the Savior says, being evil, fathers know how to give good gifts unto their children. They know how to provide for the wants and needs of their children, and somehow manage to do so whether they're making six figures or six bucks an hour, through economic recessions and hyperinflation and layoffs. Fathers know how to protect their children. Such knowledge is a gift from God because it is always the case that a father's children face a completely different set of threats and challenges than the ones he himself faced. Fathers know how to provide a vision for their children's future. They can see their children's divine potential and they will make any sacrifice to help them achieve it. Despite all of the evil that they face, both within and without, fathers know how to help us have the best possible life. They watch us with a level of intensity and insight and inspiration that we will never fully understand. They will catch us when we fall. They will tell us to pick ourselves up and try again when we have failed to live up to their vision for us. I know in my life my father knows how to give good gifts to me. He believes in me, sometimes much more than I believe in myself. He wants what's best for me, even when I am sometimes too lazy or stubborn or shortsighted to see what is best. Despite the evil and the flaws and the weaknesses in him and despite the evil and the flaws and the weaknesses in me, he knows how to lift me up and lead me along and sometimes how to drag me kicking and screaming into that shining vision of who he always knew I could become. I am so grateful for my father and for all of the fathers out there who without any kind of training or instruction simply know innately how to give good gifts to their children.
