First Fathers Day

Yesterday at church, Maxim's class made Fathers Day gifts, of course. Their teacher, Diane, was so generous and thoughtful, providing them with mugs to decorate with stickers that she thought would fit each daddy's interests. For the mug Maxim would make for Daniel, Diane gave him an airplane, a bicycle, a car loaded with luggage, and "are we there yet" dialogue bubble, and so on, because one way or the other Daniel does travel quite often.

After the mugs were finished, each child was given a little packet of peanuts, a chocolate biscotti and a packet of coffee or hot chocolate mix to place inside. Maxim carefully eyed those items and I could see he was formulating a plan.

I had explained that this was a gift to surprise Papa with for Fathers Day, a time when Papas receive presents.

Sure enough, by last night, Maxim was expressing that he would give the present to Daniel, Daniel would open it, say "yummy" and then Maxim would smile and say "please". What a plan!

Anyway, when he woke up this morning, he got the vision in his mind that since we were talking about all of these gifts being only for papas on Fathers Day and Maxim would not be receiving until his birthday next month, Maxim would not be sharing any of Daniel's gift today. He immediately got very grumpy and did not want to give the gift. Fortunately, Daniel was outside making some repairs after our great rain and flooding on Friday night, so he didn't witness the bad attitude for the most part.

Maxim informed us, emphatically, that "Father's Day broken!!!"

Later he was able to watch as Joel presented a gift to Daniel. It was a bar of Ghiradelli dark chocolate, which Daniel promptly opened and shared. He slid a piece toward Maxim, and our little guy put his head in his hands, surprised yet unconvinced that the chocolate was really being shared with him. Finally, he came over and took it and enjoyed it. Now he was ready to present his gift to Daniel, who also shared that with him right away. I asked him if Fathers Day was broken now, and he smiled really big, kind of sheepishly, and said "no".

I saw a spiritual lesson. God really wants us to take the time to present our best to Him. He wants everything we can offer, with a glad heart. This requires trust that if we give Him absolutely everything, He will provide everything we need (and could possibly want). It's just so easy to get a certain vision in our minds of what we want right now, and we foolishly focus on that instead of the very best which can only come from the Father as we completely yield.

Fathers Day will make much more sense to Maxim next year. Hopefully the give and take between my Heavenly Father and I will make more sense too. We all have a lot to learn.

Happy Fathers Day to all the papas. In particular, I want to extend a special encouragement and thanks to my husband Daniel and all the other adoptive daddies out there. It took a certain courage to go down the adoption road. It changes and enriches our family legacies in such a wonderful way. May God continue to bless the journey for each household.