On Joy (or, My Cup Runneth Over)

When I was a kid, we had one of those big green garbage cans that you roll down to the end of your driveway on Thursday morning for the trash fairies. I don't know what they're actually called, because my dad—a meticulous grammarian, word-lover, and nationally respected scholar of military ethics—always just called it the green thing. This past Wednesday evening, as I was rolling my green thing down to the end of the driveway after going through the house turning off left-on lights, it hit me again: I'm a dad now.

In truth, of course, I've been a dad since a piece of me fell in love with a piece of Ellie and the Holy Spirit gave those pieces a Sonya-soul. But it feels a lot different to hold a child in your arms than to look at a lump in a belly. It feels different to look into eyes that have just recently beheld the Lord God saying, "Hey, kid—here's a universe. Go play." And yet, it's bizarre how fast we accustom to things. After untold millennia yearning for the skies and dreaming of flight, we finally invent the airplane; and a few decades later, we're slumped in the stratosphere reading the paper and sipping our tea, bored.

Sonya's a beautiful girl, and endlessly funny. But we've got Baptismal certificates and Social Security numbers to figure out, dental complications to deal with, jobs and laundry and shopping to do, and through it all we have to keep striving to grab the odd snippet of sleep. There's not much time to sit and luxuriate. And come to think of it, that is probably all to the good. (I've had occasion before to note that God is actually pretty smart.) I don't have room in me, yet, to encompass the fullness of this joy and this vulnerability. So He parcels it out to me at unexpected moments, quite often when I'm thinking about something other than myself. There's a reason we have Purgatory. The solar empyrean would scorch us blind if we didn't have time to adjust.

Tonight, though, my beautiful wife is dozing at my side and my beautiful daughter is dozing in the crook of my arm. My idiot cat is curled up on my legs, John Wick is on YouTube mowing down endless waves of superhumanly loyal incompetent henchmen, and my PBR is nice and cold. I do not deserve all this. Domine, non sum dignus. But I will try. I will try to be worthy of this love of which I have blundered my way into stewardship. I know, believe me I know, it'll hurt and be hard, but I'll try to keep trying, I'll try. And for tonight—for this tiny momentary glimpse of Eternity—I am a very happy man.