A Father Teaches Sacrifice
“If there is one thing I could stress to young couples, it’s to learn to love sacrifice.” This comment, coming from Daniel West in a recent PeakDay Podcast with Martha Haenni, got in my head.
Daniel continued. “Our broken reaction to any kind of discomfort, misunderstanding, any kind of pain is to say, ‘No, get it away from me, I need to be comfortable.’ But our faith helps us get beyond that… Learn to love sacrifice, to love the cross, because it’ll get you closer to the resurrection.”
As a married man with two kids, I resonate with this. Marriage and parenthood can demand intense sacrifices, and all too often my response is “Get it away from me. I need what I want right now.” Our desire for comfort can easily outweigh our desire for virtue.
From the moment we are born, our main concern is survival. Babies cry for food and warmth, and we seek comfort more and more intelligently as we grow. Inevitably, though, it reaches a point where the imperative turns to indulgence. Comfort means safety, and safety is addictive.
Denying Ourselves
That’s part of why there is so much resistance to denying ourselves comfort. Babies aren’t capable of doing that, but we are. And if we want to raise virtuous children, we have to be virtuous fathers.
My coworker, fellow father, and CCL Ministry Consultant Nick Vicinanzo said it well (and with typical humor): “It all comes back to temperance,” he said. “What do you need as a father of a little creature that is completely unreasonable? You have to be over-the-top with your patience, your care, your temperance.”
Nick said he has come to believe there is a deep importance to children learning temperance and chastity specifically from their fathers. Where mothers provide unconditional nurturing and comfort, fathers must offer something external – natural discipline and modeled virtue.
“If fathers themselves are not temperate, if they’re not able to teach virtue to their kids because they’re not practicing it, it hurts the family,” he said. As Daniel West said in the podcast, “We can’t give what we don’t have.”
Learning the Lesson
“We as parents want our kids to be virtuous, to be chaste,” he said. “We need tools as parents for that… We need NFP.” For married couples, NFP can become one of the places where this lesson in loving sacrifice is lived out most concretely. In a recent conversation with someone who doesn’t practice NFP, I heard a common argument: “When you’re practicing NFP, you have to go long periods of abstinence with your spouse. Isn’t that hard?”
Of course it is. But, isn’t that kind of the point? No one ever became a better person because they did something easy. When you learn to love the sacrifice – and I mean love it as you love Christ, or your spouse – you transcend what seems like difficulty and are able to see with incredible clarity the gift of it all. You might even call it a resurrection.
I drop a drinking glass on the kitchen floor and it shatters into a hundred pieces. As I’m trying to figure out why we still use glass for anything in our home instead of plastic, my two-year-old stampedes into the room, screaming for her Play-Doh, saying, “I need it right now!”
For the thousandth time, I look at this tiny, beautiful, blonde-haired menace who I love more than anything. And I see myself. There I am, standing before God, demanding my will over His – screaming for what I want when all that lays down that path is a floor of broken glass.
The Thing We Need Most
I pick her up, make sure her feet aren’t bleeding, kiss her cheek, and tell her she will have to wait. She doesn’t understand it, and I don’t need her to. Maybe one day, because I showed her, she will understand that sometimes the thing she wants most is not the thing she needs most.
And maybe that is what Daniel meant when he said we have to learn to love sacrifice. We do not love the broken glass or the waiting or the discomfort itself. We learn to love what sacrifice can make possible: a heart that can receive something greater than what it wanted in the first place.
Written by David Wright. David is the Mission Advancement Specialist at Couple to Couple League. He resides in Western North Carolina with his wife Emma and two children, where he enjoys hiking, fishing, and camping in his spare time.