Two very excited girls about getting ready to decorate the Christmas Tree!!


I’ll Do Anything!

During the past week, something has happened that has totally changed my life. I mean, it’s happened to me two other times in my life as well, but whenever it happens, I’m never prepared for it. When it happened the other day it made my heart skip a few beats and made my mind race. I may never be the same person again. Honestly, I cried a little… so, what was it? What was this earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting thing that happened? Ready? Okay… Jack smiled.

When you find out you’re going to have a baby, you experience this tornado of emotions, that depending on your plans and your place in life can be either really exciting, really scary or some strange alloy of the two. Then you go to your first pre-natal care appointment and they use this little JV ultrasound to let you hear the baby’s heartbeat and you’re in love. Whatever you were before that moment, you’re in love now. Over the next few months you get to see fuzzy black and white images of what is either your baby or a tadpole clinging onto a beanbag. The images become more and more human-like or rather, your baby does, and so your excitement builds. Finally, your baby arrives… after much toil, trauma and sacrifice, your baby is in the world and in your arms and there is nothing in this life that compares with that moment.

Then you go home and they scream all night long. You trudge through your days on the kind of sleep that tortured prisoners of war get and then change so many diapers and outfits that washing your hands becomes a reflex, like blinking or something. The whole time you’re thinking about how you love your baby more than anything, but soon you will be dead, and then it happens... You’re holding this person that has relentlessly taken absolutely all you have without ever saying “Thank you” or “You rock, Dad” and just when you are about to lose hope of making it through this season of life, they smile. He smiled at me. It wasn’t gas and it wasn’t an accident. You can tell the real ones. He smiled at me and everything was okay.

Since that time, I am a new man. I am not kidding, I would do anything to get this boy to smile. In the past week, I have made the craziest faces that a human being can possibly imagine without the aid of photoshop. I would sing, coo, jump up and down, hit myself on the head with whatever is around… you name it! If I could get Jack to smile by eating cold spam drenched in yogurt and balsamic vinaigrette, I’d do it right now… right now. Now that I know it’s possible to make him smile, it’s all in the world I want.

When I realized the change that’s happened inside me and recognized the fact that all I want is to make that little dude smile, I thought of David as a teenager writing the words of Psalm 19, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” It’s possible for us to make God smile. It’s possible to please His heart and to put a smile on His face. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to make Him smile more than anything else out there?! Isn’t the thought of pleasing Him the most exciting and intoxicating thought ever?! Don’t you want His smile like you want air? You can have it! You… right there where you are in the middle of your life… you can make God smile. Wouldn’t you do anything to see Him smile?