I used to dread Father’s Day.

Not because my kids didn’t try. Not because my wife didn’t love me well. I dreaded it because it held up a mirror, and I couldn’t stand what I saw looking back.

For years, my main occupation as a father wasn’t fathering. It was evaluating my fathering. I was so consumed with how poorly I was doing that I missed the people right in front of me. My wife would speak encouragement into me and I’d hand it back to her with a list of reasons she was wrong. My kids would celebrate me and I’d drain it before they finished the sentence.

I wanted to be seen as a good father more than I wanted to actually be one.
That’s a hard thing to write. It’s harder to admit it was true for longer than I’d like to say.
There’s a particular kind of man who does this. He works hard. He shows up. He genuinely loves his family. And he is absolutely miserable because the gap between who he is and who he thinks he should be has become the only thing he can see. Everything his family gives him gets filtered through that gap and comes out as evidence of his failure.
If that’s you right now, I’m not going to tell you to cheer up. I’m going to tell you that I know exactly where you’re standing, and I know what the ground feels like under your boots there.

Here’s what started to shift it for me.

My wife said something honest that I didn’t ask for and didn’t want. My employer furloughed me during COVID and sent me home. God used six weeks of forced stillness to do what years of striving hadn’t. I didn’t fix myself. I got delivered out of a hole I’d spent years digging.

The student who eventually cracked me open wasn’t a counselor or a pastor. She was a college kid in my first-semester automotive class who raised her hand during an icebreaker and asked me, genuinely baffled:

“How are you smiling when you talk about having four children?”

I answered without thinking. “Because I love them.”

I meant it. And somewhere between the hole I’d been in and that classroom, it had become true.

That didn’t happen because I tried harder. It happened because I finally stopped making my performance the point and started making my people the point.

Father’s Day used to be a verdict. Now it’s just a Sunday. A good one that reminds me of God’s grace.

If you’re in the hole this weekend, if the cards and the pancakes and the “Happy Father’s Day” texts are going to feel like accusation more than celebration, I want you to know that’s not the permanent address. It’s a season. And there is work to do on the other side of it that is worth doing.

That work is what I wrote Pray Then Plow about.

Not from the top of the mountain. From about halfway up, still climbing, boots muddy, writing back down to the men still in the valley.

If that’s where you are, it’s for you. → Pray Then Plow: Practical Steps For Men Who Won't Give Up

Whether you grab it or not, Happy Father’s Day. Show up today. That’s enough.

Stay anchored and keeping fighting the good fight,

~ Josh Simons ⚓