The ingredients are exactly the same, but the taste is not. And that’s because it’s not about the ingredients. Rather, it’s about the mother who took the time she didn’t have to create the meal she didn’t need for a child who didn’t understand. And once I became an adult, I realized that those ingredients make the best meals.

The future is shaped by the people that we send into it. And we must never forget that the child tugging on our pant-legs is one of those people.

A father knows that the voice of a child singing is nothing less than the heart of a father that lost its voice. And so, rather than write such singing off to the ignorance of childhood muse, the wise father learns to sing again.

The difference between a ‘man’ and a ‘father’ is that the former shares his genes, but latter gives his life.

If you want to completely destroy a child, all you have to do is mold them into your vision of what you want them to be. If you want to completely liberate a child, all you have to do is grow them into the person they were created to be. The former cannot see God in the child. The latter can see nothing less.

If a father does not altogether embrace a life of uncompromised sacrifice as the core of all principles by which he nurtures his children, he is a father by birth only and no power on earth can ever or will ever make that sufficient.

All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it.

One of a mother’s greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water’s edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet.

A parent holds within their hands the gift of a child to which they must expend the gift of themselves. And in such a monumental outpouring, the parent will lose both the child and the gifts given, but they will possess the far greater gift of knowing that they gave both.