Unconditional "Like"

Dear Son,

I got this story in an email message today, and I thought about how it applies to how I feel about you (and how I should apply it in how I treat you). I have read it over a couple of times – it says some things that I really would like you to hear – from my heart.

I should have learned this lesson a long time ago and not wasted so much time pushing you away. For that, I am sorry. I hope you can see that someone else struggles with the same issues that I do, but that it in no way means that this man hasn’t always loved his son very, very much – as I do you.

I am always here for you – and I will make an honest effort to just let you be you.

Love, Mom (...osm)

Unconditional “Like”
By John Fischer

I just finished spending four days in the constant company of my 25-year-old son. I am a fortunate man.

At his request, I accompanied him halfway across the country with harrowing experiences crossing the Arizona Rocky Mountains on the heels of a thirty-inch snowstorm with no heat in his truck, scraping ice with our credit cards off the INSIDE of the windshield!

The whole experience was crammed into four days—two days and nights driving including a stop to repair the heater, and two days finding an apartment, shopping for essentials, and moving him in. On the morning of the fifth day he dropped me off at the airport and immediately drove to the office for his first day at his new job.

And now I’m on a plane home and I can’t hold back the tears. I’ve known I loved my son—of course… he’s my son—but I didn’t realize how much I liked him. My feelings toward him have been hindered by my judgment of him and my displeasure over some of his choices. Of course my disappointment was the result of a true concern for him and his own development, but it occurs to me now that it has also been colored by a concern for the repercussions his choices might have on me and what others might think of me as his father.

So I guess you might say I’m learning about unconditional “like.” My wife likes our children unconditionally. She does not judge them when they come to her with things that might displease her, and as a result, they tell her everything. I am not so fortunate. I get the edited version of the truth.

How does God love? How do I want Him to relate to me? Certainly I would want Him to like me unconditionally—to want to be with me regardless, and to not reject me when I do something wrong, or remove His love from me when I tell him the truth.

What the late Fred Rogers meant when he said “I like you the way you are”, is a way of expressing God’s unconditional “like.” I am so sorry it’s taken me so long to get this. The tears are over lost time and the distance I need to make up.

In the film, Father of the Bride, Steve Martin looks at his 22-year-old daughter and sees her, instead, as his 6-year-old in pigtails. I had a couple of those double takes this weekend as I caught my son at a much younger age when it was easier to like him. He was smaller and his early decisions were easily managed.

Starting here, starting now—I like him, just the way he is.