Owen Hugh Coffman

I am writing now from the living room of my house, absolutely distracted by the beautiful child laying on the floor wrapped in the blanket his great-grandmother made for him. I am a father now, weird as that is to write out. Last Friday morning, July 15^th, we welcomed our first son, Owen Hugh Coffman, into the world at 9:08 a.m. He weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces and was 21.25 inches long. He just might be the most precious thing in the entire world.

I am not really sure what to write. The reality of being a dad, of the fact that this kid will live with Clara and me for the next 18 years (at least), sometimes loving us, sometimes despising us simply has not set in yet. I don’t know that it ever will, explicitly. Eventually it will just be the way it is. This is how marriage worked. It felt weird until it didn’t. Nothing happened. Life just kept rumbling on. As it will surely happen in this case.

These are days to be treasured, though. Held close. I am jealous over my time with my son which has absolutely destroyed my productivity. There is a stack now of half-read books about John Milton and the relationship between Christianity and culture that seemed so important a week ago but have not been touched since Owen’s birth. They will seem important again. I am already feeling the pull back to the other things of this world that occupy my time. But what a gift to have nothing better to do now than stare at this beautiful and precious child.

I have an incredible wife. Sorry, I couldn’t think of a great transition into this paragraph. She woke me up at 4 a.m. Friday. We had gone to bed at one and she hadn’t slept a wink. She let me sleep for a little bit, though, and woke me up to tell me it was time. We threw everything into the car and I drove like hell to Topeka. I topped out at 95 mph but backed off a bit when a coyote crossed the road just in front of me. I figured the last thing we needed would be a deer splattered across the windshield.

We got settled in to the birthing center by five and Owen came out at nine. I cannot even begin to describe the toughness I saw from my wife. This was an all-natural birth—no medication, no doctors—just a midwife and a husband’s hand to squeeze. But she gritted it out. What’s more, she remained sweet and good-natured. The night before my calf cramped at an ultimate Frisbee game due to dehydration and I loosed a string of profanity under my breath that would make an inmate blush, and here was my wife giving birth and remaining nice and even. I feel like I have learned more about her in the past few days than I have in previous entire years of our marriage. I have fallen in love with her all over again. She is simply out of my comprehension. Sometimes I wonder if my one great virtue in this life is that I have married well.

I imagine she would not say this, but for me it went fast. All of a sudden instead of enduring contractions, the midwife was telling her to push. I asked her if she was serious, if our son was really coming. You see, part of me was beginning to believe that it might never happen. That the pregnancy was some sort of elaborate ruse and Clara had really just been eating a lot of chocolate or something. Or that our son was going to age for years in his mother’s womb. After months of anticipation and questions, imagining holding him and kissing his face and sleeping with him on my chest, I couldn’t really imagine actually doing these things. They had been abstractions before.

I lay beside her as she pushed. She squeezed my hand to the point that I am still grateful feeling returned. I watched the whole thing. It was unreal. Beautiful. The most amazing thing I have ever seen. And, frankly, it scared the hell out of me.

I am not sure entirely what I was expecting him to look like, but whatever mental picture I had, I was picturing something slightly other than human. I guess I expected him to come out coated with a bunch of gunk and be indiscernible. Imagine my surprise when I saw a head of blond hair and then a face and then the midwives helping his torso and then legs come through and then they put him up next to Clara’s chest and she welcomed him into the world. He started to cry and so did I so he wouldn’t be lonely. Clara held him close and said his name over and over again. I held her close and put my hands on him. And we were a family. We drove to Topeka as two and came home as three.

Letters to Owen

I wrote this letter by hand to my son the other day and left it on the table for his mother to read to him out loud when she got home from work (he is, alas, still in the womb). Today is our due date. Pray for us.

Dear Owen ____ Coffman,

                Listen here, little man, I don’t intend to make cutting deals a central part of my parenting strategy with you. Most of the time I will tell you what to do and expect you to do it fairly well in accordance with my prescriptions. Moreover, I imagine that I am already offering you the best deal that you will ever receive apart from grace when I promise to provide at least 18 years of three meals per day (that’s close to 20,000 free meals), 18 years of free clothing and free vacations and even free life advice. This last offer will last forever. But I feel compelled to sweeten the deal. You see, your mother is in a hellatious work situation right now and your father is something of a deadbeat this summer. I could say that I am pursuing the scholarly life (there is a sizeable stack of books beside me right now with highly intellectual subject matter), but that is only partially accurate. In any event, your arrival will hasten your mother’s retreat from this awful job, plus, we are rather excited to meet you simply for the sake of meeting you, so how about this: if you come sometime on your due date or before, I will take you on the trip of your choice when you graduate high school (within reason: for example, I don’t know what space travel will look like by that point, and within the family budget: your father will probably never be a wealthy man). So there it is. In ink. I love you and can’t wait to meet you. Now that you are fully incentivized, get out here.

Your father,

Toby Alan

DON’T READ THIS PART OUT LOUD!!!

P.S. Mom, I will probably make him this deal in any event. But that’s just between us.

The Fear of the Lord, Part Three

In this series on the fear of the Lord, I began by giving a working/fluid definition of how the fear of the Lord looks for a Christ follower. In the second post, I looked at a brief passage in Luke 12 where Jesus zeroes in on the functionality of the fear of the Lord in the life of a believer—it frees us from the fear of anything else. In this post, I will look at a secondary function of the fear of the Lord and how, building off of our freedom from fear of the world, we are now able to act boldly and somewhat foolishly as we live our lives seeking to give God glory.

Once again, I am drawing from the words of Jesus in Luke’s gospel as the basis for my hermeneutic of fear. These are the words of Jesus after the famous passage about not being anxious about our lives and considering the lilies of the field as an example, which though neither toiling nor spinning are clothed in more grandeur than the finest ensemble in which man has ever arranged his body. After giving these poignant examples, Jesus seeks to encourage his followers with these words:

Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Luke 12:32-34

Because fearing God frees us from the fears of this world, and the fears of this world are not only the more pernicious fears of persecution or martyrdom but the more pressing and mundane concerns over worldly riches and possessions, we are free to live completely counterculturally from the world. We do not have to fear the consequences of making a decision based on serving the kingdom for our God will meet all of our needs. And he is a rich God.

I do not take this to mean that all Christians as our entry fee into the club need to get rid of everything we possess and live off the largess of the government or wealthy and more prudent relatives. Some of the Thessalonian Christians made this mistake and Paul had to correct them a couple of times. It is good to work hard and save some money and manage well what the Lord gives us. But we are also free. The freest of all people. And we exercise that freedom by standing confidently in reverent fear of our God who is love and also a consuming fire. And that God, when he walked around this planet as a man, told us that if we seek first the kingdom of God everything else that we need will be given to us as well. Amen.