​I have always marveled at Elliott's eyes in this baby picture. Less than a day old, and his eyes are staring the world down. As if dreaming of chasing down all that can be seen.

Babies do that, don't they? If they see it, they chase it. It's why we parents lock cabinets and put 'do-not-ingests' on the highest shelves.

But at some point, for most, the chasing stops.

I've wondered lately, what happens first. Do we stop seeing, do we stop having visions, or do we lose the courage to go after what we see?

I think I believe it's the latter.

Baby Elliott's 12-hour old seeing involved no analytics. There is no calculation in his gaze. There is no memory of disappointment. No voice whispering, "Careful." There's simply seeing followed by going. Instinct. As if vision is all the momentum one needs to take a step.

What changes? Trust?

Do we start attaching footnotes to what we see?

Yes, but last time...

Yes, but who am I to think....

Yes, but I know how this ends.

I don't think vision ever goes away, but belief does. And without belief, seeing can become cruel rather than inviting. So we protect ourselves - not by closing our eyes, but by staying put.

I've always loved the innocence in this picture of Elliott. He hasn’t learned yet that going can cost you something. He hasn’t learned to wrestle with fear. He hasn’t learned that going sometimes leads to more hiding than chasing.

I don't think we all need to return to our baby picture age of innocence. But I do think many of us need to recover some permission in our lives.

Permission to go again, even with scar tissue. Permission to believe that failure doesn't need to blur our vision, it can deepen it. Permission to trust that what we see now isn't foolish just because something else didn't work before.

Elliott could see, but he really didn't know where he was going. He just knew life was moving toward him and he was allowed to meet it.

I've learned, in no small part from being a dad to a baby, that growing older isn't about seeing less. It's about learning, slowly and courageously, how to go anyway. 

​Yesterday, I wrote about New England Patriot's coach Mike Vrabel, and how he made connection with his team a priority in his coaching style. I wrote he does that because that is what each of us requires - longs for - relationship.

I thought about that deeper yesterday in terms of Jesus - and Christianity. There's an old saying - a cliche' of sorts - that says 'Christianity is not a religion, it's a relationship'. What that is saying is the heart of Christianity is not about cleaning up your act, it's about drawing closer to the one who gave you your act to begin with.

It's about loving the one who gave the rules so deeply that rules feel more like a path to love than mandates that begin to feel like the price of love.

And this is how Christianity often gets distorted into something transactional:

“If I do this, God will do that.”

“If I behave, God will bless.”

“If I fail, God will punish.”

That’s not relationship. That’s spiritual management.

As someone who has experienced a failed marriage, I started thinking of this spiritual management in terms of marital management. How you can be committed to following every rule of marriage and still land in an emotional desert. How if you don't wake up every day centered on growing and nurturing the love in the connection, the rules of the connection can become quickly meaningless.

Behaving like a happily married couple doesn't always mean there is happy love between the couple.

And I think of it in terms of fatherhood. How a dad can raise children to fully understand the rules of a home so strongly that the child's greatest desire becomes leaving that home. It's easy for parenting to become about establishing and enforcing rules at the expense of not growing a connection.

Rules will never bring a child back home; connection will make it impossible for them to stay away.

I think that's what Jesus longs for - a connection that makes it impossible for us to stay away. And too often, it's breaking the 'rules and commandments' of Christianity that leaves folks believing they are unworthy of a connection with Jesus.

That's a completely upside down understanding of Jesus, and a repellent to those longing for a connection with something bigger than themselves.

Jesus came to help us understand that following rules is not the path to him, but rather, loving him is the path to following the rules. Jesus love is built on accepting that he came to love the flawed rule breakers, not the folks who believed they could become flawless enough to earn his love.

Following rules is rarely the path to a loving connection, but a loving connection is often a path to longing for guardrails and rules that will protect that connection.

Memorizing the rules of love will leave you in a constant pursuit of love. Getting to know someone - a never ending desire to do so - that is the path to love.

That, is the ONLY path.

​Mike Vrabel is the first year coach of the New England Patriots. He just led the Patriots to their first division title since a guy named Tom Brady was around - which makes Vrabel and his team quite a story.

Before their playoff game yesterday, one of the pre-game shows interviewed several Patriot players about "how did you do it?" The players referenced something that happened before the season, and off the field, as a big piece of their success.

In a team meeting before the season began, Vrabel asked each player to share their 4 H's. He asked each player to stand up and share their: History, Hero, Heartbreak, and Hope.

The players said initially they felt uneasy about the request - until Vrabel volunteered to go first. They said their coach being vulnerable felt like an invitation for them to do the same.

It's my observation that the leaders who don't lead well - who are leaders with far more subordinates than followers - skip this vital step that Vrabel put first. The step of connecting.

And the first step of connecting is always - "I want to know you."

Leading without connecting is managing. Or more honestly, it’s controlling. You can get compliance without connection. You can get motion without meaning. You can even get results for a while. But you will not get loyalty, trust, or transformation.

I see it often in the business world, in the pastoral world, in the coaching world - and really, quite often, in the parenting world. Leaders - those in some position of authority - who have no idea how to connect to another human being on a vulnerable level, so they overcompensate for it by doubling down on control. Intimidation. Fear-based guidance.

Without connection, people don’t follow the leader, they follow the paycheck, the rulebook, or the exit sign. I hear a lot about 'burnout' these days - and in many cases, burnout is simply a case of not enough connection.

None of this is surprising. Our brains are wired this way. They are always seeking safety - they most often feel their safest inside connection - and inside that connection is where they are eager to listen, learn, and follow.

When you stand up in front of a room of teammates and share your biggest heartbreak, and your teammates listen with interest and compassion, you feel safe, seen, and known. And when this is all arranged by your coach, invited by him, you're suddenly a player who wants to not just play for that coach, you want to follow him.

Some days the world feels pretty chaotic to me. I feel like that's because we don't have enough leaders. And I'm not talking national level politicians - I'm talking leaders in our families, and businesses, and churches, and communities.

We have too many people in charge who don't know how to connect (often because they grew up without it) - who do not VALUE connection - so they lead with control. And eventually, too much control starts to look like too much out of control.

If you want to become a better leader today, maybe ask those you want to follow you about their 4 H's. And when they look a little uneasy about it - you go first.

You lead the way.

​What kind of man sends an open letter to a college football team that will never read it? The kind of man who’s less interested in telling them something and more interested in telling himself something.

Many of you know writing is my way of processing life. To include disappointment.

And - many of you know I am a diehard Notre Dame football fan. Have been dating back to the days of playing high school football for Knute Rockne's grandson. We weren't very good, but he was still Knute Rockne's grandson!

As such, I had many friends reach out yesterday asking my opinion about Notre Dame being left out of the college football playoff. I don't know, honestly - my son Elliott and I exchanged a lot of text messages yesterday after the announcement, and I'm sure I included some opinions in there, but with age I've become much more interested in the lessons available in conflicts and unpopular decisions than I am with opinions.

Which gets to the letter. Because more than anything, my heart hurt for the kids this decision impacted. I know fans assume no one is more impacted by sports decisions than fans - but that's a myth. The folks actually playing the games have a little bit more invested in the outcomes. Hard to believe, I know, but it's true.

And the young men on this Irish football team had every reason to believe that for the second year in a row, they were headed back to the college playoffs. And, like last year, when they made it to the championship game, they believed they could make a run at winning it.

When your mind gets to believing a plan and the plan is suddenly swept away, spirits can be swept away as well.

My heart for this team got caught up in that sweeping yesterday. I don't know a single one of them personally, but you get to know a team over the course of a season watching every second of every one of their games. Not REALLY knowing them - but enough so to wish away disappointment in their lives.

With almost perfect timing, I heard Steven Furtick say today, "God often sends a problem as an answer to a prayer." The idea being that sometimes our plans being swept away IS part of the plan.

God's plan, not ours.

I look back on my life and I can see it - more times than I can count - disappointment that my Plan A didn't work out being transformed to a Plan B - or C - that made disappointment suddenly feel more like a gift.

This team is lucky. They have a coach whose greatest gift might be helping young people see the path ahead when the path they're on seems washed away in a storm. They have a coach in Marcus Freeman who helps people - players and fans alike - see sunshine where there is none.

None present and none in the short-term forecast.

Only one team will win the college football playoff. And after they win, their lives will take on a direction influenced by that outcome.

And our beloved Notre Dame players. They are not included in the playoff. That will influence life direction as well. I don't have an opinion about that, really. There is too much wrong with the world for me to be too opinionated about what is wrong with college football.

But I do have a prayer for the players on this year's team. That they will one day walk a path on which they can look back at this moment, and even if not find beauty in it, they will at least come to know that disappointment is far more often a building block than it is destruction.

Plan A is nice when life goes according to Plan A.

Life rarely does, though.

Which makes embracing the Plan Bs in life - or Cs - one of the keys to embracing a fulfilling life.

When it comes to Notre Dame football, Plan A for me is still living long enough to see the team win another National Championship.

Plan B has given me something a championship alone never could - countless Saturdays with my boys, watching young men chase something bigger than themselves.

For that, I’m deeply grateful.

So, to the Irish players and coaches, thank you. May your plan B work out as beautiful as mine, even if today it is hard to see.

And forever, #GoIrish🍀

​I remember receiving a phone call from a young man I worked with at Eckerd Youth Alternatives. Jimmy. He was 12 years old when he came into our care. I was his counselor. He was a kid with tons of struggles in life, and he handled none of them well.

The kid threatened to kill me daily and cussed at me more often than that. After spending a year with us, he graduated the program. Most kids did.

The adult staff and the 9 other boys he lived with at camp all stood up at this ceremony and shared fond memories of their time with Jimmy. I'm not sure where any of them came up with those memories. They wished him well, and stated how sure they were he was going to be a great success in life.

I'm sure I lied and said something along those lines as well. But in reality, I knew the only success Jimmy was going to have in life was the possibility of parole attached to the multiple life sentences he was sure to collect within minutes of departing our lying eyes.

Nearly 5 years later, I inexplicably answered a weekend phone call in the main office building - something I never did on the weekends. It was Jimmy. He told me he had been locked up in a detention center in Florida for the past year. But before I could think or say "I knew it", he told me this:

Chief Keith, (we were all called "Chief" at Eckerd), he said, I know you didn't think I'd make anything of my life when I left camp. And until now I really haven't. But I'm going to. I've spent the past year thinking about all the things you told me about life, and now I'm going to change. I just wanted to say thank you.

Then he hung up.

That thank you has haunted me. Not because of who said it or how little faith I had in that kid, but because it is the starkest reminder I have of how few people I have thanked for helping me along the way.

People who never gave up on me.

Several years later I was sitting in my office pondering how ill-prepared I was to become a father. And since I was less than a few months away from becoming a father for the first time, this depressed me.

Until that day, I had been able to convince myself that raising a child couldn't be any more difficult than tossing a ball or putting a worm on a hook. But the due date kept closing in, like a fire, and as it did, I could hear a baby crying and I had no idea how to stop it.

I began to see images of a boy who needed direction through a world I was far from figuring out myself. I began to wonder what I had gotten this innocent child into.

To distract myself I rifled through the day's mail. That's when I came across a letter from a young man I had worked with several years earlier. Tyler.

Unlike Jimmy, I always knew Tyler would be successful. I often wondered what he was even doing at camp. Most days I was sure my life was more screwed up and at-risk than his.

As I ran my fingers through the envelope to open the letter, it struck me that it was stamped in Samoa.

Tyler began the letter by telling me he was working at a surf shop in Samoa. I wasn't surprised. Then he told me he heard that I was going to be a father. He said that was a great thing - that I was going to be a wonderful dad.

He went on to tell me how I was always a great father figure to the guys in his group. And he said thank you.

I was floored - that from a far away place - he would think enough of my contribution to his life to send a letter. More than that, though, I wondered how many people in my life may have needed some timely reassurance that I could have provided with a simple thank you - and they never got it.

I don't know, but thanks to Tyler's thank you, I never worried about my ability to be a father again. Or at least, not with as much panic.

On December 18th, 2006, Elliott Cartwright arrived. In no simple fashion. In the words of Dr. Knelson, who delivered him, he was born with little more than a heartbeat. But Dr. Knelson pounded our baby's chest and shared breath with him for the next several hours like he was his own son. He saw life in a lifeless baby and willed our boy to see a world beyond that delivery room.

I watched that man, old and graying, steal our boy from the determined arms of death and hand him to us like it was just another day at the office. Elliott spent a couple of weeks in the NICU, but he came home with us.

Today he is a healthy college student.

A couple of days after he delivered Elliott, Dr. Knelson walked into Elliott's mom's hospital room. The timing of his visit was a little unexpected and sent me scrambling for the speech I had rehearsed over and over in my head since witnessing the miracle he had performed. The one that allowed me to be called a father.

My mouth got tired of waiting and without permission spit out the following words: Thank you.

From across the room, Dr. Knelson stared me straight in the eyes and said, "don't thank me, thank Him. I'm not good enough to do what happened in that delivery room."

With his response came two lessons:

One, I do not thank God nearly enough for the blessings in my life. Too often, because I don't think beyond the rush of emotion that comes from receiving an act of kindness, or a miracle, I fail to look for God's hand in the sometimes miraculous but often quite simple moments that construct this astonishing life I live.

Two, God knows what he is doing in my life. He uses each of us to do his His will in our intermingled lives. And although I don't believe He is ever more glorified than when we thank Him personally for our connectedness, he doesn't need it.

I imagine God feels like I feel when I watch one of our boys do something kind for the other that I have secretly directed. And the other, completely unaware that I've had a hand in the act, thanks his brother. I always feel the joy of that thanks as if it is directed at me.

I believe God celebrates each and every time we thank someone for the contributions they have made to our lives.

I remember sitting down at my desk and writing out a thank you note to an old high school football coach. It surprised me that I was doing so. Until I began taking a mental inventory of the people who had made contributions to my life that influenced who I was to that day, I hadn't thought much about him. That's because life had lulled me into some sense of belief that it was me and only me responsible for any good in my life.

I thanked coach for the day he piled the entire team into the backs of a herd of pick up trucks and drove us out the country roads that surrounded our school until we were 10 miles or so from where we left. He then told us to get out and run home. This was troubling. I didn't know how to get home, and I knew there was no way I was keeping up with my teammates who were sprinting away like they were the only ones who did.

I made it home. I ran sprints after practice for a month or so because I didn't make it as fast as coach wanted me to, but I made it.

Many years later I would embark on a career working with at-risk youth. Many times these kids would get upset with me because I was asking them to do things they felt were impossible to achieve. I grew fond of telling them that it's not the people who are asking you to do the impossible you need to be upset with, but the people who aren't asking you to do anything at all - because that's exactly what those people believe you're capable of.

When I finished the note to coach, I began to search the internet for his address. I hadn't talked to him in years so I had no idea where I'd find him, but I was determined to get him this note. I suppose that's what hurt the most when my search turned up that he had died of cancer several years earlier.

He would never receive my thanks. He would never hear me admit that what I once called the dumbest thing I had ever heard a coach ask his players to do clung to me long enough to become a valuable life lesson for others. A legacy of sorts, I suppose.

I think people deserve to know their legacy.

I think they deserve to know it before they unknowingly part from our lives forever.

Maybe that is one of the things a thank you does best. It writes legacies.

It's never too late to say thank you, until it is.....

(re-written from a 2012 article I wrote)

​I have shared this story before, but several years ago I had a scary dad moment. I was sitting in my chair doing something on my laptop when my 6 year old son Elliott came in and told me a story about something that happened at school that day. He finished the story and began walking away, turning around as he walked off. I looked up just in time to see a face, sad and dejected, that upended me.

The face of a child who knew an important story in his life wasn't Important enough to draw his dad away from his work. Or more likely, away from some social media or a sports website.

I made a commitment in that moment of shame and embarrassment - when I hear one of my kid's voices I will look up and listen. I'm sure I haven't been perfectly faithful to that commitment, but the awareness I gained in that moment has helped me be a part of conversations I'm sure I would have totally missed in the years since.

And that goes beyond my son.

I am a part of a training this week: CHATS (Connecting Humans and Telling Stories). I've been a part of several of these. But one thing about these experiences that never stops amazing me is just how important it is for people to feel listened to.

It's always rewarding, and yet, at the same time sad, seeing subtle looks of disbelief on people's faces as other people embrace their stories. As if they have spent most of their lives telling stories to people who refused to look up from their laptops.

I told the group yesterday that it is always fulfilling for me to see beauty come alive in a diverse group of people sharing stories with one another and not one story is too diverse to be heard and treasured by the collective diversity. But, I also told them, it breaks my heart for the giant world of people outside our little room carrying stories they long to share with people who have no longing whatsoever to hear them.

Being unheard. It may be one of the quietest forms of torture.

Being heard. It may be one of the sweetest kinds of relief. A relief that is so ever pervasive in these CHATS experiences.

On the way to my CHATS experience, I stopped at Virginia Tech and took my now college freshman, Elliott, to lunch. Sitting at lunch, I had no laptop or phone open, and I asked him, "What's been the hardest part of transitioning from high school to college several hours away from home?"

We had a nice talk. And it wasn't lost on me just how different the look on his face was in that moment than it was on the face of that dejected 6 year-old walking away unheard.

It's never too late to be curious.

It's never too late to ask questions.

So many people base their worth on the willingness of others to hear their stories.

Please, ask someone to hear their story today.

Let someone know today that they are worthy of shutting the laptop, putting down the phone.

We need to know, that as we scroll through the stories on our devices, we are missing the most important stories of all.

​Last night, I went to see the movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere with my 17-year-old son, Ian. The film tells the story behind Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, the same year I graduated high school.

Sitting there beside my son, I couldn’t help but notice the collision of timelines: my past and his future, my youth mirrored in the music of a man whose songs have quietly scored the story of my life for decades.

There was something almost spiritual about the experience, watching my son inherit a cultural influence that helped shape me long before he was born. It felt like passing a torch I had no idea I'd one day pass when I first held the baton - awestruck - watching the boss perform for 3 1/2 hours in Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-80s.

What struck me most about the movie wasn’t just the music, it was the pain behind it. Nebraska wasn’t an album Springsteen wanted to write; it was one he had to write. Out of his own darkness - darkness born of a fractured childhood and lifelong depression, he created something raw, unsettling, and true.

As I watched, I saw pieces of myself reflected back on that screen. It frankly made it difficult to watch at times. I saw a man haunted by his past, struggling mightily to enter intimacy and connection, wrestling with ghosts that refused to leave him behind.

I saw the blank-faced isolation of someone who can fill stadiums and still feel desperately unseen.

I wondered, did my son see it too? Did he see and feel the connection between this story he was watching on the screen and the story sitting beside him?

Probably not. How could he? Like most sons his age, he knows fragments of my story - some of the good, the bad, the occasional vulnerability, but not the full arc of how closely my own life has shadowed Springsteen’s.

There would be little reason, really, for the empathy he was surely feeling for that man to reach the man beside him. And in many ways I felt okay with that in the moment.

Springsteen’s struggle was never about fame; it was about survival. He wrote Nebraska as a means of deliverance, a way of giving voice to the darkness that threatened to consume him.

In that way, I understood him completely. Because writing my memoir has felt the same - not something I want to do, but something I have to do. It’s an act of surrender to what’s been buried too long, a way of pulling beauty out of pain, as if that's the sole mission of pain to begin with.

I heard someone say recently that the worst thing we’ve ever done is not bigger than our calling. I’ve been thinking this morning that maybe the worst thing we’ve ever experienced isn’t bigger than our calling either. Our pasts may try to drag us down, but if we’re willing, we can drag them into the future as art, as truth, as connection.

Springsteen’s producers and promoters tried to talk him out of Nebraska. Too dark, too strange, too unlike anything expected of him. But he persisted. He knew this was the work he needed to put into the world.

Watching that persistence stirred something in me - a reminder that some creations are born not out of idea or inspiration or ambition, but out of necessity.

What we create from pain has the power to heal - not just us, but others who see themselves in our stories. That’s the strange redemption of art: it transforms isolation into resonance, sorrow into song, and suffering into togetherness.

Maybe that’s what my son saw last night, even if he wasn't quite old or wise enough to name it; he saw the mysterious way our brokenness can still become a bridge.

A bridge from 1982 to 2025.

A bridge from darkness to light.

A bridge from father to son.

Deliver me from nowhere.

But please, deliver me forward.

​Post divorce, movies were a source of healing and bonding for me and the boys.

In the beginning, there was no small amount of guilt that came with those movie visits. While I was married, it was their mom who always took them to movies. I would stay behind. Just one example of how kids are impacted when the two people they live with are quietly invested in avoiding one another.

But eventually, I saw how much joy the movies brought the boys. It became clear to me that the movies didn't trigger the same kind of emotions in them that were often triggered in me. So, I traded triggers for peace.

And now, today, with or without them movies bring me peace. Thankfully, yesterday was a 'with them' day. Or at least with one of them.

Elliott is home from college, and so we decided to take in a movie. It was the first movie either of us had seen since Elliott went off to college two months ago. In many ways, the theatre felt like we were both coming home.

One thing about the movies - Elliott is my popcorn guy. Ian doesn't touch the stuff. But Elliott - well, I know he'd still go to the movies if they didn't have popcorn, but I also know he wouldn't enjoy them nearly as much without it. Kind of like I'd still eat ice cream without the chocolate syrup and peanuts, but PLEASE don't take away the syrup and peanuts.

It was early in the movie. I reached over and stuck my hand in Elliott's giant bucket of popcorn and retrieved a handful. I'm not a big popcorn guy myself, but there has always been something kind of comforting about sharing a handful or two of Elliott's.

I think maybe it's the way he doesn't fight me off. Or more, the way he'll move his hands aside to gladly let me share in it. It's not a "he paid for it so I guess I'm obligated to share" kind of sharing, but more like a willingness. A desire. And I like that.

It is funny in life how the places we once had a hard time showing up to can still become places of peace. Joy. It is interesting how wounds can become scars and then scars can somehow become a source of peace in the revealing of them.

In the letting go of them.

In the healing.

It's worth noting that the movie we saw yesterday was "One Battle After Another". That is life, isn't it? One battle after another. I know it's mine.

But I was reminded in that theatre yesterday that life is always better when we don't allow ourselves to stay stuck in the same battle. There's a battle ahead that deserves our attention. And hey, if they are serving popcorn at that battle, count me in!!

​Last night, Elliott sent me a picture out of the blue, his first football game as a student at Virginia Tech.

On the surface it would appear to be just another snapshot of a ruckus Lane stadium, the crowd, the moment. But the picture was more masterpiece than snapshot; snapshots can't find the deepest parts of one like this picture did.

There’s something about surprise gestures like this. They remind us we’re being thought of, even when we don’t ask. They open a window into our kids’ world - what they’re seeing, feeling, living. For a moment a simple picture bridges the miles between Short Pump and Blacksburg.

The truth is, I needed that bridge. You worry about your kid when they go off to college. And maybe I worry a little bit extra because when I went off to college I really went off - and in many ways my life since then has been a giant fight to get back on.

It's also true that Elliott's birth was probably the biggest victory in that fight to get back on - a light in a dark life came on. I've never depended on that kid for that light, but I have sure treasured it.

I think that’s why when his picture came through joy swelled in a way that feels bigger than the picture itself. It’s not just the stadium lights or the maroon shirts in the stands, it’s the message behind it: “Dad, I wanted you to see this. I wanted you to be part of this moment with me.”

It strikes me that these small, simple ways of saying “I’m thinking of you” are missing in many relationships. We wait for the big conversations, the grand gestures, or the perfect timing, when most of the time what we really need is just a simple reminder that we’re on someone’s mind.

Is there a greater gift in life than to know we are on the minds of those whose minds we long to be on? Is there any easier gift to offer?

Connection isn’t as complicated as we sometimes make it. It lives in the ordinary. A picture. A quick text. A simple “I thought of you.”

Those are the moments that remind us we belong to one another. And they are never as small as they seem.

It is the thought that counts, they say.

Sometimes there is little that counts more.

​He goes off to college today.

In the earliest seconds of his life, when they were fighting to SAVE his life, college seemed so far away.

As I changed the first diaper of my life, good Lord did college seem so far away!!

When he took his first steps and said his first words, college seemed so far away.

When we were playing ball in the yard and then when he caught his first pass on the field, college seemed so far away.

When he started high school, when he was suddenly holding a driver's license, college seemed so far away.

Shoot, even as I sat and Facetimed him in a McDonald's parking lot yesterday, college seemed so far away.

But it is not far away.

Today college is here.

I have joked with Elliott a lot this past year: "don't do it dude - don't grow up - I am telling you this whole adult thing is not all it's cracked up to be."

I have said that with such mixed emotions.

I know in that joke (or maybe not a joke) is the voice of a dad who has not treated the whole adult thing well, and nor has the whole adult thing always been a devoted friend to him. But yet, I also say it with great joy and great hope and great pride, for this kid - my kid - enters this adult world from an entirely different starting point than I entered it from.

He does not take with him many things from his childhood that I took from mine, things, it turns out, that will always want to make a war of adulthood.

As thankful as I am for things he will take to college, I am equally thankful for that which will not go with him.

I am also thankful that one of the greatest declarations of peace upon my adulthood was hearing the words: "your baby is going to be just fine." If I were to know I'd have to experience every moment of my adulthood war all over again just to experience that one precious moment of peace, I would do it.

I would do it without anything near a second thought.

For that little baby goes off to college today. And I don't need him for even a moment to redeem my adulthood - that mission has long been accomplished.

No, all I need is the chance to say thank you.

Thank you, God.

For as far away as college has always felt to me, you've always known this day was right here and now. You have guarded so many of his steps along the way. You have guarded so many of MY steps along the way.

In your quiet way, you have always encouraged me to treasure every moment, and I have. So that today I don't sit here wondering where the time went, I simply say thank you for that time.

What a gift. Every second.

For sure there have been moments along the way when I have not been there - and today will be another one of them - but you will be, God.

That is not just 'a' comfort, it is THE comfort.

My comfort.

For I know it will be true of his adulthood what has been true of mine, that no matter what, you never walk away. There is never an adulthood war too big for you. In the midst of all darkness, you remain a light.

A light pointing to college.

To adulthood.

To eternal life with you.

It all seems so far away, until it's not. And in that I find great joy and great hope.

Go get em baby Elliott.....

Welcome to adulthood, and don't say I didn't warn you 😊❤️