parenting...........................

 

     My dad and I fished together when I was young, and those are among my most treasured memories of him.  He taught me first to fish with a worm on a bobber, and then to cast a spinning rod.  He was not a fly fisherman, but I wanted to be.  Around the age of twenty-five, I bought myself a rod and reel and began to try to teach myself—a pattern by which, unfortunately, I have learned most of what I've learned in life.  We often speak of a man who's done this successfully as a "self-made man."  The appellation is usually spoken with a sense of admiration, but really it should be said in the same tones we might use of the dearly departed or of a man who recently lost an arm—with sadness and regret.  What the term really means is "an orphaned man who figured how to master some part of life on his own."

-John Eldredge, Fathered by God