This is from Dr. Hershael York, one of my professors, to his son. Dr. and Mrs. York have been a great encouragement to Elicia and I. He posted this on his blog (http://hershaelyork.blogspot.com/)
Dear Michael:
During these last days before your marriage to Sarah, my heart is full of anticipation and hope as I look to the future, but also gratitude and smiles as I look at the past. When you came into our home on Easter Sunday almost twenty-four years ago, you brought a sweetness and a joy that I desperately needed. I remember those first days well. To be so tiny—relatively speaking, of course, since you were over 10 pounds at birth—you filled our home and our lives with your presence.
Your mother loved you and gave herself to you in unrelenting and unwavering ways. She was affectionate with you, taught you, played with you, and made your world a wonderful place for a boy to find himself. For all that she poured into you, perhaps the most selfless thing I have ever seen is the way she ceaselessly worked to give me your heart, always attempting to elevate me in your eyes and to make us both men worthy of her. Even in those early days, not long after you were born, when I would come home from the church in the afternoon she would have you freshly bathed and dressed in your little yellow gown. I would lie down on the couch and lay you on my chest and we would sleep the sleep of comfort and connection as the warm afternoon sun filtered through our windows.
In spite of my best efforts you were naturally close to your mother and, like most babies, always preferred her. When you were ten months old, however, that dramatically changed in a single day. We were in Pine Mountain, Georgia, for a music conference at Calloway Gardens and staying at the Davis Inn. I was attending sessions all morning but got the afternoon free. I came back to our room for lunch and you were waiting for me at the door, smiling at me through the glass and holding yourself up. You wanted me to hold you and you intended to stay with me all the time from then on. The greatest gift was seeing what delight that brought to your mother who was wise enough to plant those seeds in your heart.
That closeness never left. When you were nine and ten years old I would steal into your room at night and kneel by your bed and just whisper to you, “Whose boy are you?” and you would answer me without ever opening your eyes or stirring in any other way: “Dad’s boy.” When you were eleven and we went to Chicago and when we went to London for your sixteenth birthday, I felt the same intimacy and comfort with you that I had lying on that couch years before.
You have always been brilliant, graduating from high school at sixteen, from college at twenty, earning your MDiv at twenty-three. Your knowledge of certain things—some of them useless things, by the way—is breathtaking. Now you are one of the youngest ever in the PhD program at Southern. You are not only my son, but also my student and even my Garrett Fellow. Of course I am proud of you. Why wouldn’t I be? You have rarely asked for anything, even more rarely caused me a moment’s worry. If anything, you have let me off the hook way too easily. You are kind, loving, and display a desire to serve the Lord Jesus. Ever since you gave your life to Christ you have been focused on serving Him and fulfilling your ministry.
If my instruction to you has had a recurring theme, certainly it has been that the area in which you needed to grow is your concern and love for others, your compassion and empathy. Not everyone has had your advantages and those very advantages are themselves the gifts of a sovereign God and nothing for which you can justly take credit.
You always attempted to build your own environment and control it. You like things a certain way and have often thought you could have it just so. Now that you have fallen in love with Sarah and are about to marry, I am delighting in just how quickly I see you growing in compassion, in service, in giving up control and learning that service to God often matters most precisely when we are least in control. Marriage will, no doubt, continue to smooth those rough edges and teach you these truths even more effectively, more personally. Seeing you deepen your walk with the Lord even as He shapes you through your commitment to this other wonderful person brings such satisfaction to your mother and me.
I thank you for the grace you have given me. You have always been loving, encouraging, cheerful and especially forgiving. No matter how badly or often I have blown it, you have always chosen to see the best in me and to give me the kind of love and respect that every man wants from his children. If you apply that same grace to your marriage, your wife will feel as blessed to have you as her husband as I feel to have you as my son.You have chosen well, my son.
Sarah is everything your mother and I could have wanted for you. We used to play Wayne Watson’s song, “Somewhere in the World,” and pray for that little girl whose name we did not even know who would grow up to one day marry our son. Little did I know when I came to Buck Run that she was here, waiting for you as you have waited for her, that her parents have prayed for you just as we have prayed for their daughter.
My priorities in life have served me well and I commend them to you. I love the Lord Jesus, I love my wife, I love my sons, I love the Lord’s church, and I love to preach. I trust you have seen these loves reflected in my life and that they will serve as a guide to you.
Keep your priorities as you keep your head on: straight. You do not have to be a great preacher or a famous author. You don’t have to pastor a megachurch or be president of anything. You have to be faithful. Be faithful to the Lord, to your wife, to your children, to the church, and to the task of preaching the Word. Not only will your old man be smiling. Heaven will, too. And one day, when life reverses itself and I am the one in need of constant care, you just might kneel by my bed and whisper in my ear, “Whose dad are you?” and something deep within me will awaken and answer, “I’m your dad.”I love you, Michael. You have my blessing.
Dad
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