I just felt baby girl kicking and moving around for the first time!

It is one of the coolest, strangest, most awesome, most mind-boggling things I have ever felt. There is a little person in there, growing – now big enough that when she moves and pushes or kicks against the womb, I can feel it.

In a few months, she’ll be so big that we’ll be seeing it when she’s stretching and kicking.

A few months after that, we’ll be holding her.

The thought awes me, and it has brought me near to tears a few times already. There is already a sense of responsibility and weight and fearful expectation. I am going to be this little girl’s father, her first picture of a father.

I have seen, in many people’s lives, how their relationship with their father informs their understanding of God. That is as it should be: God created the human relationship of father to child as a model of our relationship to him, just as marriage is a picture of Christ and the church.

If we are not struck by the responsibility we have to present him well – as faithful husbands and gracious, loving fathers – we do not understand what marriage and fatherhood are at their core very well at all.

Every time I get a better sense of what marriage means, and now as I first begin to grasp what being a father means, I understand the weight that God has put on my shoulders and I am driven back to him. There is no way I can do this as I should on my own, no way that in my own understanding and wisdom I can present God as he is.

Yet the Spirit gives grace, and Christ has united us to him, and the Father himself loves us. Praise God that our hope is not in our own strength, but in Christ who has become our wisdom as well as our righteousness.