Expectant Faith

(This article is re-posted from The Lutheran  online)


Being an expectant father is an act of faith. Our whole lives are filled with acts of faith, but the stakes seem a little higher for me now that my wife and I are expecting our first child. As Father’s Day approaches, I’m acutely aware of my abilities and failures, my strengths and weaknesses, my faithfulness to God, my sins against the world and how I might influence my future child.

The unknowns and anxieties that come with expecting a child are pretty daunting and push one into living by faith alone. This faith entails living into the unknown but daily approaching the role of providing for my child. It is because of my faith that I am up for the challenge of fatherhood.

Being an expectant father has also made me realize my faith in new ways. Over the past few months, Scripture has come alive. Something has changed for me when I read Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism, the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in our world, in which the voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).

Reading these beautiful words, a whole new level of meaning has opened up to me. It’s truly remarkable that God chose the Son to unite heaven and earth in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The pattern for our life with God is the relationship between the Father and the Son, a relationship that is a profoundly wonderful pattern for salvation. God could have chosen any means by which to save the world, but the person in whom God placed the hope of all the world was Jesus Christ, God’s only son.

This is newly amazing to me because, just as all of the world’s hopes and dreams were fulfilled in God's son who was promised to the world long ago, all my hopes and dreams are wrapped up in the baby whose arrival I anxiously await. The expectancy, anxiousness and hopefulness that culminated in the incarnation are present as my wife and I await the new gift of life that will be born to us soon.

Father’s Day is a day of honoring fathers and those who are father figures in our lives. This Father’s Day, I live into the expectation of my child and my fatherhood. Truly, an act of faith.