You found my boots by the door the other day. My big boots, the ones without laces because I had just finished cleaning them for another season at camp. You climbed in before I could stop you, both feet swallowed whole, and stood there grinning up at me like you’d done something amazing.
“Dada!” You shouted and took one step. The boots stayed put and you nearly went over. You laughed. Tried again. Wobbled across the kitchen floor like a man learning to walk on someone else’s legs.
I tried to laugh too, but something caught in my throat.
It’s the thing I don’t readily say out loud. I’m not sure I’m the man whose shoes you should want to fill. I think about the men who shaped me. My dad, steady when I gave him every reason not to be. My grandfather, whose hands could fix anything and whose word meant everything. The men at church who prayed over me before I understood the meaning of prayer. The men at camp who showed me what it looked like to follow Christ into the woods and not lose Him there.
Theirs are shoes worth filling.
And then there’s me. A man who loses his patience and talks out of turn. Who checks his phone too much when others need him to be present and engaged. Who fails you in small ways you’re too little to catalog yet, but will remember one day.
So I don’t pray that you’ll grow up to be like me.
When I lace up and step out the door each morning, into the cold and the work and whatever the day is going to ask of me, I pray something else. I pray that God walks ahead of me. That He sets my feet down where they ought to go. That the boot prints I leave in the mud behind me are ones He’d be proud of, so that if you ever do come walking after, you won’t really be following me at all.
You’ll be following Him and I’ll just be the prints in between.
Fill those boots son, not mine, but His.
But God help me leave you a trail worth the trouble.
Westerman.Blog 