A Late Night Lesson from a Screaming Baby

My daughters are only sixteen months and two and a half years old, yet I think they’ve already taught me more than I ever will be able to teach them. It’s not that I’m not trying. I know that teaching them about life, faith, and love is my biggest duty. It’s just that some of their lessons to me have been so powerful that I can’t help but doubt my ability to match them. This is one of those lessons.

The majority of my life has been spent making plans and working to complete them. From elementary school on through West Point and law school; my teachers taught me that you had to define your goals or you would never achieve them. My coaches said that those goals should be taped up on my mirror so I would see them each morning as I brushed my teeth and each night before I went to bed.

I dutifully taped up the goals and eventually achieved some of them. But time and time again my best-laid plans shattered upon the anvil of reality. The complex world swirled by and around my fixed goals. A military career ended by injury at the moment that my country needed me. A business career stymied by technical problems in the product we were bringing to market. A writing career stunted by the brutal realities of the evolving publishing industry. A law career crippled by the fact that I didn’t care enough about the end state of corporate legal battles to ever master the field.

Then tragedy struck, I was in the right position with the right skill set to make a bigger difference than I ever could have imagined. If I had succeeded at any of those other fields, then I would not have been ready when I was truly needed. If I hadn’t had tried and failed at so many random occupations, I would’t have had the diverse skill set necessary to weave my way though the military bureaucracy and legal pitfalls that needed to be overcome along the way.

I had to face the stark reality that I was put in all of those positions by a higher power. My plans were destined to fail before they’d even been concocted. It’s a humbling and terrifying feeling to understand that you’re a pawn in a larger game and that it is a game beyond your comprehension. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters said in The Brothers Karamazov, “since I can’t understand even (Euclidian Geometry)…, I can’t expect to understand about God.”

So much of the world doesn’t seem to make sense. How can we not help but question the greater plan. In a world where a father is killed by an IED on the other side of the world from his children… Where illness or abuse can inflict a child before they’ve even said their first word… Where a man can spend his whole life trying to build up a company only to have it dashed by a world economic collapse… Where people will blow themselves up in a marketplace crowded with their neighbors in an effort to please God…

How do you try to navigate through a world that complex and disastrous?

I received the answer from my two little girls.

I was not prepared for parenthood in general. I was even less prepared for the long nights spent trying to get an overtired baby to quit screaming and go to sleep. I read the books and followed their tricks: everything from setting a sleep schedule, to swaddling, to rocking them in the same room as a running clothes dryer.

Some of these tricks worked to a degree. But they didn’t change the fact that I spent a lot of time with screaming infants in my arms. The longer they stayed up, the madder they became. I felt their frustration at their inability to make themselves feel better. They would struggle to move this way, then that way, then this way again. None of their attempts to improve their plight helped.

I knew that they were just tired. That the only way for them to feel better was for them to go to sleep. I wished that there was someway for me to impart that to them, but their young minds couldn’t comprehend what was really going on.

Each night, they would struggle in my arms until they finally went to sleep. Then I would walk them over to the bassinet and lay them down at total peace. The exact peace that they had wanted all along. They just didn’t know what they had to do to get it.

One of those late nights, I realized that we are all in the same position with God. We don’t understand what role we are supposed to play in this world or what good things can come out of our failures and miseries. We struggle, fight, and rant to try and accomplish the objectives that we think are critical.

We rail against the situation and lose ourselves in doubts, but eventually we have to give ourselves over to the knowledge that there is a higher power and that higher power will eventually drag us kicking and screaming to where we are supposed to be.

Our job is to do our best not to be a complete disaster along the way. I still have a lot to learn before I figure that trick out.