Last Post/New site

Greetings to all 3 of you who read this blog. It may seem silly, but Dana and I have combined and moved our blogs over to:

http://kangascommune.wordpress.com

So... um, if you remember, or read this at all, please feel free to check that site, rather than this.

Book: Becoming a Dad

Becoming A Dad: A Spiritual, Emotional And Practical Guide by Stephen James

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really liked this book. It's written by two christian guys, both counselors. They really cut right to the heart of what being a dad (and an many ways, being a man, and being a christian) means. You have all sorts of responsibility, you have a certain amount of influence and power, you have very little real control... and guess what? You're going to screw it up. You will fall flat on your face. But, the great thing is, life isn't lived in the perfect moments only, but in recovery and repentance. And as a dad, you have the opportunity to teach your children that very fact.


View all my reviews.

On Being a Father

It is going to be bloody and messy, painful and hard. And we cannot escape it. We cannot separate ourselves from it. The ugly truth is that our children will experience this same painful wounding, and it will be at our hands.

Stephen James and David Thomas

Four years ago

Four years ago, my father, Daniel Raymond Kangas, 54 years old, of Chattaroy, WA, passed away. I miss him terribly sometimes still.

Grief is a really hard thing to process. I guess I just want to sort of "get over it" and only have happy feelings when I think back about my dad, but feelings don't really work that way. There are always happy feelings mixed up with pangs of sadness. Then sometimes there's guilt for wanting to not feel sad, as though it's wrong of me to not miss him. Then there's anger at the guilt, as though I am trapped by it and I MUST feel that way, even though I don't want to.

And of course there's feelings of helplessness as I know that there's nothing I can do to bring him back, and very little I can even do to sharpen my memory of him. There's some feelings of sadness and fear that all that I know and remember of him will fade with the years.

But usually, when I miss him and go through all this again, I come to the conclusion that he wouldn't want me to sit around moping. I'm sure he would love to be the center of my thoughts, but he wouldn't want me to be paralyzed by grief. So it becomes a wound that I bear, that never really heals. And yet it's not all bad. It's this kind of crazy wound that feels good and bad all at once, waxing and waning in the intensity of feeling, sometimes quickly, sometimes very, very slowly.

I miss my Dad.