holding our breaths

I can't help but think back to all of the times in my life when everything changed all at once. My first day of kindergarten when my parents stayed a little while for the first hour or so just to make sure I was okay. And despite my uncertainty combined with the feeling that everything from here on out would be different, for the the next thirteen years, sure enough, I was fine. Then I had to feel it all again when I moved into the dorm room for the first time. The next time I felt it was on an airplane headed toward Portland Oregon after joining a team of actors whom I had never met for a year long excursion promoting the power of translation and the work of God. The night I got there I had no one to comfort me and let me know that this next year of your life would challenge and change everything I thought it meant to be a man and a Christian. That time changed my life more than anything. The next time I felt this strange feeling of change and uncertainty mixed with excitement and elation was on a six hour drive from Pine Bluff to a little town called Nashville. It was not long after Leslie and I had met and I knew for some inexplicable reason that that was where I was supposed to be. I moved into a small tri-plex house with a roommate I wouldn't meet until the next day in a city where I didn't have a job or even a prospect of a job and all I really did know was that I was in the place where Leslie and I had fallen in love and this was where I wanted to begin a life with her. (She hadn't even moved there yet.) While there everything changed again: I got my first grown up job, learned I was not a banker, applied for college again, proposed to Leslie, started back school in Philosophy, married the love of my life, then graduated. Lots more stuff happened in between all of that, but every one of those experiences started the same way. It's almost like the feeling right before you get on the biggest roller coaster for the first time: you know you want to, you don't know why you want to, you are scared to, but you do it anyway, and right when you get to the top of the first hill, you look over the top at where you are headed, then you look around at the world you are so high above, you have that most unique feeling that life is beautiful, then right before your stomach hits your throat there is a pause. I'm in that pause right now.

Nine months ago, I was staring at a little stick on the bathroom counter while standing next to Leslie and both of our eyes became saucers. We looked at each other in joy and fear and we knew that from here on everything would be different. We hugged and cried and we were excited. We knew that things would be difficult, as most pregnancies are, but we didn't care. We would carry on. And so we did. Nine months has gone by like summer break after the fifth grade. Now we are on the precipice again. We are holding hands gritting our teeth and holding our breaths for the plunge that is the ultimate of uncertainties. We already love this person that we have never met and we are being entrusted with the responsibilities of not only growing him into a healthy self sustainable being, but have also been entrusted with the ultimate rite of developing him into a normal adult. I know that is too overwhelming to think of in the over arching future, but I can't help but take the responsibility seriously. Every one we talk to tells us that we will be good parents. We know that we have four eager and willing grandparents to help us in all ways in which we need it. We have friends and other family that is there for anything we need as well. We make enough money to make Luke's life more comfortable than probably 80 percent of the world's population. Living in the suburbs of New Orleans is proving to be a wonderful place to start a family and raise them to fear God and respect life and love.

I know that the next however many years will be unlike anything I have ever experienced. I wouldn't have it any other way. What is strange is that Luke will never know me before this coming week. I almost wish he could have been with me through all of the changes and lessons I will be teaching him and that are okay to experience. He will live the first part of his life knowing that the things Leslie and I teach him are things that we have always known. He will not understand that experiencing them is how best to learn them in order to help someone else through them in the future. He will think (I hope) that I am the strongest daddy in the world and Leslie is the refuge of comfort that will always be there to make things okay. These are the things that you always look forward to as being a parent, but once they are here and after experiencing life up until this point, you know that nothing is ever the way you envisioned them before you have yet experienced them.

Before we moved to South Louisiana I knew that I would be working for Leslie's dad in his tree business. I had worked a couple of times with him before we moved, but only a couple of times. I had this vision of what working with him full time would be like, and I thought I knew what to expect. It turns out after the first month of waking up every morning hardly able to move, and coming home every day smelling like the underside of ground up tree roots; things were quite a bit different than I had expected. The work was hard: physically and mentally. But it turns out I enjoyed it. I took pride in our work just as Leslie's dad had done for many years before. The pride he felt for a job well done I felt the same. We were a team and we did a good job together. It turns out that the job that I had expected from the start turned into much more, developing my sense of pride in hard work, developing a core strength with extensive patience and endurance, but also a strong bond between me and Leslie's dad (one we might not have if we hadn't spent almost every day together for the past two years). My point is that even though I had good expectations going into the job, I was rewarded a hundred fold in what I actually got from the job. I know that Luke's birth will not prove to be different. What is kind of overwhelming is that I can't wait for this time with Luke to start. I am on the roller coaster on the top of the first and highest hill looking at what I think is going to come then looking around at the world below me and all around me thinking this is going to be good and knowing I can't wait to fill this baby's life full of love and happy experiences he can some day look back on and know he was right where he was supposed to be; with the family he was supposed to be with, with the abilities he was predestined to have, with parents that genuinely desired the best life that he could possibly have.

Luke, I can't wait to meet you. I can't wait to hold your hand when you are young, and walk beside you when you are old. I can't wait to pick you up when you are little and teach you to stand when you are strong. I can't wait to teach you what's right so you can later live a life of integrity. I hope and I pray that I am and will be the kind of man you will always want to be like. You have become my inspiration to be a better person, and I hope you share that desire with me some day.

I know every dad says there is no other feeling in the world like being a dad, but right now I can say, there is no other feeling in the world like becoming a dad in a matter of days. Leslie and I are holding hands, standing on the precipice, and holding our breaths about to take the plunge of our lives. I can't help but know that this is going to be the best experience there is in life.

Love and Sincerity,

Aaron and Leslie