But who can endure the day of His coming? And who shall stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap. (Malachi 3:2)

So this is what it feels like to be thrown into the kiln, to be shaped, molded and refined into a masterpiece at some point.

It hurts a little right now as a dad. It might even be knocking me around a bit on many days, for reasons I can’t go into. When that happens often enough, you replay the tape. Did I do the right thing here? Could I have stayed longer during bedtime? It’s so easy to shoulder the blame and the guilt.

A far cry from how it used to be, because being a dad was so easy.

Kids would listen to you, laugh at y0ur jokes and look up to you. As long as I could give them piggy-back rides to bed, everything would be OK. When things got really bad, you could tell a fart joke to make it all better.

Let’s go to the store for a junk food feast, I used to tell them. Everybody gets a dollar to spend on something bad for you. We would bring it home, gather in a circle and dump out our loot. It was like Halloween in July. The food tasted terrible and probably shortened my lifespan by 10 years. But that wasn’t the point.

It was one of our traditions that nobody else did. It helped make us special.

Now it’s been hard. Sometimes, we don’t have all the answers as parents. We might be reading more parenting books than we would even think about writing.

And even as I write this, the whole building has lost power. I think somebody up in Heaven has a sense of humor.