Audrey Rae-
Your brother is a little young to have passions right now, save for eating, sleeping, and providing a plethora of diapers for me and your mom to take care of, but you, on the other hand, are a passionate 2 year old.
It’s fun; there are few things you do halfway. You can’t watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse without participating in the Hot Dog Dance. Painting never remains on your easel, but quickly becomes an exercise in body art. Even your favorite songs must be sung with volume and fervor. You don’t just love these things, you love to love them.
It may not be the Hot Dog Dance, but your mom and I have passions too. There are things that we love to love, things that we just can’t do mildly. The unfortunate truth of life is that jobs and other responsibilities force people to prioritize their passions, to choose which things to do in the limited amount of free time you have. I love to preach, I feel it’s what Christ has called me to in my life, I love spending time with your mom, I love baseball, I love Magic: The Gathering, I love video games, and I could go on and on about the things I love, but the truth is that I can only partake of some of these things very occasionally.
Sadly, one of these loves had been buried amongst being a responsible adult: writing. In my younger years, I kept and filled composition books and pocket sized notebooks with poetry, short stories, and the like. As I got older, I found myself taking less and less time to sit down and just write. But, being the nerd that I am (and that someday you will likely be as well, but that’ll be a letter for another time), the time that I did find to write was to make backgrounds for my characters in Dungeons and Dragons, and I eventually began to put those backgrounds in a blog.
Recently, Ralph Amsden (and old friend and writer) contacted me about an opportunity. He graciously offered me a chance to write for his blog, The Dad Letters, along with a few other fathers.
Not only was I enthusiastic about writing you and Braxton, something I had been considering for a while, but this gave me a genuine reason to revive my passion for writing.
The reason I tell you this is because someday, you are going to feel like you may want to abandon some of the things you’re passionate about. It may be school, it may be what your friends say, it may even be your mother and me, but there will be reasons that you feel like you just can’t maintain the loves that you have. Other people will encourage this. They’ll tell you to “grow up” or to “be responsible”, but that’s because they just don’t share the passion that you have. They truly just don’t see the thing you love like you see it.
Never let go of the things you love. Never stop drinking in your passions with the utmost enthusiasm. You may not always have the time to enjoy them, but never let life’s circumstances snuff out the zealous girl you are. Approach each new hobby with the same excitement you have now (assuming all of these things are safe and smart, of course) and never abandon the old ones until you choose to let that passion go.
You never know, someday someone may ask you to do the Hot Dog Dance.
On second thought, if someone ever asks you to do a “Hot Dog Dance” and they don’t work for Disney, just walk away.
1 Corinthians 1:4-
Dad
thedadletters.com 