It is possible for me to feel so repulsed by the need to suffer along with people for their sins and their failures and their stupidity and all the ways they bring misery on themselves, that I withdraw from them, despise them, resent them. But fatherhood is a school of vulnerability, one that will guarantee a broken heart. Fatherhood is the choosing of a person, and the verification of that choice by not ceasing to love when that person abuses their freedom and brings misery on themselves and those they love and by whom they are loved. "Why isn't it easier?" we ask ourselves. Shouldn't sacrificing and not taking the wide and easy road have been... well, easier? A strange question, but it's the one I'm asking. How did we convince ourselves of this possibility? Was it a ruse to console ourselves in the midst of self-chosen hardship? That it would definitely pay off one day, and we would be spared the ordinary suffering, the unintelligent and undisciplined suffering of those who never sacrificed as we did? We took the discipline, we restrained ourselves, we chose the difficult good, and found that we still have to suffer with the rest in all the same ways they do.

Yet seeing this in no way causes me to regret the way of sacrifice and discipline. What is wisdom, anyway? Is it anything more than the sifting of a marginally deeper layer of the mystery, the full depths of which remain buried beyond my reach? Wisdom has no other payoff than itself. Am I any better for having grasped this? What am I to make of the resignation that would not renounce the free choices that brought me to this place of painful understanding, however helpless I remain? Is this what hope feels like?