When my daughter was very small, she had a favorite song she would sing, very loudly, often for hours at a time.
This song is one most, if not all, of us know very well. “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”. Just mentioning the song has many of you singing it right now. Like many children, my daughter, when she was first learning the song, replaced some of the correct words she could not remember, with something else so she could continue the song. In her case she added the words “whumpa whumpa”. Here is how it went:
“The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain.
And the whumpa whumpa spider went up the water spout
Down came the rain…..”
The effect of this addition was, it created a closed loop that never reached an ending. On long road trips, this became quite annoying for her brothers who had to sit in the back seat and hear the never ending song. Eventually, eliciting a desperate plea to “make her stop!”
It’s funny how we now look back and cherish some of the annoying things our children do because it is part of what has made them uniquely who they are today.
As fathers we sometimes add a “whumpa whumpa” to how we live our lives.
Physically, emotionally, and spiritually we add a “whumpa whumpa” and get locked into a never ending loop of responses, actions, reactions, thoughts, and etc. This “whumpa whumpa” causes those around us, as well as us, to become frustrated with the way our lives are going.
We keep doing the same things over and over without seeing any change in our lives. In fact, like the siblings in the back seat on a long road trip, we find ourselves digressing into destructive or argumentative behavior and not growing in a positive way.
Many of the American Indian tribes believed that life is a great spiral beginning at birth and ending in the afterlife joined with the Great Spirit. The expectation was always that what you see today you will see again in the future. The trick is that as you complete each circle, in life, you should not be seeing things from the same perspective. You must see things from a higher vantage point or you are not moving closer to the Great Spirit.
If we use our Father God as our example of perfect fatherhood, we will find ourselves constantly searching for new pearls of wisdom to become better fathers. As we seek we will learn more about our Father God and be drawn closer to Him. Thus we will spiral ever closer and as we complete each circle in life, we will see the past in a different way,
Like when we look back on the annoying actions of our children and cherish them as part of what makes them uniquely who they are, we will be able to look at the things we face today and cherish them, no matter how bad they seem today, as what is forming us into better fathers who are more aligned with the perfect Father God.
Do not allow the “whumpa whumpa”, in your life’s moments, to lock you into a never ending loop of immature fatherhood.
Break free and climb the water spout again.
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