This is a #repost from my social media accounts from 3 years ago… Amazing to look back and see all that has happened since in my life, and specifically all the amazing things that I am so humbled to have been a part of in Danbury! Knowing so many more students and families in Danbury and beyond, an award at DHS in dad’s name, working, coaching, and winning a championship at DHS, and now I am becoming a teacher in the near future, wow, all I can say is #Godsplan is great and still getting better everyday!!

Here is where my heart was and what I wrote 3 years ago (6/22/15)…

To my champ and hero:
“Thought about you often yesterday dad.  It was Father’s Day of course and so I missed you certainly, but I also remembered you because of where I am and what I was doing.  It’s the same as where I was the last week of your life, and the first anniversary of your home going; I’m at camp with kids.  Not just any kids, kids from your high school and your city, where you made a ‘hall of fame’ name for yourself as a player but much more as a man of faith overcoming life everyday even while losing your physical ability daily.  But I’m also with kids much like you, growing up on the wrong side of town where home didn’t always feel like home and safe, and kids with often times deeply strained at best relationships with their dads.

Life in this broken world was so far from fair to you, but you proved to be one of the people of faith that the Bible speaks of as one ‘of whom the world was not worthy’.

I’m thankful for you dad, my daddy, and I’m so proud to be your son and the privilege I had to see your example of faith in Christ growing up.  I’m thankful to the Lord for giving me the best father a boy could have, and the best fit for me.  I’m thankful for all the really fun memories I have of you, and I have them because you always chose to think of me when it was totally valid to just focus on yourself and survival.  I’m thankful that I can say I have a dad who other people bragged on all the time, a truly humble man in every way, that others celebrated and who never desired the spotlight.  I’m thankful how God has set it up once again for me to be at camp on a significant ‘dad day’ between you and me, and for how when I shared the significance of this timing to me, one of the boys with us, a boy brand new to most of the group, was encouraged to be bold and share about losing his dad and how he, a teenager, took it on himself to read the Bible; a God moment on Father’s Day, this bold young man spoke to a room of his peers and said if they would open the Bible and read, God would speak to them too!  I’m thankful that it’s moments like these that remind me, and have reminded me, that just like your last week when it was so hard to be so far away from you, these places with these kids is where the Lord and you too daddy, wanted me to be.

So just as you wanted me to go be with others instead of you, to share with them the Lord Jesus you loved and faithfully served, I’m here again now this week.  And once again I’m remembering you my hero, my champ, my example, my dad, and I both fight of tears and gird up strength knowing you are in a great cloud of witnesses in heaven watching and cheering me on.

One of the boys asked how to know Gods purpose and plan for your life, I believe he and many others will learn just a bit of what I learned from you dad.  You knew the hard way that the only thing that matters in this life is knowing and following Jesus, running a life race of following Him by faith, and hearing when you see Him face to face ‘well done good and faithful servant’ and there becoming no longer a servant but a son!

I love you dad forever, I will see you later when I hope to hear those same words that I know you did.  Until then I press towards that honorable mark of the high call of God in Jesus Christ!”

Forever a son first, Nathan

#TeamWilda #Wilda32 #Team32 #sonsbeforemen