byChrisWhite – 2025

Power is a precarious thing. It demands stewardship, not domination, humility, not hubris. The responsibility to wield it rightly, to nurture rather than exploit, becomes clearer when we reflect on what it means to truly serve. As Matthew 20:25-28 reminds us, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

What a grand narrative fathers might weave, were their collective stories gathered and laid bare. Surely, within each of us resides a tale or two, secreted away in the chambers of memory. Yet, as our own fathers age and pass on, we hesitate to expose those accounts that reveal their vulnerabilities, their missteps, their moments of weakness. Such reflections are fraught with tension, for to speak of a father’s fallibility after they’re gone is to acknowledge the fragile nature of authority itself.

I, too, entered the realm of fatherhood more than three decades ago. For twenty-five years, I walked the corridors of law enforcement, occupying positions of considerable rank and influence. In the last fifteen years, my presence has remained within the sphere of governance, where I now hold a station entrusted with the stewardship of private property rights, an arena where power is both an instrument and a test of character. Thus, the nature of dominion, the moral weight of authority, and the grace with which it is wielded have been meditations that have accompanied me for the better part of my life. To command is not merely to govern; it is to reckon with the ethical burden of power, knowing that its true measure lies not in its possession, but in the manner of its restraint.

What I think I know, at least feel, is that power, like fatherhood, is fraught with all sorts of complexities. It is often marred by good intention gone awry. Robert Penn Warren captured this reality when he wrote, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” The stench of our failings clings to even our noblest acts. There is always something, indeed.

As fathers, we inherit the mantle of power, sometimes unwelcome, and often shaped by the men who came before us. And I made many mistakes that I couldn’t see while in the moment. One that I view differently today is that my own father’s legacy, was not one I sought to pass down. His intentions, I’ve now come to see, were not malicious, but his execution was sometime cruel, sometimes an overreaction, tinged with anger and imperfection. In my zeal to shield my son from those not-so-positive memories, I crafted a fortress around him, high and impenetrable. I worked tirelessly to be the opposite of the man who raised me. Yet, in doing so, I now see how I stripped away the fragments of goodness my father sought to convey in his own fumbling ways.

Thus, I found myself, a young father, striving earnestly to embody the ideal of fatherhood I had long envisioned. Yet, even with the purest of intentions, I faltered, though in ways I had not foreseen. It is a peculiar paradox of parenthood that our deepest yearnings to do right by our children are often laced with imperfection. At times, the flaw resides in the impulse itself, misguided by our own limitations. At other times, the intent is noble, yet our execution is marred by haste, by unchecked emotion, by the inability to stand still in the current of our own desires. Wisdom does not merely reside in planning but in the capacity to wait, to listen, to observe, to recognize that the first attempt may be inadequate, and that true mastery lies in returning, tempered by patience, with a plan refined not by passion alone, but by understanding.

There is an unyielding honesty in the bad we endure. It sharpens us, sculpts us, and sometimes wounds us so deeply that we vow to spare our children at all costs. But in that vow lies a blind spot. By insulating my son from the jagged edges of my own upbringing, I denied him the tiny but luminous moments buried in the shadows, those rare instances where my own father’s love emerged, raw and awkward, but genuine. I was just too immature to understand. Worse yet, he died of cancer when I was too young to have future opportunities for reconciliation. Those thoughts got buried, and the exhumation took nearly 60 years.

Fatherhood is, in essence, power wielded over fragile lives. It is the power to build, to shelter, to break, to heal. And yet, in all our striving to master it, there is always something. Perhaps it is inescapable: the mistakes, the blind spots, the unintended harm. We may inoculate ourselves against one evil only to unwittingly breed another.