I went to bed this week feeling some regret as a dad.

That's not totally abnormal. I've gone to bed many times as a dad feeling regret. But I was falling asleep. And one of the last things I said to my wife was I feel some regret specifically about our older two kids. We have four kids and we kind of have two sets. We have a 14 year old and a 12 year old. Then there's a five year gap. And we have a six year old and four year old we thought we were done after the first two which is why there's a five year gap and we said let's have more babies i wish we would have just kept going by the way i wish there was no five year gap i wish we would just as soon as we started just kept going busting out the babies uh there's such a gift man um now that i'm in my 30s, I wish we had more kids.

And anyway, if you're young, man, just keep busting out babies.

They're such a gift.

Anyway, we have two sets.

And with the first two, the reason I was feeling some of this regret is with the first two, I was having kids in my 20s and my mid-20s, early to mid-20s. And I still, I came into marriage

and I came into parenting with wounds, with sins, with past pain that I hadn't addressed. And so,

to be frank with you, I think that my older two kids did not get the best version of their

dad that my younger two kids are actually getting to experience. I think that my older two kids did not get the best version of their dad that my younger

two kids are actually getting to experience.

I think my younger two kids are experiencing a healthier version of me than my older two

kids got to experience in the early part of their childhood.

And that just brings some regret in me.

I feel sad about that.

I wish I would have addressed the pain in my life earlier so that my younger two kids

would have got a better version of me. To be honest, I've spent most of their early childhood sick

and in pain, emotional pain, spiritual, relational, all the pain that I hadn't addressed,

I just kind of shoved down. And they took the brunt of that, unfortunately. And that's kind of where that regret came. I'm not going to live in regret and shame. That's not helpful. But it does pop up from time to time. And it popped up recently. I came into parenting when I had our first two kids with such high motivation, man. I was really, really excited about being a dad.

I wanted to give my kids the kind of childhood I longed for.

I wanted to be the kind of dad that I wanted as a kid.

And it turns out motivation is not enough.

Just wanting to be a good dad isn't enough. You have to address pain in order to be healed and to be whole and to be the kind of man that your kids deserve,

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