Today Paul Steinbrueck has some thoughts to share with us, and I’m grateful for his encouragement and support of my new book, All Pro Dad. I hope Paul’s words will be an encouragement to you as well.
All Pro Dad: Seven Essentials to Be a Hero to Your Kids is an excellent playbook for fatherhood. Mark Merrill has filled the book with lots of gems of wisdom. Here are 25 of my favorites.
Introduction
1. Leading a family is the hardest job a man can ever have. –Dave Ramsey
2. Our job as dads is to stay the course and to persevere when trouble comes our way, even during the darkest and most difficult hours of our children’s lives.
3. People think love is soft and weak, but it is really a sign of strength. –James “JB” Brown
4. Love is not a feeling; it is a decision. Love is an act of the will to be patient, kind, gentle, humble, sincere, compassionate, giving, faithful, trusting, forgiving, uniting, and persevering.
5. Hail Mary passes don’t work in fatherhood. Fathering is all about a dad moving the ball forward in his relationship with his child, one yard at a time, day in and day out.
Makeup
6. Image is how we think others view us… Identity is who we really are.
7. You were created exclusively by God and for God… There were no flaws in your design & no errors in your construction.
8. Our children need to know that we love them for who they are, not for what they do.
Mind-set
9. Real masculinity is based on two things – relationships and having a cause beyond yourself. –Joe Ehrmann
10. Think of your role as a father as being your job – your most important job – because it is. That should be your mindset.
11. Your job is not that of a general contractor… Your job is that of CEO in your home.
Your Motive
12. Don’t follow your heart, lead your heart.
13. The problem with following your heart, as most people define it, is that you are just chasing whatever feels right at the moment, even though it may not be right.
14. A father who leads his heart pushes aside what he wants to make himself happy and determines that he will do what’s best for his family.
Method
15. People often say “Time is money.” I say, “Time is love.”
Model
16. As a father, you are influencing your children all the time. They are watching you.
17. To be a great prototype for our kids to follow, we must be models not only of integrity but also of humility and courage.
18. If you are married, the very best thing you can do for your children is to love their mother.
Message
19. Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve. –MLK
20. Your pain handled rightly, can turn into your passion and your message to the world.
21. This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. –George Bernard Shaw
22. Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that because that’s what the world needs, people who have come alive. –Howard Thurman
Master
23. Sooner or later, life is going to drop you to your knees. You have to decide whether or not you’re going to look inward or upward. If you look inward, you will find emptiness. If you look upward, you find strength beyond anything you can imagine.
24. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. –CS Lewis
Conclusion
25. You must be forever expanding your capacity to love in order to expand your capacity to lead in your home.
I hope you’ll join me in raising the value of fatherhood and encouraging fathers by tweeting & Facebooking some of these quotes and the whole post. And if you’re a father or love someone who is, you’ll definitely want to buy a copy of All Pro Dad.
Which of these quotes resonate with you? Got any other quotes about fatherhood you’d like to share in a comment?
