On May 15th, I became a father for the second time.
Kersey Tate Perdew came into the world at 7 lbs. 5 oz, and I held her in the delivery room and felt something I don’t quite have words for yet. Luther is three, Kersey is two weeks old, and I am more undone, in the best possible way, than I have ever been.
Father’s Day has been meaningful. This year, it means more.
I’ve been spending time in Exodus this month, and I keep returning to a thread that runs all the way through it. Not Moses, exactly. But the God behind Moses. The God who speaks from a burning bush and says: I have seen the affliction of my people. I have heard their cry. I know their sufferings. And I have come down.
I have seen. I have heard. I know. I have come down.
There is something about those four phrases that I cannot get past. This is not a God who watches from a careful distance. This is not a God who is aware of suffering in some abstract, celestial way. This is a God who moves toward. Who gets close. And then through the wilderness, he does not deliver Israel and step back to watch from a safe remove. He goes with them. Cloud by day, fire by night. He feeds them when they are hungry. He stays when they forget to follow. Exodus is not primarily a story about escape. It is a story about a Father who will not let his children wander alone.
That is the picture I keep sitting with as Father’s Day approaches.
I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters. Our neighborhood is full of fathers. Men who work long hours and come home and show up for their kids. Men who coach and pray and sacrifice and are quietly breaking cycles that were handed to them, choosing something different for their children. There is real, faithful, present fathering happening on the South Side, and I do not want to gloss over that. We celebrate those men. They are a gift.
And at the same time, we would not be honest if we did not name that father absence is also a real and painful part of the story here. Some of the kids who walk through our doors carry a specific kind of wound. It is one of the griefs of our neighborhood, and we hold it seriously. What that absence does, over time, is distort something in a child. It distorts their picture of what it means to be known and kept by someone who has power over you. It can make the love of a heavenly Father feel abstract or untrustworthy, because the earthly image has been broken or missing. That is not an abstraction to us. We see it up close.
Which is why those four phrases from Exodus feel like more than theology to me right now. I have seen. I have heard. I know. I have come down. That is what children are made to receive. Not from us, but from God. And the work we get to do at CLDI is simply to be a community where that character is on display, imperfectly and partially, as a reflection. A signpost pointing toward a Father who sees every child in this neighborhood, who hears, who knows, and who has not stayed at a distance.
We don’t need to be anyone’s savior to do that. We just need to show up and stay.
This Father’s Day, I want to say two things. To the dads in our neighborhood who are doing the work: we see you. What you are building in your families matters more than you probably know. Thank you. And to anyone who wants to extend that kind of faithful presence to kids and families on the South Side: we would love your partnership. Volunteer. Give. Come. The work is not dramatic most of the time. It is small and slow and ordinary. But it is the kind of work that reflects a God who does not love his children from a distance, but who comes down and walks alongside them, all the way through the wilderness.
That is the story Exodus tells. It is the story we are trying to tell here, too.
