06/20/2026
I don’t think there’s any way to explain what it does to a father watching his little girl suffer and not being able to fix it.
Our first daughter went through things no baby should ever have to go through. Surgeries, paralytics, swelling, shots and pokes every day, tubes, hoses, breathing machines, and days where all we could do was sit beside her, pray, and hope.
I remember looking at her and wishing I could take it all from her.
Every needle.
Every machine.
Every hard breath.
Every ounce of pain.
But I couldn’t.
All I could do was love her, pray over her, fight for her, and be her dad for as long as God allowed me to.
And then we lost her.
There’s a kind of pain that changes you permanently. Losing a child does that. It changes how you see life, how you see faith, how you see being a father, and how tightly you hold the people still in front of you.
Then, a week after she passed, we found out my wife was pregnant.
I don’t even know how to fully explain that season. We were grieving one daughter while trying to understand that another life was already beginning. Pain and hope were somehow happening at the same time.
Since then, God has blessed us with two more daughters.
They don’t replace her. Nothing could.
But they remind me that God can still bring life after loss. He can still bring light into places that felt completely dark. He can still write chapters we never saw coming.
This Father’s Day, I’m thankful for the daughters I get to hold, and the father I still have running around on my jobsites! And my father in heaven.
Fatherhood has taught me that love doesn’t end at goodbye.
It has taught me that children are not promised to us, they are entrusted to us.
It has taught me that grief and gratitude can live in the same heart at the same time.