Catch-all Clean-up

Today I decided to dive into the top drawer of my dresser...which is a serious catch-all...and has been collecting stuff for at least the last decade...maybe longer.  I truly believe my boys especially, are fascinated by this assortment of "stuff", because for years I have been catching them in the act of getting into it...and telling them to stay out of my top drawer, mainly for personal privacy, but partially because I had even lost track of all the stuff that was in there and I didn't want them to discover some lost treasure that I might find one of these days when I got around to it.  Anyway, for whatever reason, today was that day.  I opened the drawer and decided to discover what all was in there, and also because I was running out of room.  To my surprise, among a lot of other stuff, was an emotional experience in the making.
Sure, I found a variety of nick-nacks and miscellaneous items galore, which I won't bore you with, since that is not the point of this blog entry.  What I discovered that was worth writing about was a poignant reminder of how fast time flies and how much I am now wishing I could turn back the clock.
Somewhere along the way I had received 2 small books on being a good Dad.  One entitled, "How to Be Your Daughter's Daddy, 365 Ways To Show Her You Care" and another much like it entitled, "How to Be Your Little Man's Dad, 365 Things To Do With Your Son".  Finding these 2 books stuffed back in the back corner of my top drawer immediately brought me to tears.  First of all because they were stuffed way back in the back corner and had not been removed in years and then right along with that and all mixed in with the emotion was knowing that time had indeed slipped away.   Being my daughters daddy and little man's dad is basically history...chapters of my life that are mostly gone.   Then at the same time discovering a pile of wallet size pictures of my kiddos over the past few years and having the visual evidence right before my eyes of just how fast they had indeed grown up.  It was too much.   But that wasn't all...I kept finding more things that continued to drive home this same message.
My own Dad, somewhere along the way, had sent me a copy of an article from Christianity Today, in a section of the magazine called "A Father's Heart", and an article entitled, "The Little Things".   He sent it to me to encourage me to treasure the time spent with my family and protect it and not neglect it.
And then I found a "TUIT"...you know, a round tuit.   One of those little coin-like things you keep in your pocket and pull out at that perfect moment (which I don't think ever actually occurs, except in movies) when you catch somebody saying, "I will take care of that when I get around to it"...and then you casually take your round tuit out of your pocket and hand it to them nonchalantly and tell them to "Get ur' done".  The TUIT kinda did me in too.  It all came swirling down and just nailed me.  The whole drawer was throwing signs at me from different angles that kept telling me my kiddos were not kiddos anymore...that my time as a daddy was soon to be, if not already gone....that my times for using these books as practical suggestions of things I could go and do with my kids was now so outdated that they were irrelevant...gone...done...history.   The round tuit wouldn't even help.  I couldn't do these things when I could get around to doing them...they just were not even a possibility anymore.
So I sat and stared at this stuff causing me to think back on my past years as a "daddy", and I began to reflect.  Sure, time had indeed slipped away, and sure I am a bit of a work-a-holic and there were missed opportunities that I now wish I could go back and do over and re-live and re-prioritize the time spent with my kiddos, and yes I feel sad about these things.  But, guess what I also realized?  I realized that even though I may not have been the perfect father, I do have a lot of great memories and if I needed to refresh my memory of these past years, all I had to do was pull out the 2 drawer fulls of pictures and spend a day looking at them all. (by the way, I think that was one of the 365 things in the book I could do with my kids...so maybe some of these are not outdated after all).   I realized that I really love my kids and am really enjoying the age they are at right now too, and the talents and skills they are developing and the young adults they are becoming.   And, I also realized it is not too late to still be their daddy...and maybe won't be until we get to heaven.

Do you ever think these kind of thoughts when you clean out your top drawer?  Just wondering.