It is Father’s Day around the world, and that takes on special meaning for us as Christians. Our relationship with our fathers is a reflection of our relationship with the Father above, who loves us all as His children and endlessly forgives all of our mistakes. Indeed, if you read through the Gospels and try to understand the life of Christ Jesus, you will see very quickly that even though His father Joseph is hardly mentioned after a point, His words on the relationship that the Lord has with us was profoundly influenced by the kind of Earthly father that Joseph was.

Now obviously St. Joseph was a bit special. The Lord clearly saw something in him and decided that he would be an ideal steward for the Messiah. And the Scriptures make it very clear that St. Joseph did the absolute best that he could to give his son a sound and moral upbringing according to the precepts of the Law.

St. Joseph provided a model for all of us to follow as fathers. And it’s a good thing he did, too, because – as I have pointed out before – fatherhood is by far the most difficult and demanding job that a man will ever face.

There is no instruction manual for doing it, and you don’t get a chance to go back and do your mistakes over again. If you have more than one child, the chances are very high that the screw-ups that you make with the first child will carry over on to the other children.

If you play favourites, you are almost certain to damage your relationships with your children, and especially their relationships with each other.

If you have sons, it is your job to provide them with a masculine role model that teaches them both how to be a good man, and how to be good at being a man. The two are NOT the same things.

If you are weak, indecisive, foolish, unwise, or reckless, you will create a disastrous template for your sons to follow – but if you do not even bother to show up to do your job as a father, you will condemn your sons to a damaged and incomplete life that they will have to fix themselves. They will struggle mightily to make those changes, because they have no role model, no template, from which to take cues and lessons.

Several of my readers went through that particular special form of Hell. They made good men out of themselves. But they will tell you openly that it was the hardest thing that they ever had to do. And it was only when they had children themselves – especially sons – that some of them realised just why it was that their fathers ran away from their responsibilities.

Fatherhood is terrifying. It is horribly expensive. It is unbelievably hard work. And it is full of dangers lurking around every corner – and it is only when you become a father that you feel that sickening, numbing weight of responsibility crashing down upon your shoulders, and you realise that it’s not a game anymore, and that here is this tiny helpless squalling little thing in front of you that is looking to YOU for protection and guidance.

And you’re stuck with that thing – FOR LIFE.

Not the first 16-18 years of its existence. Not even the first 26, which is apparently the US government’s idea of when a child is old enough to get its own insurance policy and therefore be an adult.

Fatherhood is a literal LIFE SENTENCE of hard labour. And, make no mistake, it is the hardest kind of labour for a man, because you have to be a man, no matter what. You don’t get a choice in this matter, and if you fail, your own flesh and blood pays the price.

It’s on you to be the knight in shining armour and the model of chivalry for your daughters.

It’s on you to be the dragon-slayer and the monster-killer for your sons.

It’s on you to be the rock in the tempest, the fixed point in the topsy-turvy chaos, the shepherd that goes out looking for his sheep when they go astray.

It’s on you to be a hero.

As I wrote a few years ago on Father’s Day, my father is that man for me. Always has been. Always will be. He is flawed, Fallen, broken, just as any man is. But he’s still my dad, and I know that he loves me with all of his heart – even if he has funny ways of showing it sometimes.

I was incredibly lucky. My father was there when I was born, he was there throughout my childhood, and he never, ever abandoned or dropped his responsibilities. And, whatever their disagreements over the years, my mother and father figured them out and stayed together.

This year my father will celebrate his 68th birthday, my mother will celebrate her 60th, and early next year they will celebrate together their 40th wedding anniversary.

That is an incredible legacy by modern standards, where marriage is seen as lasting only as long as both partners feel like it.

The thing is, though, that ever since I left home at 18, the distances and separations involved created a sort of idealised version of my dad in my mind. I only came home for a couple of weeks every year, so all of our interactions got packed into a relatively short span of time. I didn’t have to live with him day-in and day-out for extended periods and observe him in close proximity beyond a point.

But now that I have spent a year living at home with my parents – with interruptions in the meantime to go traveling to various parts of the world – I have come to see what my father is really like up close, and how much he has changed and drifted away from that idealised version in my mind.

And I have to admit, it is not fun to realise just how ordinary, how human, my dad is.

Back when my mother first met him, the idea of a fixed schedule was absolute anathema to him. But forty years later, he is such a creature of habit that any disturbance from his precious routine will result in a display of grumpy cantankerousness that leaves one wondering what the fuss was all about.

My parents constantly tell me that my diet is incredibly restrictive because all I eat is meat and vegetables. My response to them is that I actually have no problem eating a huge variety of foods – I just hate the variety that is normal around here, because when you insist on cooking the plants into spiced mush and the meats and fish into overpowering curried messes, then you take away all of the pleasure of eating food for its own sake and reduce yourself to eating spices instead.

But compared with my dad, my diet is actually incredibly flexible. The range of foods he cannot eat is bigger than the range he can eat – and I have come to suspect that a lot of his issues with food are psychosomatic, because when he is away from home and traveling, he eats a much wider range of foods and has no problems whatsoever digesting them, but while he is here, he suffers from a number of mysterious and quite weird stomach ailments.

And that is before we get to the way that his temper has degraded over the years.

It used to be that my mother was the one who was as volatile as a hatful of fulminated mercury. The slightest lapse of personal discipline could set her off into a towering rage. My childhood was a happy one, overall, but it was also full of memories of some very traumatic and violent confrontations.

Yet as the years have progressed, she has mellowed significantly – and my dad has worsened.

It used to be that you could have a long conversation with him and he would be pretty mellow about it, on a very wide range of subjects. But nowadays, if you challenge or press him on certain things, beyond a certain point, he will bridle and simply shut down the conversation, and there is no point at all in trying to restart it.

I have observed all of these changes in my father from my time living with him here, and the conclusion is inescapable:

Eventually, your heroes will always let you down. Sooner or later, you will realise that they are merely human – just ordinary men, trying hard to be good, and usually failing pretty miserably.

And that is precisely what makes them heroic.

They try, and they fail often – but when they succeed, they provide a model for you to follow in your journey as a man. Therein lies their value – because instead of running away from the fight, instead of hiding and cowering, instead of complaining about how difficult their burden is to carry, they showed the hell up and did their jobs.

My dad did that. Still does, every single day.

I could describe his daily routine in minute detail, and it would seem quite ridiculous to most people. I understand why. It is ridiculous to hold so rigidly to a fixed schedule every day with no variation – and actually, I believe that my mother makes things worse by constantly mollycoddling him and doing everything for him, which has the unintended effect of making him feel like a helpless invalid when he is absolutely nothing of the sort.

But that would be uncharitable and churlish. The reality is that, whenever I’ve really needed my dad, whenever I’ve really been in trouble, whenever I’ve really been desperate for guidance or counsel – he has been there.

And he always will be. Until he draws his very last breath on this Earth.

I know that as surely as I know that the Sun rises in the east – because he is my father, and he understands what that means.

He knows that his children need a hero. He knows and sees that his son screws up a lot and makes big mistakes and needs to be forgiven from time to time, if only he would ask.

And he does his best, in his own way, to give the things that only a father can.

To all of you fathers out there who read this – you are the hero that your sons look to for lessons on how to be a man, and you are the white knight that your daughters need to keep them safe from the world.

Don’t ever shirk or shrink away from that responsibility. There is no one else who can do it, and certainly no one else who will do it.

It’s all on you. Embrace the glorious burden of fatherhood, for the rewards are great and wonderful indeed.

Someday – and it won’t take that long, actually – your children will thank you for being a good father, for being their hero. They will overlook your faults because they will have learned that heroes aren’t perfect, and aren’t supposed to be.

And they will still love and honour you for being their hero, with all of your imperfections.

There is no greater reward for a man than this. Your children are the manifestation of your hopes and dreams for the future, of the promise of a better world than the one you were born into.

And for those of you whose fathers failed you, or forsook you…

Try to find it in yourself to forgive them. Forgiveness is a wonderful thing, with a power to heal that has to be seen and experienced to be believed. Your father was, and is, only a man. And all men have our breaking points.

If you are not a father yet, perhaps when the day comes that you become one, you will understand why your own father failed to do right by you.

If you are a father now, remember that just because your father failed you, does not mean that you have an excuse or right to fail your sons and daughters.

Be the man that your sons need – the hero that they need – so that one day, they will go on to be the same for their children, and carry your legacy on through time.