This piece breaks down the top ten gifts every father can give—from patience and playfulness to strong spiritual leadership. A practical and encouraging read for dads at every stage.

Take What You Need: Thanksgiving Scriptures

Have you ever struggled to relate to the healing miracles in the Gospels? It may seem like an odd question—after all, these miracles confirm Jesus’s identity as the Messiah and the divine Son of God. His healing reveals both his power and compassion. But what if you’re not the one who experiences the miracle? We lost our precious 11-year-old daughter, Alynnah, four years ago to a rare blood disease called aplastic anemia. In the months after her death, I read John 11 more times than I can count. Though I found comfort in our Savior’s great proclamation, “I am the resurrection and the life,” my heart also ached because we didn’t experience a miracle in the hospital room. While Lazarus’s resurrection is one of the most amazing stories in the Gospels, Don Carson reminds us that Lazarus was raised to a mortal life; he died again. But John tells the story of Lazarus so we may believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and to assure us that Jesus is who he claimed to be (20:31). Let’s consider three aspects of John 11 that comfort those who grieve. ‘He Was Outraged’ The raising of Lazarus is the climax of John’s “Book of Signs” (chap. 1–12) and a foreshadowing of the “Book of Glory” (chap. 13–21) that will culminate in Jesus’s death and resurrection. At the beginning of John 11, Jesus hears that Lazarus is sick. John’s readers are perhaps shocked when Jesus doesn’t immediately travel to Bethany and even says he’s glad he wasn’t there, in order that they’ll believe (v. 15). When Jesus arrives, Lazarus has already been dead for four days. Lazarus’s sisters are in deep distress. Beyond their grief for their brother, they know that Jesus could’ve prevented his death. But Jesus assures Martha he isn’t just a healer. He is, in the truest sense, a grave robber: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (v. 25). What great hope for the Christian! The weeping of Martha and the Jews with her prompts a strong emotional response from Christ in verse 33: outrage. Though often translated as “deeply moved,” many scholars agree that the Greek verb here indicates outrage or anger (e.g., HCSB). Therefore, “he was outraged in his Spirit” may be the better translation. Why was he angry? Some scholars suggest he’s angry at death itself; others suggest his anger is toward the Jews’ unbelief, a major theme in John. Edward Klink suggests both may be in view, while giving more prominence to the first option. Additionally, he argues that Jesus, as the second person of the Trinity, embraces the plight of his people and also sees what God sees: the effects of sin and death in the world. Death is unnatural, no matter the person’s age, and Jesus’s disposition toward death is anger, which is wonderful news for us. ‘Jesus Wept’ Many of us proudly memorized John 11:35 in Sunday school—just two words in English. But what does the shortest verse in the Bible teach us about Jesus’s relationship with those who mourn death? Given his outrage in verse 33 and his imminent resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus’s tears aren’t for Lazarus, as George Beasley-Murray observes. Jesus has already said this death is for God’s glory, and in only a few moments, Jesus will be reunited with his friend. Jesus’s disposition toward death is anger, which is wonderful news for us. Instead, Jesus weeps because Martha and Mary weep. Though he knows the end of the story, he doesn’t remain emotionally detached from those whose hearts have been shattered. James Hamilton puts it beautifully: “No one knows better than Jesus what is going to happen in this episode. No one is better at mourning with those who mourn than Jesus.” ‘He Has Been Dead Four Days’ While it’s a great comfort that Jesus hates death and grieves with us, we don’t only need sympathy. We need Jesus to do something about death. When Jesus commands the stone to be rolled away, Martha protests: “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days” (v. 39). While many Jews believed resurrection after four days was both theologically and biologically impossible, four days is no problem for the Creator of the universe. As Jesus approaches the tomb, he’s outraged once more, again at the idea of death itself. In 1 Kings 18:37, Elijah asks God to act so the people around him would know that the Lord is God. Here, Jesus has already been heard by the Father, but he prays so the people around him would believe (John 11:42). He then shouts, “Lazarus, come out” (v. 43). The dead man walks out, still wrapped in burial clothes. Jesus’s simple instructions to unwrap him and let him go implies not only that Lazarus was miraculously brought back from the dead but that Jesus’s glory as the Creator is on display in immediately restoring Lazarus’s decayed body. Lazarus’s resurrection after four days gives us hope for two reasons. First, as Irenaeus wrote long ago, Jesus’s raising of Lazarus prefigures our bodily resurrection. Just as Jesus raises a shout at Lazarus’s tomb, he’ll descend from heaven with a shout, calling all the dead to burst from their graves (1 Thess. 4:16). Just as Jesus raised a shout at the tomb of Lazarus, he will descend from heaven with a shout, calling all the dead to burst from their graves. Second, whether someone has recently died (such as the widow’s son at Nain or the daughter of Jairus) or has been in the grave for four days, four decades, or four thousand years, no length of time is an obstacle for Jesus’s resurrection power. My family will grieve our daughter for the rest of our lives. Grief is messy, and faith is often frail. But we cling to Jesus’s promise that he’s the resurrection and the life and that everyone who believes in him shall never die. Dear reader, I pose the same question Jesus asked Martha in response to this truth: Do you believe this?

Trees are a major character in Train Dreams. They aren’t just beautiful (though they certainly are beautifully shot by cinematographer Adolpho Veloso). They’re meaningful. In the haunting new film from writer-director Clint Bentley (out today on Netflix), trees act almost like avatars of the divine presence—the Creator who gives life and takes it, a God who is our shelter and shade but also a consuming fire. Based on Denis Johnson’s novella—a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—Train Dreams is about a lot of things. It’s about America: westward expansion, Pacific Northwest frontier grit, rugged individualism. It’s about a man: Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), an orphaned boy turned railroad worker and woodsman whose lifespan the story narrates. But it’s also about God: little spoken of in the film but palpably present. Johnson is a Hemingwayesque writer who became a Christian in midlife, writing acclaimed essays with titles like “Bikers for Jesus.” His writing is spiritually curious if not explicitly Christian. Train Dreams has a transcendental vibe that feels inspired by Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau. The prose is terse and masculine but imbued with an existential wonder. Bentley’s film captures all this well, in a style unmistakably indebted to Terrence Malick (especially Tree of Life). Yet it’d be unjust to write off Train Dreams as a Malick knockoff. Bentley is a formidable talent in his own right (see his 2021 debut Jockey or last year’s Sing Sing, which he cowrote). And Train Dreams announces him as a major American talent. It’s one of the best films of the year. He Gives and Takes Away Train Dreams (rated PG-13) evokes Malick’s style (elliptical editing, ponderous voiceover, golden-hour cinematography) but also his themes—especially Tree of Life’s focus on the parallel tracks of life’s beauty and pain. The Book of Job looms large in Malick’s magnum opus, with one character explicitly referencing Job 1:21 (“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away”) in response to a tragic death. That tension also frames the drama of Train Dreams, the “dreams” of which sometimes look Edenic and sometimes nightmarish. Grainier’s life is full of transcendent beauty and unimaginable tragedy; sublime bursts of joy and heartache haunt him. Life for Grainier is both blessed and cursed. This is our world: jarring contrasts, highs and lows, verdant springtimes and cruel winters. It’s almost like there’s a design to it, a harmony that makes it meaningful. This is our world: jarring contrasts, highs and lows, verdant springtimes and cruel winters. Trees underscore this. The film foregrounds how trees give life. They bless us in their oxygen-producing, shade-providing life. And they bless us in their death. The cutting down of trees provides shelter in the form of houses (Grainier builds his own log cabin twice in the film), fuel for fires that help us survive winter, lumber for industry, and materials for infrastructure—railroads, bridges—that opened up the West. In the death of trees, there is life. But trees are also means of death, something the film notes explicitly several times. A miscalculated felling of a large spruce turns deadly for a handful of unfortunate men crushed in the giant timber’s path. A dead branch falls and happens to hit a man walking underneath at the wrong time. Most fearsomely, trees become agents of death by spreading wildfire—turning an idyllic, enchanted forest into a hellish inferno, beloved homes into ash. “The dead tree is as important as the living one,” one character observes. “There must be something we can learn from that.” Indeed, trees teach us what Grainier comes to see: that all things work together, both the hard things and the good, both in nature and one’s own life. There’s a design we need not understand to acknowledge. In a memorable scene (featured prominently in the trailer), one character says, “Beautiful, ain’t it?” to which Grainier replies, “What is?” The character responds, in one of his last words before death, “All of it. Every bit of it.” The line is the film’s thesis. Life in its anguish, as well as in its bliss, is a beautiful gift to acknowledge and embrace. Even if we can’t control or understand it. Small Life, Big World Bentley’s script—which he cowrote with Sing Sing collaborator Greg Kwedar—does a marvelous job juxtaposing one small, unknown life with a big, mysterious universe. Featuring the distinctive voice of Will Patton as the narrator, the story follows Grainier’s life from his obscure beginnings as an orphaned child sent to Idaho on the Great Northern railroad, from an unknown place and unknown parents. His is a “hidden life” that plays out against the backdrop of a rapidly changing America, from the 19th-century pioneer days to the invention of television and space travel. Occasionally, Grainier feels directly affected by this wider world. The Great War influences his job prospects. The Great Depression takes its toll. The macroeconomic needs of American industry intertwine with Grainier’s microeconomic livelihood. But mostly Grainier just lives quietly in his little acreage near Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in a Thoreauvian cabin in the woods where he’s building a life with a loving wife (Felicity Jones) he met at church. Their baby daughter Kate makes his dangerous work feel more worth it. He wants to provide for her, perhaps giving her joy and opportunities he didn’t have. The American dream. Here’s a man who works hard, his head down and an axe over his shoulder. Simple ambitions: love and protect his family, work with a sturdy hand, help others where he can. When he fails to protect others—as in a pivotal early scene when a Chinese railroad worker is threatened by fellow track laborers—it pricks his conscience and haunts him for years. Malick’s Tree of Life jarringly juxtaposed the micro (nuclear family in 1950s Texas) and the macro (the literal cosmos, from its creation until its death) in a way echoed here. But Train Dreams tackles the contrast in a more modest way. There are no dinosaurs or asteroid impacts, yet there are frequent references to how mind-bogglingly old creation is (“The world’s an old place. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now”) and how minuscule our lives are by comparison. The effect is powerful. It’s one life as a lens to contemplate the cosmos. The universe in a Grainier of sand. See Life from a Bigger View Edgerton is an underrated actor and inhabits Grainier’s character with uncanny power. He gives the character a strapping stoicism that’s strong but also quietly vulnerable; he’s a man who speaks little but says a lot with his eyes. It’s rare and refreshing to see such an honoring portrait of a man in contemporary film. Grainier is a husband, a father, a provider, a friend; “a steady man,” as Johnson’s book describes him. Late in the film, he looks in a mirror and sees a reflection of his face for the first time in nearly a decade. He’s not a ruminating overprocessor, even though his trauma and pain are real. He opens up emotionally to friends on occasion. But mostly he works through his pain in his sleep, his haunting dreams excavating layers of unspoken emotion. In waking life, he may be unmistakably world-weary, but he doesn’t complain. He keeps his hand to the proverbial plow. He copes not by laboring to understand what’s ultimately unanswerable but by simply pressing on. It’s not that Grainier isn’t curious about the “why” behind his life’s traumas. It’s just that he knows he has a limited perspective on how it all fits into the broader workings and mysteries of the world. Moments of perspective loom large in the film. Grainier stands with a friend on a forest service lookout tower and sees a larger view of the landscape. At one point in his old age, he takes a $4 single-engine plane flight to “see the world as only the birds do.” In a rare visit to a city in 1962, he pauses by a TV screen in a storefront window to see John Glenn’s first images of Earth, as seen from space. “So is that—?” Grainier asks a woman on the street. She replies, “That’s us.” Here’s a man who works hard, his head down and an axe over his shoulder. Simple ambitions: love and protect his family, work with a sturdy hand, help others where he can. The line has meaning for us viewers too. As we watch Grainier’s particular life, in a specific place in time, we’re invited to reflect on our own lives. We may not be bearded lumberjacks, but like Grainier, we’ve been given breath in a particular place and time. We’ve each been given an unfolding life of twists and turns we can’t control and might never understand. But do we need to understand? The tree in the forest doesn’t know when it’ll be cut down or burned in a fire, or why. It doesn’t need to know. It’s enough to just be a tree while it has the chance to be, putting down roots and breathing out oxygen. So for us. Your life and mine are like the tree whose every ring of age is known by its sovereign Creator even before it was a seed. Every hair is known by God (Matt. 10:30). Every word, every action, and the precise duration of our lives are known before our first cells took shape (Ps. 139). “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it,” David rightly reflects (v. 6). Yet even as we can’t have Godlike knowledge—the forbidden fruit of the tree of Genesis 2:17—we can trust our Maker and marvel at all he made: Our lives. Every tree in every forest. Every snow-capped mountain peak. All of it made with intention. All of it made to glorify God.

In this plenary talk from TGC25, Mark Vroegop teaches from Ephesians 2:11–22. He talks about the compelling need to remember our redemption and its results, to understand how our vertical reconciliation to God affects our horizontal reconciliation with each other. In response to this truth, Vroegop calls for the church to embody the unity and diversity foretold in Revelation 7.