What makes fatherhood an initiatory fire?

 
Of all the initiatory fires you’ll confront in your life, fatherhood is perhaps the most challenging and confronting. Unlike the slow-burn of all the other fires, fatherhood is a raging inferno you get thrust into without any preparation. You’re tossed into the furnace — and left to burn.

This process is not controlled or self-paced. It’s a blunt force trauma to your self-identity as a man and the predictable structures it once relied upon.

There’s very little you can do to prepare for the extreme event of becoming a father.

You’ll fight. You’ll flail. And in your weakest moments, you’ll temporarily succumb to total utter collapse. Collapse of your dreams. Collapse of your mission. Collapse of your relationship. Collapse of every entitlement you held so dear.

You’ll experience the momentary despair and hopelessness of a man being pushed to his absolute edge. Complete and total overwhelm, where all the tools and strategies you successfully relied on in your previous life are now rendered useless.

Like trying to rip through a thick steel door with a dull hatchet.

Yet you’ll bang and hack and cry and scream, for you know your freedom is on the other side of that steel door. Overmatched and exhausted, you’ll die the necessary death. You’ll let this fire consume you, You’ll let the man die — and the king rise. For only he possesses the key.