To my beloved children:

As you were growing up and even as you are still learning in life, I am doing my best to be a good father and provider for you and to teach you the life skills necessary for being people of true character and people prepared for real life. At this stage in your lives, I continue to pray for each of you, and when invited, it is my greatest joy to provide fatherly counsel to you for important life matters. However, I also realize that giving and receiving fatherly counsel is not always easy; therefore, to help you benefit from my many years of life experience and hard learned life lessons, I personally write these letters to you as a simple way to benefit you throughout your whole life. And one of my deepest prayers for each of you is that you fully realize each day of your lives that you are each completely and totally responsible for your life and your decisions. In the simplest of terms, this is what it means to be an adult. Without question, to live your life as a fully responsible and healthy adult, you must unequivocally embrace your life decisions as well as the resulting life consequences – the good and the bad – always.

I share this with you because as much as possible, I don’t want you to experience life the painful way. And because I know that we mostly learn in life through two primary means…tribulation and revelation…mistakes and mentors, I firmly implore each of you to please seek truthful revelation to avoid painful tribulation and please choose wise trustworthy mentors to avoid foolish costly mistakes. And trust me when I say…mentors are so much better than mistakes and revelation is so much better than tribulation.

When you live life long enough, I am certain that you will each learn for yourselves that every choice requires a decision and every decision determines a path and every path leads to a destination. Therefore, learn this principle early. Your life choices are yours alone to make and your destination is yours alone to embrace. Regardless of your life choices, I want you to know that I love each of you individually, with my whole heart, always and forever, no matter what. With that said, I trust that you will each take my fatherly counsel to your heart and live your life as if wise fatherly counsel truly matters.

Your imperfect loving,

Dad

Learning In Life Copyright 2016, Gary J. Borgstede.  You have permission to reprint the letter, Learning In Life, in its entirety only, and forward to your colleagues and friends, provided the copyright notice remains part of the reprint and transmission.  All other rights reserved.