Fathers and Daughters

We had the immense blessing of going to the Vision Forum Father-Daughter retreat this past March.  It was a wonderful weekend, full of encouraging messages, one-on-one time with Daddy, and meeting new and old friends!  Here are a few pictures from our trip.

 Us 3 girls in the gardens.  Everything was starting to bloom and it was lovely!

Me, Ellie, and Dad before one of the sessions.

Ellie and a new friend :)

More new friends!

When we got home, we each took pictures with Dad :)

Dad and Ellie

Dad and Libby

I want to share one of my favorite pieces of prose with you.  It was been an encouragement to me for many years, as I strive to be "a good daughter" to my earthly father.  Be forewarned, it can be slow reading, but I believe you will be encouraged and it will be worth the time you take to understand it.  

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A Good Daughter, by J.G. Palfrey

(slightly abridged)

A good daughter! there are other ministries of love more conspicuous than hers, but none in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none to which the heart's warm requitals more joyfully respond.  But a son's occupations and pleasures carry him more abroad...while a good daughter is the steady light of her parent's house.  Her idea is indissolubly connected with that of his happy fireside.  She is his morning sun-light, and his evening star.  The grace, and vivacity, and tenderness of her sex have their place in the mighty sway which she holds over his spirit.  The lessons of recorded wisdom which he reads with her eyes, come to his mind with a new charm as they blend with the beloved melody of her voice.  He scarcely knows weariness which her song does not make him forget, or gloom which is proof against the young brightness of her smile.  She is the pride and ornament of his hospitality, and the gentle nurse of his sickness, and the constant agent in those nameless, numberless acts of kindness, which one chiefly cares to have rendered because they are unpretending, but all-expressive proofs of love.  And then what a cheerful sharer is she, and what an able lightener of a mother's cares!  What an ever present delight and triumph to a mother's affection!  Oh how little do those daughters know of the power which God has committed to them, and the happiness God would have them enjoy, who do not, every time that a parent's eye rests on them, bring rapture to a parent's heart.  A true love will almost certainly always greet their approaching steps.  That they will hardly alienate.  But their ambition should be not to have it a love merely, which feelings implanted by nature excite, but one made intense, overflowing, by approbation of worthy conduct; and she is strangely blind to her own happiness, as well as undutiful to them to whom she owes the most, in whom the perpetual appeals of parental disinterestedness do not call forth the prompt and full echo of filial devotion.

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This is a favorite picture we took with Dad several years ago. 

And a good random ending, here's me in the gardens posing with my old friend, the agavé cactus :D

xoxo,

Elise