Not long ago while doing some remodel work, I – I accidentally cut my telephone wire. It had to be repaired. But the problem was that the area was too small for me to get into it. I couldn’t fit. So I asked my twelve-year-old daughter if she wanted to learn to wire a telephone. She gave me that look like, “Right, Dad!” but dubiously agreed to help me. I showed her what to do, gave her detailed instructions, and up the ladder she went.

I turned my attention to hanging a door. A few minutes later, though, she was back standing at my side.

“Oh man, Dad. That’s hard!”

She complained for a few minutes. I encouraged her, and she went back up the ladder. But it – wasn’t long before she was back again. “Oh, this hurts,” she said, working the soreness out of her shoulders, and showing me where a staple was scratching her arm.

I smiled, I sympathized, and I sent her back up the ladder, explaining that if she couldn’t fix it, I would have to cut this big ol’ hole in the wall to repair the damage I’d done.

Over the next thirty minutes or so, she must have come down that ladder four or five more times, each time more frustrated and in more pain. Finally, with only a little bit left to go, she broke one of the wires that she had already spiced, leaving a little tiny stub so short she could barely get a hold of it. Oh, that was it – she had had it! And I knew at that moment, all I had to do was to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, dear, I’ll fix it,’ and she would have walked away, never again to get any closer to a telephone than picking up a receiver.

But – I didn’t want to tell her to walk away. I mean, much of my childhood was failure. For a good part of my life, I believed I was a loser – that I couldn’t do anything right. And now,
call me a sap if you will, but as a father, it was important to me that she not fail. I didn’t know what to say. So a told her that she should just walk away for a while, go cool off, and come back later. Well she took me up on that. She went upstairs, pulled on her sweats and did something I had never seen her do before: She went running! She was frustrated.

Well she came back about an hour later, and with a renewed sense of determination, she scrambled up that ladder, wedged herself in the ceiling, and about fifteen minutes later she was back standing at my side.

“All done,” she announced. In that short time she had accomplished twice as much as before. Aw – she was grinning so wide you could have tied it behind her ears.

But now came the real test: Was the phone going to work? She picked up the receiver of the once-dead phone. It worked – perfectly!

As we cleaned up, we talked about the experience, and I asked her what she had learned. Among other things she said something that pleased me much.

She said, “Never give up.”

We turned to go upstairs. “So how do you feel,” I said, “I mean you know, about wiring telephones?”

She looked up at me with a big smile, and she said, “Anybody need a phone wired?”