Sometimes “I’m proud of you” means more than “I love you.”


My dad told me he was proud of me the other day. “I’m proud of who you are, Richard.” It felt really good. I didn’t really show it then but all the happy little emotions started to boil up at that moment. Why do words have so much power?

Not all words are weighed equally. Some words are worth more than others. Words from a father mean more than others. Everyone likes encouragement. But in order for words to have value, we have to value the person they are coming from. If we don’t care what someone says about us then their words don’t have any value. But if we do, their words have an incredible transformative power on our human souls. Their words can build. Their words can break. Their words can restore and refine.

“I’m proud of you.” It means I am happy to be seen with you. I see you and what I see is good in my eyes. You have both my recognition and my approval. You see, you don’t have to be amazing for someone to be proud of you. The pressure is off. You can finish in fourth place and someone can still be proud of you. Someone being proud of you is not contingent upon your performance but upon how they see you and how they feel about you. I’m proud of you is different than I’m proud of what you did. It is not a performance-based thing. The approval is based upon identity so you don’t have to work for it. Your heart can rest in knowing that your father is smiling at you.

In the biblical narrative of the creation story, God creates man and then declares that he is good. He sits backs and rests and watches as his creation takes his first steps upon the newly formed planet. It’s normal biblical language to refer to God as father. The father of the universe and of human beings. What’s interesting is that the creation narrative states that man was made in the image and likeness of God. So man was made in the image of The Father. Maybe that is why fathers have so much power in their words. Like Father God they create worlds with their words inside their creation. Maybe deep within the human psyche, we see fathers as more than fathers. Maybe fathers, if they truly are made in the Imago Dei, teach us about God. Almost as if the voice that spun the universe into existence dares to whisper through the mortal frame of a flawed human that gifted us half our DNA matrix.

Maybe that’s why when a father says, “I’m proud of you” it means more coming from him than anyone else.