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iQuestions Faculty, Dr. John Trent 
 
 
Question: 
 
I'm sure my kids know that I love them. Why do I get flack for not 
telling them all the time? 
 
Answer: 
 
“You don’t have to tell your kids you love them. They just know it.”  
 
Is that really accurate? 
 
I can tell you from personal example how wrong that is. We need to 
say it. 
 
Let me give you that example. My dad left when I was two and a half 
months old. I never met him until I was in high school.  
 
I’ll be honest with you: I really used to hate my dad. Then I became a 
Christian, and I just intensely disliked him. But I was finally able to 
build a relationship with him. 
 
I will never forget when he had his first heart attack. Doesn’t this 
sound like an old Marine? My dad was an old third Marine division guy, 
and he has a heart attack and tries to drive himself to the hospital.  
 
He doesn’t make it. He ends up slumped up in his car. Thank the Lord, 
they get him to the hospital.  
 
He’s got my card in his wallet and so I get a phone call, “Is Joe Trent 
your dad? He’s here at Saint Luke’s hospital.”  
 
 
 
We go running down there. I get my older brother on the phone, 
miraculously. I will never forget, as long as I live, walking up to that 
nurse’s station and having that nurse say to me: “The surgeon needs 
to see you, boys.”  
 
Usually, you don’t meet the surgeon ahead of time—even family 
members—when they’re doing emergency surgery. But he had waited 
for us and says, “I’m getting ready to do this balloon angioplasty. It’s 
the best thing. It’s like a Roto-Rooter for his arteries.” 
 
But my dad was a chain-smoker. He was an alcoholic. He had gotten 
malaria in a field hospital in the war. The surgeon says, “His lungs are 
so bad, we’re going to lose him on the table. I’ll give you boys five 
minutes to go say goodbye to your dad.”  
 
I will never forget walking into the room, thinking that would be the 
last five minutes on earth with my dad. I remember patting him on his 
leg and I looked him right in the eye. “Bright eyes make the heart 
glad,” it says in the Bible, and I tried to brighten up my eyes.  
 
I said to him, “Dad, we love you and we’re praying for you, and we’ll 
be right here for you.”  
 
I’ll never forget my dad looking up at Joe and I, my older brother, and 
saying, “Well boys, I guess I ought to say something.”  
 
I’m thinking, “Absolutely. I’ve waited all my life to hear something 
positive, and now here it is.”  
 
And we wait. And we wait. And we wait. About two or three minutes 
go by, and this nurse comes through and pushes my dad through that 
metal door. I can see him laying on that gurney.  
 
Trent -2- 
 
 
But guess what, I never once heard words that attached high value or 
that said “you’re special,” or whatever.  
 
You know what that does to a kid? It’s like a fill-in-the-blank question 
where they really don’t know what to put in there. I’ve thought a 
thousand times that my dad would probably have put something in 
that blank, but he never did.  
 
So if you’re thinking, “I don’t need to say it. Are you kidding me?”  
 
You need to say it, every day.  
Trent -3- 
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