Skip to main content

Being There

Today is Fathers' Day.

My own father left when I was seventeen, though it wasn't his choice. It was cancer. I've gotten used to Fathers' Days without him, and most years, I do okay. Although I don't think I'll ever stop missing him. It's been thirty-one years since my mom woke me in the middle of the night and said, "Daddy died." He wasn't a super-dad. He wouldn't have won a contest if I'd written an essay about all the things he did for us. Truth be told, he didn't really do a lot of hands-on parenting. He didn't coach our little-league teams. He didn't take us fishing or camping or hiking. He didn't come home from work each night and play ball with us or go to bat for us when a teacher "unfairly" disciplined one of us.

So what did he do? He loved us, and we knew it. We were safe as long as he was there. He was our protector, our provider. Dad always knew what to do. We didn't have to worry. He would right any wrong; and although we didn't like it at the time, he wasn't afraid to let us learn some things for ourselves . . . the school of hard knocks, he called it.

He wasn't exceptionally tender or gentle. He was a good German. He was fun. He was funny. He was strict. He was stubborn. He loved us. He loved our mom. He was home most nights. He was there when we needed help with our math homework. He was there at the dinner table. He was there on lazy Sunday afternoons. He was there. Period.

Many years after he died, a tornado tore our home from its foundation. My husband, son, nephew, and I were home when it happened. It left me with a sense of intense insecurity - if my home can be ripped away in a matter of seconds, what in my life is safe? What in my life is sure? Surprising myself, I realized I wanted my dad more at that time than I had at any other time since he'd died - even more than I had wanted him to walk me down the aisle on my wedding day (and that's saying a lot). I yearned to curl up in his embrace like I had done as a little girl. If I could only do that everything would be okay. He wouldn't have to do anything - just be there as he had always been and be dad.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

As A Child

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3 Become like little children? Really? Children are definitely cute and innocent, but that pretty much covers the positive qualities. On the negative side, however, the list is quite a bit lengthier: demanding, dependent, self-centered, messy, often smelly, expensive, and embarrassingly honest. So why? WHY in the world would Jesus tell us to become like little children? WHY in the world would He want that? What was He thinking?! Well, He was a thirty-something year-old bachelor. Maybe He didn't really know what He was talking about when He said that. I mean, if we come to Him like little children, it's pretty much guaranteed to be messy. We're likely to be crabby, cranky. We might be downright angry. Prayer-ADD is hard to control on a good day. If we're not on top of it, if we don't have our list in front of us to focus our thoughts, we...
4 comments
Read more

The Hug That Said It All

I witnessed a hug the other day. Big deal, right? People see other people hug all the time. Yeah, but this was a hug that melted my heart. We attended a graduation party in honor of our nephew. It was held under a pavilion. There was quite a spread of food, and each table was loaded with decorations and favors (very nicely done, Ange!). Obviously a lot of work . . . a lot of love was poured into this party. As the evening wound down, many of us hung around to help clean up. That's the un-fun part of a party. The un-fun part of this party became even more un-fun when, in an attempt to dump a drum of trash into a plastic trash bag, wet, gooey, smelley garbage ended up on the concrete floor of the pavilion. It was rank and disgusting, but my sister-in-law (the afore mentioned "Ange.") cleaned up without complaint. When the graduate meandered by shortly thereafter, I jokingly told him, in a scolding voice, that he had better get down on his knees in gratitude for all his moth...
3 comments
Read more

More Than Enough

Life is teeming with reminders of our need for God. Take today for example: I'm exhausted. I have this ridiculously sensitive body rhythm, and I messed it up yesterday. I went to St. Louis with a mother and daughter. The daughter is strongly considering an extended stay in Burkina Faso as a missionary. So the mother/daughter team that have been there/done that spent the day with the mother/daughter team in the early stages of going there/doing that. It was a great time. Ami and I both enjoyed sharing our experiences, and by their own admission, the time was profitable for the other mother and daughter; but for me, to talk for a full eight hours is waaaayyy past my conversation limit. "Conversation limit?" Yep. Conversation limit. A previous boss used to cite some statistic about how many words an average woman speaks each day as compared to the average man. He'd see me talking and joke that I hadn't reached my quota for the day. My quota, however, is much lower ...
2 comments
Read more