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

Christ In You

My husband and I had dinner the other night with some dear friends. Our conversation didn't exactly meander to the topic of God. It was more like it burst into it with both guns blazing, although now, I can't stop my thoughts from meandering back to one simple phrase that our friend said: Christ in me . Several years ago I went through a season of reading the works of some Christian mystics, desert fathers and mothers as they are sometimes called because they separated themselves from their culture and lived in the desert to more effectively spend time with God without the distractions of city life. I read quite a bit of Jeanne Guyon. She obviously loved God deeply, and I learned a lot from her writings, but there was one phrase that she couldn't seem to emphasize enough, and it always bothered me - look within yourself to find God (sounds a little new-agey, doesn't it?) Honestly, the thought has been repulsive to me. It's so contrary to our modern Christian thoug...
5 comments
Read more

Believing the Lies

My husband and I recently watched The Help - a story about a group of African American women who worked as maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the '60s. One of the protagonists works for a woman "who got no b'ness havin' babies." This woman, this family maid and nanny, tells her little two year old ward regularly, "You is pretty. You is smart. You is impor'ant." How difficult it is for us to believe that about ourselves - really, to believe anything good about ourselves. I always try to be my raw self when I write a blog post. Today is no exception. So I confess that I've been drowning in a storm of lies lately. My head knows they're lies, and I could easily tell anyone else in the same place that they're lies, but I haven't been able to get a grip. There have been so many of them coming at me at once. It seems that I just break the surface, gulp some fresh air of truth then get pulled back under. One thing I know: the enemy of our ...
7 comments
Read more

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