It's been 18 years... I can't believe blogs have been around longer than that, it's unreal he's been gone that long, and yet here we are. I'm looking at you through these keys and through this screen and thinking of where we are right now. I feel like I have a halfway decent idea of what my dad would think of the world as it is now. I know he would sit with any one of us to talk it over and think it out. If we were able, he'd probably prefer canoeing or hunting or fishing or road tripping or carpentry or exploring! But he would sit and be present, if that's what we needed.
I'd like to try to capture a few threads of thoughts, wisps of memories that chain together as I think about my dad tonight.
...my dad would go out of his way to be with people.
There were folks that gave as well as took: folks that took he and my mom and the four of us in and lavished love and healing on us in all sorts of ways. There were the many folks that had nothing but themselves to share. And then there were the rest of us: somewhere in the middle of life-giving and absolutely draining and probably a mix of both most days. Let me bring up some situations and faces that appear in context of this man who was raised on a small farm in northern Wisconsin and died at the age of 54, a pastor and a friend and husband and a dad.
I have early, early memories, of crossing the street to talk with Loretta, strapped to a scooter, body and voice twisted with the terrible effects of cerebral palsy, but smiling and working so hard to get words out: words my dad had time to unravel, and interpret and share.
I remember nursing homes and hospitals. Visiting. It's what you did: not worrying about the awkwardness, the motionless person on the bed who may or may not hear you. Singing. Straggled groupings of wheelchairs and cushions and folks tapping along to hymns or carols or songs they'd never heard before. Praying. Committing to the God of the universe, this pain, this un-navigable situation, this injustice, and this impossible joy in an impossible situation.
Going back to the farm: visiting great Aunt Elsie with her wooden puppet monkey and squint and broken voice and boundless love. Visiting great Uncle Bert in his one-roomed cabin-hermit-house on the lake. Visiting the Spragues, spending time in their tiny house and humongous welcome; people who had been there for my dad as a high schooler who had run from and then found faith, and who had then been an outsider till the relief of college in a town far away.
Driving to Wyoming to visit his best friend from college, Jim. Driving back to Wisconsin from eastern Montana, and then Idaho. Always road trips were about people: reunions and holidays and stories at Grandpa and Grandma's dining room table. Driving to California for a family vacation, but also to see second cousins living in San Diego.
Doing life with folks. Being the youth pastor in a local church. Bringing friends up to the farm for fishing, hunting or haying, or to the boundary waters for fishing, fishing, and more fishing! And hunting: whether it was rattlesnakes, elk, pheasant, or deer my dad continually went with and brought folks along. Driving ambulance. Becoming a pastor and taking on the new people challenges and the odd isolation that came with the job. Crashing a motorcycle down a hill with Doug and flying with Don over the irrigated sugar beet fields of eastern Montana. Learning the Yellowstone: looking for agates and smelting his own paddlefishing weights and bringing friends/neighbors to Intake when they were running. Starting Bible studies and dealing with small town folks and big town folks and family dynamics and church splits. Walking alongside folks who had been through unimaginable abuse and welcoming missionaries as they rested stateside, sharing stories and trying to make sense of culture and family and home and a sovereign God who does miracles and redeems hopeless situations.
The more I write the more I think of. Camps and jungle swings and bogs and scavenger hunts and lakes and singing. Traveling bands and special music and the Gaithers and intra-church musical nights. Playing trombone and taking his kids swimming and canyon rafting and water skiing, and making them tree houses and haymow forts and igloos. A goofy sense of humor that could be dry and sophisticated, or completely slapstick and silly. Helping people anonymously, so they never knew how life came to be just a slight bit easier than it had been.
My dad loved his family, and he loved people God put in his path. To be clear, many of those were people most of us would think of as not being on our path: folks in group homes and jail and nursing homes and hospitals and huts.
... my dad left us in good hands
I know I've written before that my dad wasn't perfect. He wasn't on this one either; sometimes he probably should have spent more time with us than with "ministry". I think there were times where people and their opinions mattered too much to him. I know he had a hard time admitting when he'd made mistakes.
But much bigger than his failings, my dad's love for God, his desire to share with all of us around him the peace and the joy that come from casting all of our care, anxiety, and burden on Him - meant that He was okay leaving all of us in God's care as he stepped into eternity. He fought the good fight, kept the faith, finished the race that was put in front of him. I can remember him singing me to sleep when I was small, and holding me as I learned to swim and ride a bike on my own. He did everything he could to set us kids (and everyone he knew) up well in a wild and broken world, and he left us in good hands.
I Corinthians 13
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
