I have been taking a look through my past at events that I can consider major milestones,as a means of reinterpreting what at one time might have been considered “mundane.” This blog post will be more personal, but I think it will be worth the read by the time its finished. I believe that by God’s grace I have been given a story which serves to illustrate just how true it is that God indeed orders the world in such a way that when we join him in that work, the world around us becomes healed.

My father divorced my mother when I was five years old. Once their divorce was final, he moved far away and, for all intents and purposes, I never saw him again until I was twenty-four.

I was an undergraduate student in bible college in Dallas, Texas, and preparing to be a pastor in a southern baptist church anywhere I could find a job. It was during this time in my life that I received a video through facebook messenger from my father. After nearly twenty years of being completely absent from my life, this would be the first real contact we had since I was a little boy. The video was him, sitting on the edge of a small twin bed, telling me through sad eyes that he had just been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and given less than four months to live. This video was the only way he knew how to tell me that he wanted to see me and my two younger twin brothers before it’s too late.

A lot of people who know this story find this video from my dad to be something like his attempt to gaslight me into coming to see him; like he finally realized that he was at the end of his life, and instead of coming to grips with his own sins, he guilts his sons into pleasing him one last time.

But this isn’t how it was. This was a sad, hurt, dying man, who had become the end product of a grievously regretful life: lonely and aware of it. What I think that video symbolized was his last, humiliating effort to find a way, the best he knew how, to get in touch with his boys one last time.

I am not going to tell the whole story of how I finally made the decision to go to Washington to see him for the sake of brevity. Suffice it to say, through much trepidation and generosity of a friend, I got to spend 5 days with my dad.

Prior to arriving I had planned to ask him all the questions I never had the chance to ask before. Why did you leave mom? Why did you leave us? Did you ever think of us? Did you ever want to come back? Did you ever try? But once we were there, in the car, riding the two hours from SEATAC airport to the northwestern coast of the Olympic Peninsula, all I could do was wonder if I looked like my dad.

It became clear over the course of the next few days that something else was off. I knew my dad’s brother lived in the next town over and wanted to see him too. My uncle has a daughter who is my age and I had planned to see them while I was there. An odd silence filled the room when I asked about making dinner plans with him. I eventually put the pieces together and realized that they don’t talk. They lived less than twenty miles away from each other and my dad didn’t even have his brother’s cell number. I was persistent, though. I managed to arrange a night at a pizza joint in town. We all met up, spent five or ten minutes in a very awkward silence, but then silence slowly turned to laughter and stories about childhood and memories than my dad and uncle shared as little boys.

After five days with my dad, I finally got what I was looking for. Instead of humiliating him with questions and demanding answers that I already knew, I just let us have time well spent. We played many games of chess, walked on the beach, and I got to see what kind of rhythm of life my dad had for the twenty years he was away. But on the last night, as we stood in SEATAC airport once again to board our flight home, my dad, with every ounce of energy he could muster cried on our shoulder as he begged for forgiveness. We forgave him.

My dad also reconciled with his brother after we left. They realized that the differences that separated them in the past were nothing they couldn’t move on from now. My uncle agreed to be my dad’s live-in nurse for the last three months of his life until he passed away.

I share this because I have recently become aware of what happened here. Well intended people in my family always made me feel perfectly validated in holding a grudge against my father for what he did to my mother and to me and my brothers. “He doesn’t deserve to be in your life” they would say. But this kind of a grudge eats at you, and at the end of the day, I knew that my dad’s life doesn’t have to be mine. I think somehow I knew that if I could forgive him, he could have something like his dignity back; maybe that way he could die with some sort of honor.

My dad, unfortunately, chose to live a very sad, lonely, regretful life; his sins are certainly his own to bare. However, I think in those five days, by the grace of God, I actually experienced what happens when the broken pattern between a father and his sons is healed. And not only was my own relationship with my father healed, but the broken relationship between my dad and his brother was healed as well.

I debated on where to put this passage of Wisdom of Sirach. I suppose i’ll just leave it here at the end.

“Do not glory in the dishonor of your father,

for your father’s dishonor is no glory to you.

For the glory of man is from the honor of his father…

… My son, help your father in his old age,

and do not grieve him in his life;

And if his understanding fails, be considerate,

And do not dishonor him in your prime.

For kindness to a father will not be forgotten,

and it will be credited to you instead of your sins.

It will be remembered in the day of your affliction;

thus your sins will melt away like frost in warm weather.”

— Wisdom of Sirach 3:10-15