It was the room I remembered from my early childhood.
The blue paint, the matching nightstands, the bed placed against the
wall under the window. It was my parents’ old master bedroom.
My father was dying, and like a version of Minority Report, we already
knew when and by what means it was going to happen.
It was his heart.
He was in so much pain. His eyes
filled with tears. I sat kneeling next
to the bed, holding his hand. I was
panicking.
I have 17 seconds, I thought.
He saw my eyes shift toward the phone.
“Why try?” he gurgled, his voice sputtering from pain.
“Because I have to!”
I had never dialed 911 before, so I listened intently as my finger
pressed the last number. A pause, and
then the recorded operator picked up.
A recording?
“You are number 73 in waiting,” her monotone voice buzzed.
I dropped the phone, exasperated, and began weeping. I held my father, and waited, precious
seconds ticking down to the end of his life.
I felt a dark shadow smirk from the bathroom. Through tears, I couldn’t make out its
identity, but I knew it was not of God.
And as it leered, I continued to sob.
Needless to say, this dream terrified me. Friday morning, my alarm woke me from that
plane, and sent my heart into mourning.
Daddy’s little girl.
Sometimes this term houses irony.
Nobody’s words have cut as deeply as his have, and this
is spawned by my deep love for him and deep aching to be loved by him.
As a father wanting more for his daughter, his desire for
her to be ambitious and self-dependent grew in her a heart broken from
unsatisfaction and a supposed inability to attain.
My efforts were never enough. Congratulations
were never just congratulations, but instead just a car on a train tailed
by a caboose of, “Now what?”
Now what?
There was always something I could improve upon. Always just one step closer.
One step closer to what?
As if one day I would reach something where accomplishing would no longer be had.
Never being good enough…
And this is where my heart has turned now instead…
To one father I will never be good enough.
And to The Other I will certainly never be good enough.
But it is by The Other’s unfailing grace, love, and
faithfulness, that I can embrace not being good enough.
For if I ever beheld that I was good enough, everything
that is good would fall from my life and I would forsake the most precious
gift.
And it is by such a gift that when I go back to
California, I can love the first father I knew with the love of The Second, who
is really second to none, but the Number One Who has stolen my heart and protects
it, redeems it, sustains it, believes I can be who He has called me to be.
And so I am his daughter.
The one who was hurt. The one
forgotten, and never encouraged, and never congratulated. But because I am His, a new love exists and
one so powerful that I am willing to fight for my family like I haven’t before.
And so, I begin in baby steps. I cannot love my father unless I know
father. And as this thought reverberated
in my core today, God placed a simple book at the tips of my fingers as I
perused the walls of Francesca’s, the most unlikely of places—I assumed—for the
Hand of God.
Scrolling through its pages, I imagined some of the
answers I could hear. I pray that this
opens doors for my relationship with him, and that whatever hurt abided is
flushed away, leaving healing to grow and flourish in its depleted place.
ACTION PLAN PA: Share an afternoon at IHOP, relive old memories of his
day at the cannery. If the weather and
season permit, plant a plant in his garden.
Ask him to write in this compilation, of which of his all his gifts
bestowed upon me would be his greatest yet; discuss it.
