He wasn't much of a runner...

My father wasn’t much of a runner. After a bit of time, he wasn’t much of a walker either. I remember going to my sister’s softball practice in Huntsville. You probably didn’t know my father, but he loved to play games. At my sister’s softball practice, we played a game that I assume he had made up. We would take out a bat, a ball, and a glove. The idea is that he would hit the ball with the bat and I would catch it or run after it. Then, as I’m running towards him, he would drop the bat. As soon as the bat would hit the ground, I would have to stop. At that point, I would roll the ball to see if I could hit the bat with the ball. Almost invariably, I would miss the bat altogether. But, on the rare occasions I did hit the bat, we would switch. Almost invariably, he would hit the bat.

I really don’t think too often about my dad. I dream about him (as evidenced) but don’t really think about him. Over the years, we had some pretty hard conversations. I found out later (from my mother) that a few of the conversations we had while I was in college actually made him cry.

He was a man who tried to seem so hard on the outside. He had a penetrating stare. He had a smile that could melt your heart and a grip that could crush your hand. He seemed so tired so often.

He never knew, but I learned a lot about how to love my wife from him – whether good or bad, I learned. He taught me a lot about what it means to be a man. He taught me a lot about a lot of things.

My hope was that Christ would be communicated to him through the way my wife and I interact and through the way we would interact with our [future] children. I think that it was always hard for him [on so many different levels] to hear of Christ from his son. He had seen my struggles. He was there to see how much of a hypocrite I was while growing up. He saw my vanity, my arrogance, and my inconsistencies.

Was I his stumbling block?
Maybe not.

Part of what scared him was how Christ was changing my life. I know because we talked about it. Part of what scared him was how much of a different man I had become than what he had expected. Part of what [I think] scared him was that he took me seriously. Sometimes I wonder if part of what made him proud was that I wasn’t going to grow up to be like him in so many areas of life and yet so much like him in the areas that mattered.

I miss him.