I remember where I was the day I got the news. I was sitting in my living room when the phone rang. My father’s voice was strong, but the words he spoke were crushing: “I’ve got cancer.”
I slid down in my chair and went numb. “You should be used to this, Lee,” he said. “You’re a pastor.”
“It’s a lot easier to preach it than it is to live it,” I said. Just two months earlier, I had accepted the interim pastorate of my father’s church. Little did I know I would pastor him through the toughest year of his life.
Daddy was one of the last real men. He was tough as nails, a butcher by trade, and level-headed. He was a wise and swift decision-maker, consistent, methodical and focused. He had an inner drive to succeed and action to make it happen. Most importantly, Daddy was a born-again child of God and a fisher of men.
His dream was to open five grocery stores and have his sons working in all of them. But God had a different goal in mind. When Daddy was 33, an eye disease left him legally blind, and he had to retire prematurely, crushing his dreams.
God has a way of using hardships to redefine our dreams. Instead of pouring all of his energy into building five stores, my father built five sons. He found us jobs even when we weren’t looking for them. He showed us how to serve others in the community. He stood in the gap and reached out to young men who had no father figure. He taught us how to be men and follow Jesus.
I was in the room at his last doctor’s visit. “There is nothing else we can do,” we were told. I wanted to tell the doctor that my dad was invincible, but the lump in my throat prevented the words from coming out.
I helped him to his feet, and we walked out of the office, crushed but not abandoned. Later my dad said, “I kept waiting on him to say the word ‘cure,’ but he never did.” I said, “Daddy, they haven’t found a cure for death yet, have they?” Daddy smiled and said, “Jesus still has the market on that one.” Two months later, we held his hand as he took his last breath.
This Father’s Day, I will give thanks to my heavenly Father for blessing me with an earthly father who showed me how to trust in Jesus in the valley of the shadow of death. His accomplishments are not of paper and coins or of brick and mortar, but of flesh and blood. We are his eulogy.
Not everyone shares my story. There is a boy in your community whose father has been dead for years, even though he lives. There is a highly successful man whose drive to succeed has separated him from his children and who still longs to hear words of affirmation from his own father. There is a little girl who is filling the hole left by an absent father with one boy after another.
Be a dad, like mine, to them. Introduce them to your heavenly Father, and change the world.