Where Joy Finds You

My father called Friday night and said I was about to have a visitor. Mainly him.
Boeing was to fly dad from Seattle to Spokane, complete with a three pound box of rivets that absolutely had to be there by 6 am Saturday. Could I meet him at Spokane International Airport-help him deliver the freight and then get him on a return flight to Seattle the next afternoon?

That would be a yes.

Over these last several years, something happened in my relationship with my family. I don't know why or how it happened, but I am grateful that it did. I think the word grace comes to mind...

These days I actually like spending time with my folks-although it hasn't alway been this way. In my 20's, and through my mid-30's, our's was not a great relationship. It's a long story and in a sort of Bastard Out of Carolina way, I had many roles I played quite well. Victim. Survivor. Pissed off asshole. I'd answer to all of these and mostly I was very talented at not exactly handling my disappointment and frustration with my own circumstances in the most diplomatic way. In fact, the healing process is ongoing and is best defined as one step forward, and one or two or thirty impulsive steps back to the local Hallmark Store for yet another I'm Sorry card. My sister tells me not to put these things into writing even as my mother collects each card like they are gold.

In a word, I am broken. I will always be still finding my way. I guess if I had a Native American Name it would be Dances with Hallmark.

So the fact my father was spending the night under my roof, is pretty much a big miracle.
Not Easter size miracle, but definately up there.

There is a lot of tragedy in my family history. Not just my own nightmares but tragedy that started long before my parents were adults. Some of the most horrific things I can think of happened to land on my father's shoulders when he was a kid. I have written about this brokeness in the story "Clear Cut". To this day, everytime my father reads that story he weeps. At the time I wrote that piece, I did not know many of the details of what that boy lived through. I do now. Had I known then these realities, I don't think I could have finished the piece.

I am learning that wherever grace is found, so is tragedy, brokeness and disillusionment. It seems one can not flourish without the other. Hope rises on the fresh winds of renewal. It is lifted under the force of goodness waiting to prevail.

Still, not all stories have happy endings. I realize this. I see unhappy endings all the time in my volunteer work. I see people who have never known a single moment of grace, or second chances, or even the bonding force of love. I have seen too many throw away people, souls who die unloved, deeply addicted to darkness, and without hope. I have difficulty reconsiling my contact with abandonment with the many versions of hope I've witnessed.

Why some find grace and others do not is a question I ponder regularly.

Which brings me back to my father. Of all the people in the world who could have embraced bitterness and anger, my father never did. I mean he certainly had his quota card filled. But I can't remember a single time where my father felt sorry for himself, where he wondered "why me", or a time when he did not accept the reality of hope. Indeed he has always been one of the most optimistic people I know. That optimism is infectious in his ministry, in his contact with customers, and in his ability to make friends with strangers everywhere.

So yesterday, as we drove over Flowery Trail, as he returned to those pain ladden Colville Valleys of his youth and as he spent time with his brothers and they retold wilderness stories and log trucker stories, I saw evidense of grace. Everytime my dad spoke, the impossible optimism that came out of his shattered youth soared. I decided it was time to just shut up and listen.

Long ago I learned that Easter is the rebirth of belief from horror. Yesterday I embraced that my father is about the same. The history of my father's life under the Heavenly Fathers light has become the single largest statement that points to God's grace that I can make.

It is an Easter lesson I don't think I will ever forget.