Pastor’s Daughter

I say often the only thing that makes any sense about my father’s death is that it happened during Lent.

Dad made it his life’s purpose to imitate Jesus.

In March, when spring begins to emerge from bald branches and barren flowerbeds; the Missing emerges too.

It peeks its head out of its tidy compartment I tend to attempt to keep it in, and follows me around. It tells me stories— both if the traumatic nature and also tales of a beloved daughter and her pastor.

There is nowhere I remember Dad more clearly than in the quiet of an empty church building. Any church building. It doesn’t matter which denomination. If the building is small and modest, I sense Dad there. It is easy for me to see him in my mind flicking on lights, carrying out the garbage, and testing 1,2,3 the microphones.

He was a really good pastor. Not every preacher is a good pastor. Typically I am able to tell the difference. I am a daughter of the Church. I have sat under many pastors in my childhood and adult life. I know the difference between a preacher and a pastor, and they are not the same thing. Dad showed me the difference. Sure, he could preach a dynamic sermon, but it was the throughout-the-week shepherding that made him a pastor. It was the time he spent crawling under cars or digging up sewage lines that made him a pastor. A pastor should have dirt under their fingernails and grass stains on their shoes.

Church buildings have been emptier this year than other years, as many of us have been thrown into a fasting we didn’t choose. The big C church is going though a reckoning— and we need our shepherds.

We don’t need the flashy and mega. We need the lowly and gracious. We need those among the fold that are more concerned with people than numbers. We need listeners and learners. We need leaders who are quick to admit when they’ve been wrong and the first to ask forgiveness.

These days of reckoning and mass decontruction make me miss my Dad. It makes me wonder what he would say— then again I know what he would say:

Listen more, talk less. Get your hands dirty. Love people. Don’t waste time on things that don’t matter, and spend more time on things that do. Be the first to wash the feet and serve the bread. Don’t get so tangled up in theology that you forget the gospel.

In a culture where the Church has earned a terrible reputation, I am determined to stay put. I am more resolved than ever before to reflect my Abba father in a world that at times seems it has forgotten what He looks like.

I am my father’s daughter after all.