The Missing Moved In is creative non-fiction that explores the loss of my dad. I believe that sharing our grief journeys with each other brings a little brightness. Even some healing. Join me and read a daughter's lament, a father's legacy. You’ll cry, but we’ll be crying together.
When this world brings pain, and grief, and suffering—Holy Spirit, hear their groans. May they remember the prayers of their youth. Would they remember the prayers of their mama. Finally, in their own threadbare and ‘too much’ seasons, turn to You even if all they can manage to utter is:
“Jesus, ow.”
Life with a toddler is hard. And saying so doesn’t make us ungrateful, it makes us human.
Yet, even in these trenches made up of laundry and snot trails, we somehow keep putting two feet on the floor in the dark of the early morning hours. Day after day, we put out our hands and lift their bed-headed, soggy bottoms from their crib and into the start of a new, long day.
So this is my ode to a crib. An inanimate object that became a great ally. This is my begrudging goodbye. A melodramatic clinging to wooden leg—
Parting is such sweet sorrow.
I am not prone to doubt.
Prone to fear— sure.
Prone to apathy— it comes and goes.
But, I’m not a doubter. A questioner—yes. I’m always questioning, but that isn’t the same as doubt.
I wonder if she will remember my hands. I think she will, if I will stop moving long enough to let her study.
Time will paint our hands with spots, swell our knuckles and smooth our hard earned calluses, but don’t underestimate their impact.
In this enormous palm in which we spin— stop the spiral long enough to memorize and be memorized.
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:
My young self-esteem clung to what I knew would work and be grown-up approved. I kept it safe, rather than reach into the risky abyss of my own creativity.
First Published in The DELIGHT issue of Joyful Life Magazine
“I want to be fearless. I want my children to take holy risks and to know the feeling of eternal invincibility, to walk with their chins held high into dominions of darkness and challenge the status quo because they are supernaturally secure in knowing that their souls are untouchable. I want them to breathe Abba Father into a world that believes itself orphaned.”
Maybe instead of unity, we should all be praying for the courage and capacity to show the ungracious— grace.
Maybe we need to be as reckless with our grace as we’ve been with our words.
Maybe we need to guard the humanity in others as fiercely as we’ve guarded our freedoms.
“Someday we will point at our scars and tell the story.”