When I was little, I thought twenty-five years was an
unimaginably long time. But it isn’t. Twenty-five years is completely
imaginable. Completely understandable. It’s a long series of days that you
haven't been here for.
When I actually stop and think about all the things I missed
you for, I feel lost. You never sang happy birthday to my kids in your very off-key voice. You didn’t light candles at my wedding. You never met my college roommates. You didn't sit in the bleachers and cheer when I graduated from TA. You didn’t know that
I kept going to school… that I’ve never left. You missed me getting my driver’s
license, my first apartment, my first trip abroad, my first steps into adulthood. You weren’t there for any of it. And even though it wasn’t your fault, twenty-five years ago I was abandoned.
When I
was in graduate school, I joined an odd band of Christians who are
psalm-singers, and I was comforted the first time I sang Psalm 27, to
acknowledge that I felt cast off by you. For so long, I had ignored that feeling, but it was pointing me to the reality that what is in the here and now is not the way things are supposed to be. There is real brokenness in the world. I've lived it. The comfort for me came at the end of that verse as I was reminded that God had promised
to take me up (v 10) even though I'd been abandoned.
That Psalm gave me room to remember that I was His first,
and yours and Dad’s second. Room to remember to be thankful for sixteen years with you. Sixteen years of you praying with me every night. Sixteen years of you believing I could (it didn't seem to matter what I wanted to try. You were sure I could do it.) Sixteen years of your
example of how to love and care for people who were not valued by others.
Sixteen years of hospitality to traveling missionaries, widowers in the church, to so many people who needed a place to belong. Sixteen years of sarcasm. Sixteen years of seeing the reason to laugh behind so many things. Sixteen years of
being taught to stand up for myself. Honestly, the instruction that if the bully on the
bus pinched me again, I was to pinch him back at least twice as hard has served
me well throughout my life. Sixteen years with you. And those sixteen years figure larger in many ways than the twenty-five years you've been gone.
25 < 16.
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