Father's Day Weekend...

I am 2 hours early for my train back to Portland, by mistake. So I find myself here in the basement cafe of Elliot Bay Books in Seattle's Pioneer Square, reminsicent of Powell's Books in Portland. Older, more history, though not as enormous... The brick wall I am siting next to appears to be extremely old, and there is a not-unpleasant musty book smell in the air.

What a weekend! My brother Austin graduated from high school on Friday night, while I was stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere, one of several hundred people held up by a train collision further up the track (there was at least one fatality). I spent a night and the better part of a day bonding and considering with 13 other people the implications of missionality, as we studied Luke's Gospel and discussed Shane Claiborne's "The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical". I took my sister out on a date to Red Robin and the Lake Street Ben & Jerry's in Kirkland. We walked along the beaches and docks, and talked about life and family, relationships and value. It was a great time! I reconnected with a good friend from a few years ago over quick coffee, and met up with several more at a barbeque later. I attended church and saw a few men that have shaped me, was able to hug and thank them.

I forgot about Father's Day. This was a genuine forgetting, not intentional (at least consciously intentional). But it has been three years since I have had someone to call "Dad". I have mentors, some of them more like a dad than others, but nobody who I can hug and salute on this day, thanking them for raising me, for teaching me to be a man, for showing me what a good marriage is, for playing catch with me, or helping me with homework, for taking me to a baseball game and buying a hotdog, for taking me fishing, or teaching me to change the oil in my car. There are so many lost moments that could have happened, but haven't.

And now we are at odds. As I reflect back on the Father's days past, and on these last three years, day-in and day-out, I am grieving my loss. Remembering the pain and the fear, the sadness and the emptiness. And I am looking up. Romans reminds me that I have "recieved the Spirit of Sonship. And by Him we cry, "Abba, Father." The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children" (Romans 8:15,16). I am looking up to the Father who will one day wipe the tears from my eyes, and who has made me a man, and is continuing to make me the man he wants me to become.

So this Father's Day, I will thank a different Father, and I will strive to please him, because the only opinion that ever matters is Dad's!

Happy Father's Day also to Joe Rehfeld, Tom Cowan, Jayson Turner, Steve Allen, Mike Brantley, Jay Held, and Patrick Flynn, for modeling to me what an excellent husband and father looks like! Slainte, gentlemen.