What is Heaven?

Sometimes, when I think about Heaven, I imagine a place where I can find the Pamster at the same age as me from back when we were innocent kids. I have often pondered the reality that once upon a time, when I was young and full of innocence, playing out in the street or sitting in my room playing with my GI Joes, at that very same time over in Florence, Alabama, there was a little girl full of wonder and innocence playing with her Barbie dolls, or chasing a puppy, or going on a hike with her Aunt Pearlene on Natchez Trace.

Two little kids full of hope and wonder, not yet aware of the hardships that would eventually come between them and their place in destiny where they would finally meet.

I love to sit back and imagine that at the exact same moment back in the 1960s Pam and I were both sitting down watching Jonny Quest with each other with just a bit of distance between East Point, Georgia and Florence, Alabama. Somehow I imagine our living rooms being connected on Christmas morning when we were both excited and sitting there looking through the gifts that were waiting on us. I think about the times Pam suffered hurt from mean kids and wish I could have been there to be her friend during that time.

I was a small-framed little kid and not much of a threat to bigger kids. I was bullied some, but fortunately I was resilient due to my positive attitude and a mother who always stood up for me. Not sure I could have done much to defend Pam in those days, but I could have been there to be her friend. I like to think perhaps I could have made her feel special enough to heal more quickly from those attacks at least.

I fell in love with Pam the very afternoon Les Parker introduced her to me at Tucker Wayne Advertising back in 1985. The years have only made our love deeper and with that I feel more connected to that little girl from the 1960s. It would be heaven for me if we found each other in the next life as those two children where we could spend all of our days playing in creeks and catching crawdads, or riding bicycles with playing cards clattering in the spokes of our wheels.

Yeah, that’s enough for me. No golden walls studded with gemstones. No mansions with many rooms. Just two little kids playing in a creek on the Natchez Trace. That’s heaven.

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I Never Cried

I never cried.

My father passed away 8 years ago. I’ve been reflecting on him since Father’s Day earlier this week. Something that has always stayed with me since the night of his passing is that I have yet to actually cry from the event. Now, for some, depending on the relationship you may or may not have had with your dad, this may not be a big deal. However, anybody who really knows me knows that I am an emotional creature that cries at nearly anything that might cause one to shed a tear.

Seriously. I cried uncontrollably at the end of the movie “Ghost.” I cried when Spock died in “The Wrath of Khan.” I cry when listening to music and hear a perfect harmony. I can’t finish some of my favorite hymns in choir because I’m usually crying too hard by the third verse. When my cat, Roger died a few years ago I fell apart. I cried so hard when I was interring my friend Sharon’s ashes into the ground a fellow minister had to reach down with a handkerchief to keep the snot from running out of my nose and onto the ground along with her ashes.

So why? Why then have I yet to shed a tear for my father? The man I loved more than just about anything in the world. I can still remember years back loving him so much I could not comprehend what a life without him would be like. I was scared to death of what would become of me on that dreadful day sometime in the future should I outlive him. I truly wasn’t sure I would be able to survive his passing.

The closest I came to really crying was on the day of his funeral. It was my time to reflect on him in front of the congregation. I had chosen to read out loud the letter I wrote him during his Emmaus Retreat some years earlier. I asked the pastor to be standing by if I could not read the letter without breaking down. I read no more than the first two sentences out loud before having to hand it over and let the pastor finish reading the letter for me. Perhaps I should have powered on and let the tears flow at that point, but I know for sure it would have been an ugly mess, and I wasn’t really in the mood to make a spectacle out of myself during his memorial.

So here I am, 8 years later, and I still have never cried over the passing of my dad. I have speculated on a few reasons that may or may not be the cause, but there is one reason of which I feel rather certain. You see, my dad died from the complications of Alzheimer’s. “The Long Goodbye” as Nancy Reagan called it. Alzheimer’s steals from everyone it touches. In my case it may very well have stolen my tears.

When my dad was in hospice there was plenty of crying from everyone there. My two sisters practically never left his bedside. Over time we each had some time alone with dad. What would be my last “conversation” with him came only a day before he passed. He was completely unconscious, so I’ll never know if he heard my words, but I did my best to tell him how much I loved him and how much I owed to him. Near the end I lifted his hand and kissed it. Unfortunately, his skin had begun to deteriorate and the taste on my lips was shocking and almost unbearable. I felt embarrassed and shameful as I went to the restroom in the hospice to wash off my lips.

I spent that night sleeping on a bench in the chapel of the hospice. Later the next day I decided I should go back to my house and get some rest. It was that evening when my sister called to tell me we were losing him. In the 20 minutes it took for me to drive back he passed away. It was the end in some respects, but for me the end had come months ago.

We all knew dad’s memory was getting worse, but my sisters and I really had no idea just how bad it had become until one night when I had to go take care of him. His wife, Rosemary, had to be rushed to the hospital for chest pains. I got a call from the fire department down the street asking me if I was his son and could I come and pick him up. As it happened Rosemary drove herself and him to the fire station since it was only a couple of blocks from their house. The paramedics there checked her out and decided to put her in an ambulance to take her to the emergency room. Which essentially stranded my dad there.

My dad had no idea what was going on. He was incredibly upset and disoriented beyond measure. When I arrived, he was in the parking lot yelling at everybody. He had no idea who I was. I was just a strange man who came out of nowhere to drive him back home. The next 26 hours would be a surreal existence of him with a stranger he could not trust, but somehow was willing to go along with, and me with a man who was only a faint shadow of what was once my father. In all reality, for me, that is the night my father died.

I spoke with him calmly and with compassion throughout those 26 hours. I knew he had no control over his thoughts and emotions, so the only thing I could be was kind. He never slept. My job was essentially to keep him from wandering out of the house, or if he got outside, into traffic, which I later learned had happened before. In all that time he never recognized me. Shortly before it was over, I began talking to him about his days as a semi-professional baseball pitcher for the factory league in Atlanta. Though he didn’t know me he began to smile a bit at those thoughts. Finally, Rosemary returned with her daughter and things went back to normal, but it was now obviously time to find a memory care home for dad where he could be properly looked after.

But still, I never cried.

When I was a little boy, I thought my dad was the greatest superhero of all time. And in all honesty that never really went away. I followed around in his shadow everywhere he went. Lucky for me he took me nearly everywhere he went as well. I was raised in hunting camps and fishing boats.

I never had a rebellious teen period where I lost respect for him, but as I grew older and my personality developed it was obvious that I was not really a hunting/fishing type of guy. I know this probably made my dad a little sad, but he never let it bother him or our relationship. All of my years hunting and fishing weren’t because I loved to hunt and fish, it was because I loved to be with my dad.

I caught lots of record-breaking fish and appeared in media occasionally thanks to my dad. He was once the president of the Georgia Wildlife Federation and a professional bass fisherman just to name a few things. I was a champion archer by the age of 17, and though I caught plenty of fish I had never killed a deer. The very last time we went hunting together was when I was 20 years old. I had an eight-point buck walk up near my stand. He was completely broadside to me with a clear and easy shot at approximately 20 yards, which was my most practiced distance. I did not have buck fever, which is common to young hunters who begin to shake from adrenaline before drawing their bow. I was calm as a cucumber. I raised my bow and carefully took the shot. By some miracle I missed. Probably because I aimed low at the chest focusing on the heart and not at the center mass of the deer. The arrow quietly flew under the deer, then he looked up and calmly walked away managing to keep trees between him and my ability to take a second shot.

I tell this story because it took me a few years reflecting back on it to realize a certain truth about what happened that day. You see, I never had any interest in killing a deer. I was there that day to be with my dad. Sure, I was willing to kill that deer that day, not for me, but for him. I knew how proud he would be if I had taken down that beautiful eight-pointer. It would have been a proud story for him to tell back at the hunting camp. And surely, I would have been proud as well. Not because I managed to kill a deer, but because I did something that meant so much to my father.

I never hunted again after that, and my dad never loved me less for it. He was always proud of anything I did, no matter what it was. Even though I would have loved to see his excitement that day, had I bagged the deer, I never felt doing so would have granted me some kind of acceptance that I didn’t already have. I think that both the deer and I were quite content with that outcome!

Not too long before my dad passed completely into the irreversible darkness, we were having dinner at a barbecue establishment near our homes. The subject of hunting came up and somewhere in mid-conversation he interrupted and said, “I can’t do that anymore.” I stopped and asked, “What exactly?” He said again, “I can’t kill a deer.” I looked at him and nodded, then began to say, “That’s understandable. I guess we all reach our limit at some point.” Then he grabbed me by the wrist and leaned in, looking intently at me with those icy blue eyes of his and said, with a bit of assertion, “I can’t take a life. Never again.”

There was other conversation going on around the table, so I’m pretty sure the intensity of his statement went unnoticed by most of the others there. As for me, it was one of the most profound things he ever said to me. He had come full circle from the young man who once dreamed of being an artist for the Mark Trail comic strip. As a youth he had written a letter to its creator, Ed Dodd, asking what he needed to do to get a job as an artist on the Mark Trail team. To my dad’s excitement Ed wrote him back and he kept that letter for the rest of his life. I’ve read it myself.

Ed, of course, recommended dad attend an art school, so eventually he enrolled at the Atlanta College of Art. Unfortunately, after a few quarters he became disheartened with the “business” of art and left, never to pursue an art career again. Dad never stopped loving nature though. His ink drawings of deer, bears, and squirrels are still in a box at his home to this day. He treated hunting like a sacred ritual and had no patience for those who broke hunting laws. When he was president of the Georgia Wildlife Federation, he launched a campaign against poachers. Not all of his friends were as staunch as he was about obeying certain laws, but he never budged. Even though I stopped hunting all those years ago, it was his world and his high standards that informed my understanding of wildlife management, and I am forever grateful for that.

That night at the barbecue restaurant, I felt I saw him in an enlightened state unlike I had ever noticed before. It was at once beautiful and at the same time a window he opened allowing me to see into his own fear of mortality. That brief conversation passed mostly unnoticed by others at the table, but when you’ve lived your entire life with a man you’ve looked up to, who’s greatest passion was hunting and fishing, it rang loud in my ears and in my heart.

Not even since then have I cried.

I have cried for my dad before though. Two particular times I can recall. As an adult I lived in multiple cities away from Atlanta for a number of years before finally moving back home. I lived in Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, and Tennessee. Each time when I came home to visit along with my wife, and later with my son, we would split time between my dad and my mom, who lives on the other side of town. I still remember clearly one occasion when we were leaving after a visit. Dad was not really a huggy kind of guy, and I’m not much of one either, so it was always a little awkward whenever I left. We would walk out into the front yard, have a few words of farewell, and eventually even embrace a bit. But it wasn’t his words or our embrace that telegraphed his love for me. It was written all over his body and even more deeply in his eyes. I cried, probably more than once really, as I drove away and looked in my rearview mirror at the man who stood there watching until my car would disappear over the hill. That love was so present and authentic it could suck the air right out of your lungs.

Another time, the first time, came on a summer afternoon before my seventh-grade school year. I went on a hike that day into the woods across the street behind the old Conley Hills sandlot. I was pretty proud of myself as I packed my own lunch. I hiked in, set up a place to sit down and pull out my food, and basked there in the tranquility of that summer afternoon as I watched a squirrel play nearby. It made me feel kind of grown up for some reason. I finally packed my stuff, careful not to litter, and headed back home.

I was passing through the dining room at home when my mom stopped me to break some very bad news. My parents were getting divorced. Now in this day and age that might not seem like such a life changing thing, but to an adolescent boy, who only seconds earlier believed he lived in a perfect home, a boy who loved both of his parents dearly and never saw this coming, it can be equal to experiencing the sudden death of a loved one. I had never heard my dad cry before that night. So yeah, I cried, I cried a lot. I may well have used up half of the tears God provided me for a lifetime.

Don’t fret for me too much. Life got better. Time heals things, and kids grow up fast after events like that. My parents eventually remarried, at least for a while. The next time they separated I stayed with my dad and we eventually moved to another part of town. Somewhere in that haze he met Rosemary and I met my future ex-wife.

I am now happily married to my best friend for coming up on 33 years and have a son who lives on the other side of the country. So, now it’s my turn to endure the bittersweet parting of a son after a visit. My dad was fortunate enough to live to see his grandchildren grow up. The last time I saw my father quietly crying was at my son’s graduation from college the same year he would pass away. He was at that place where, for the most part, he had no idea where he was or who most of the people around him were, but he was also at that point where tiny bits would come to the surface and briefly give him clarity only to pass as quickly as it came. I know at least on that day he knew his grandson was graduating. Then very likely, only minutes later, knew he was somewhere important, but struggling to remember what it was or who it was about.

Yet for all of that, not since I looked in that rearview mirror as I pulled away from his home in Douglasville to take my family back to Ohio, or Tennessee have I cried for the loss of my dad.

I will admit that some tears have formed as I write this reflection. I’m not sure it counts as the type of cry I always expected to have on the fateful day that I would lose my father, but I’m okay. My dad hated to cry anyway. He was very much a man’s man after all, and crying would be unseemly to him, I say to myself.

Perhaps one day the crying will come, but truthfully, I have little to cry for, because I am the luckiest man in the world. Because I had a father who loved me deeply. Deeper than any fancy words I can make up now as I write this. Life has been terrible and beautiful. Would I prefer to write a different ending for my father? Absolutely. But as my dad slowly felt his life fall apart as a darkness moved in to take away from him everything he knew, I hope he understood one thing clearly before it all went dark. That he was a success. The man who never had a father of his own was the greatest dad any boy could ever ask for.

Embracing the Unknowing

When we truly learn things we immediately become aware of how much more we don’t know. I think this “unknowing” strikes fear into us and stops us from opening our minds and hearts. In this way knowledge is like true love. The only way to truly love someone is to become vulnerable to them. Yet that vulnerability opens up stronger love in the same way true answers open up more questions. We hide in the comfort of what we think we know and how much we are willing to love for fear of what lies behind the doors of opened hearts and minds.

Fully Loved. Fully Revealed.

I recently posted a photo of my wife from when she was a little girl on social media. This photo feels very special to me—my wife as a little 8-year-old girl waving back at the camera while playing in a park near her hometown. This photo isn’t only precious to me because of the cute little girl that would become my wife one day, but because of what I know about that moment and what it meant to her at that time. She was then, as she still is today, extremely shy.

Captured in this split second of time is one of the rare moments in her childhood where she felt fully loved and safe in the company of her grandmother, whom she loved more than anything or anyone in the world. Finding and keeping friends does not come easily to someone so shy. This photo is from the summer before her 4^th grade year in school. In two more years, she would become the target of some extremely vicious bullies that would change her world for the rest of her life. Very often a bullied child will stop seeking help from adults and begin to internalize their fear and sadness as a way to protect themselves from more scorn or disappointment. She was no exception.

I know, for me anyway, bullying is a mystery that seems to never go away and follows us into every generation, but that is not what I want to focus on here. I want to go back and focus on that moment when someone feels fully loved. These moments may come before or after hurtful or heartbreaking events, but unfortunately, I feel they may not come often enough for too many of us.

When God asks us to love Him with all our hearts, all our soul, all our minds, and all our strength, and then to treat our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31) we get a clear message as to what complete love looks like. I think it also clearly indicates how God loves us back. The visible effect of what it looks like to be fully loved can never be clearer to us than when we see it looking back at us in the eyes of a child.

When we fully love someone, especially a child, in that moment we help them to feel absolutely complete. When we feel fully loved we get to experience in that moment a sense of fullness, not just that we are feeling loved by another, but a complete sense of who we truly are. Love is not important simply because it makes us feel good, it is important because it reveals in us who we are. It is the final ingredient of our existence that makes us whole.

After posting this photo of my wife I told her how much I absolutely adored it. I told her how magical it was to my eyes. However, I quickly learned that the photo and my reflections on it had a completely different impact on her. The photo made her sad. It brought back to her both the good memories of her grandmother, but also a reminder that her grandmother was no longer here. It reminded her of her own frailty and the abuse she would suffer later in her childhood that would steal from her the trust she had in the world around her for the rest of her life.

I wasn’t completely surprised when she said this because I know her story, but I pleaded with her to understand the nature of my love for the photo, or rather the moment it captured frozen in time. I told her when I look at the photo what I love most is knowing at that very moment she was complete. I told her that all I can think of while I’m staring at that picture is how I desperately want to go back in time and find her in that moment and whisper to her, “All things will be well.” I want to tell that little girl that bad things will happen, but she will always be fully loved and she will prevail. I want her to know on the other side of the darkness ahead is a life that blossoms into miracles. I told her when I look at that photo I see who she really is, because in that moment she was fully whole. In that tiny little body, in that very shy little girl is stored all the power of God, because it was put there by God and love is the key that releases it. That is what I see when I look at that photo.

God loves us completely and when we likewise give our love to others we help to complete God’s work in creation. Love is a superpower available to us all. Use it.