He Showed Me

In the last month of Dad’s life, I read Our Greatest Gift by Henri Nouwen. I didn’t know how much I would need it. It speaks about being beloved. About caring for one another. About dying well. Those words felt gentle when I first read them. Now they feel true.

When I think about my early childhood, I don’t remember Dad being around a lot. What I remember is his alarm going off at 1 in the morning so he could be in Topeka by 3. I remember shooting hoops and waiting for his headlights to come up the driveway at 8 o’clock at night. And I remember on his days off, he didn’t rest much. He was doing what needed to be done on the farm.

He didn’t tell me how to work. He showed me.

Love, for him, looked like early mornings in the dark. Long days at Goodyear. Ground to tend. It was steady. It was faithful. I didn’t always understand it then. I do now.

But when I reached the age of Little League and summer basketball, I began to feel his presence in a different way. He was there. Coaching. Not with a lot of plays or strategy, but with the things that mattered more. He taught us how to have fun. How to support your teammates. How to respect the game. He influenced and shaped us at an integral stage of life.

Last spring, Dad and I were out in the field pulling old fence posts so he could squeeze a few more acres into the crops. His old red Ford Ranger was sitting there with a blown tire. He told me he had left the keys in it, and some kid had taken it for a spin and hit something out in the field. Probably not all that different from something a young Sonny boy might have done himself.

I waited for frustration. He just looked at me and said, “I’m sure they at least had a couple hundred dollars’ worth of a good time.”

That was it.

In that moment, he taught me something else. He taught me how to forgive. How to see yourself in the one who messed up. How to let go of what you could hold over someone.

And then there was his sense of humor.

Boy, this story could go a lot of directions. But I’ll just share the last joke he told me. Last Sunday, we went for a ride to look at the new terraces at Casey’s place. Before we left, a hundred or more geese flew over the house in a big V. He said, “You know why one side of the V is longer than the other?”

I didn’t miss a beat. I said, “Because there’s more geese.”

He just smiled and turned away.

Thanks for making me funny, Dad.

In that book, Nouwen says that before we are anything else, we are beloved. Not because of what we accomplish. Not because of how much we carry. Simply because we are loved.

For most of my life, I saw Dad as the worker. The provider. The steady one. But in these last months, I saw something even deeper. Beneath the strength, there was a man who knew he was loved. Even as his body grew tired, there was a quiet trust in him. A softness.

If our greatest gift is who we are to each other, then Dad’s gift was his steadiness. His work. His mercy in a field with a blown tire. His humor under a sky full of geese. His willingness to keep showing up.

I hope we carry that forward. Not just his work ethic. Not just his stories. But the deeper thing. The knowing that we are beloved. And because we are beloved, we are free to love each other the same way.

You can rest now, Dad. We love you. And we know we are loved.