Honor Your Father

Dear Dad:

I've had to convince myself to write this letter to you. Unless I've been 'X-Filed," you are dead. Mom and I laid, stood, and kneeled by your bed for 4 weeks—I should be an expert on the topic of your demise. But there are some things to say that couldn't be said while you were alive.

Yet you are still alive in at least two senses. First: in the mortal realm, you live on in my mind. At odd moments the spark of your memory is fanned until it is a raging fire of your presence. Unfortunately, that usually results in us fighting again, demonstrating that things still need to be settled and re-settled between us -- or perhaps I should say repented and re-repented. If I remember correctly, we did a lot more settling than repenting. Settling for a cease-fire instead peace treaty, settling for a grudge rather than a fistfight settling for silence instead of tranquility. So, in the world of my mind, where you are alive/not alive/alive again, we need to talk.

Second, you live eternally in a place of blessing and joy, at the right hand of the Father, with your Elder Brother, our Lord Christ Jesus. After a short 60 years of rebellion, you dashed the ship of your own works-righteousness against God's holy mountain one too many times, and as you lay on the bottom, Christ came and gave you life. I saw that happen, and it was hard to believe. You are more alive than you ever were down here, and being in a better frame, we can now speak of thing we never could before.

Dad, God has cast your sins from you, as far as the East is from the West, but if my memory serves me, you were an angry, ignorant sinner. And when you started going to church more often in my teen years, you became an angry, ignorant leader in the local church. No improvement, if you ask me.

But I honor you by announcing to the world that after a lifetime of hate, you left here in love, tenderly cradled in the Father's hands. Only 3 short years before your death, you were converted to Christ, and the change was immediate. There was still tension between us (30 years of bad relational habits are hard to break, and there is no patch for some habits), but it was clear that instead of the stench of death, you now had the odor of life coming from you.

You stood up front, the week after you had walked down the aisle of Whitesand Baptist Church, and you confessed your sin towards me. You publicly acknowledged your life of sin, and you said that it was my prayers and witness that had played the greatest role in bringing you to Christ. You wept freely, unable to continue, as you tried to say how sorry you were fro the way you had treated your family. I heard about this event, and did not believe it. "The proof's in the pudding" was my defense and I stalled and struggled against the Holy Spirit's wooing.

I still struggled with bitterness before you. Whatever work the Holy Spirit was doing you, he was doing 10x the work in me. You had only lashed out at me few times a day while I was growing up, but I had hated you for 20 years, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It took me years to believe you had converted; it took me years to learn to give you the benefit of the doubt; it took me years to not bring up old hurts (verbally as well as mentally) when we were together. In short, it took the grace of God forgiving you to make me realize I had not forgiven you adequately. If God, whom you had offended infinitely more than you had offended me, could have mercy on you, then I had no excuse to let estrangement reign between us.

I had no idea what it meant to be intimate with you, even the "Christian" you. From an early age, I hid from you and from your random (yet predictable) acts of anger against me. I hid in the woods, in my room, at neighbor's houses, and when I was in your presence, I kept up the tactic. The less you knew about me, the less you knew about my life, my hopes, my dreams, the less chance I had that you would strike out and actually hit something that meant anything to me.

I honor you for trying to get to know me, for traveling what was an incredible distance for you to visit me I Orlando, to watch me graduate from Reformed Theological Seminary. While that trip was a debacle in some way, you showed me the fruits of the Spirit and, for the first time, I had hope that we would stand before God's throne one day, stripped of the sin that had dogged us both, stripped of ignorance and arrogance, and actually know one another. You gave me hope that windy day, and I thank you.

After you died, Mom got sick, so sick she had to come to live in Orlando. We had to sell the property because you didn't leave anything significant to care for her - except a son. One of your friends said that no one in the community would have blamed me if I had left Mom to be taken care of by the government. She explained that because I was just an adopted son, not your real son, people would have understood.

I thank you for teaching me that parents are the people who raise you. You protected me from the lack of respect for parents that existed among your peers. You instructed me, one way or the other, that it was my duty to be your child and to honor you, in spite of your faults.

From beginning to end, I write this letter to honor you. Let it be known that the Barnes clan honors its fallen heroes. Soon enough, I will join you. And by God's grace, when I fall, another Barnes shall pick up the pen, and through many tears, shall begin to write.

With Love,

Your Son Robert