A Love Letter From a Daughter to Her Father

Words I Never Said

First, thank you all for coming. Second, it may be bad theology, but there are times that you just gotta do some I’ll Fly Away. Finally, if you wanted a deep theological take today, I’m sorry, you’re not gonna find it here. We all know, or have all been told, or all remember that Christ was the first fruit of the Resurrection according to Paul, that we all, as believers, are promised life. That we all, as believers, no longer die in our sins. That there is a great cloud of witnesses that we join upon our death. We know this, we read this, we hear this. It is written upon our hearts. I’m not here to reiterate any of that, I’ll refer you to the readings if you want or need that. Instead, I want to share some thoughts from an eldest child about their even more elder father.

My earliest memories of my dad were of him serving where has was called. My earliest memories of him are the consequences of what that means for those of us with a deep, unending, sense of service. Because sometimes we fall short. Sometimes we fall short of the ideal that we set out before us. But one of the things that I take from those is that, at no point, was giving up an option. You get up and you keep on trying. Just like a younger me did whenever my dad took a nap and he’d wake up to me doing chest compressions and rescue breathing.

We are not perfect creatures, we never could be this side of Eden. But, most of the time we do the best we can, and sometimes we don’t. But I think in the end, after all the set backs, after all the failures, after always trying to make decisions that in the moment he thought were the right one, he was getting it right in the end. The long arc of life was bending towards goodness, in the end. In the end, I think there’s not much more to add to a life that was truly well lived, a life where a father tried all the way up to his last breath.

Jeg elsker dig, far. farvel for altid.