Personal
My Story: Losing My Father on Christmas Morning
I've never been one to struggle with words. Dad encouraged me to start preaching, and I took to it. Figuring out who you're talking to. Reading the room. Trying to piece together the right combination of words that meet the gravity of whatever moment is facing you. It's not a fear thing. It's a joy. A privilege.
But there have been a few moments where words didn't come.
The first was 2004. I walked through the front door after a several-day binge, right into an intervention. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa. They'd finally had enough. I walked into the backyard, broke down, and the only words I could put together were: “Yeah. I'll go.”
What I didn't know until later was that Mom and Dad had written a check to Teen Challenge up in New York. The last couple hundred dollars they had. They kept calling to find out when the director was going to cash it. He never did. My parents wrote that check anyway, knowing the account was almost empty. Words were hard for that one too.
So I went. 2005. Teen Challenge in New York. Not as staff. As a student. Eighteen years old, strung out, no plan. Later, my sister went through a program too. God used the very thing Dad was trying to build to put our family back together.
See, Dad had started something small in Staunton, Virginia. A one-room referral office. Phone calls. Connecting people to programs. He said, “What a way to help people. Just to help a few people get their life back together.” That became his mission for the next 20 years. He didn't build what he called a “mega ministry.” He helped a few people. And one of them was me.
“No regret. Just thank you.”
Words failed again in 2008. Little room off the stage at Calvary Assembly, me in a tuxedo, Dad across from me in his suit holding his Bible, about to do the ceremony. And again when we told them we were having a daughter and Mom and Dad came to the hospital and held Chloe for the first time.
I came back and ran the ministry with him. Side by side. My kids grew up knowing Jesus, knowing stability, knowing what it looks like when a man finishes the race well. They didn't grow up in the chaos I put our family through as a teenager. That's the fruit. That's the legacy. The cycle broke. The mission succeeded.
Then came the stroke. The property deed for the ministry building came through the same day. I still don't have a clean answer for how those two things landed on the same calendar square, and I wrote about that here.
Christmas morning. Standing over Dad. Getting the chance to say goodbye, or “see you again,” or whatever words you put together in a moment like that. What do I say that meets the gravity of this?
Emily had grabbed my leg that morning downstairs by the tree. “Thank you, Dad.” Hours later, I found myself saying the same thing to mine.
And I realized something. Every one of those moments where words failed me—the intervention, the check, the wedding, the hospital with Chloe, Christmas morning—they all existed because Dad threw a party when I came home.
No regret. Just thank you.
I'm writing this from a liminal place. Threshold. The space between rooms. The building is on the market. The residential program is closed. We're rebuilding toward something that doesn't have edges yet. My theology is intact. My nervous system is still catching up. Grief doesn't sit still in my body, so I build things. Websites at 3am. Edits on videos that were already finished. My hands trying to process what my mind can't sit with yet.