Dear Kids

 

Dear Kids,

Along with being married to your mom, being your dad is the greatest of privileges. I love you and wouldn’t change anything about who you are or how we are together. Hey, its’ us! I will not be able to capture all the blessings about being dad to you.

I am thankful that I was able to hold you in the delivery room. I don’t know how your grandfathers could handle pacing in the waiting room until their kids were born, weighed, measured, or even cleaned up. I certainly don’t know how my dad could stand it being half the world away when I was born and not seeing me until I was six months old or so. Being there right then in the moment? Awesome!

All those things listed on the card pictured below? I wouldn’t run from any of them, bring it on. I loved the whole lot of it. Being your coach, from indoor soccer to baseball, basketball, swim meet timer are memories I cherish – being your biggest fan at high school meets and drama gigs – special. I’m not sure I can pick one activity over another. I love walking with you and have having taken you for walks, watching birds, swimming, hiking, rafting…all of it has been a gas, as we used to say.

Mission trips with you to Arizona? A highlight of decades of youth ministry. You demonstrated and continue to demonstrate your caring hearts for others. I must have done something right and that is likely because of amazing grace. I suspect I’ve received far more out of being a dad than I have any right to expect. Just the same, I’ll take it.

Your adult selves continue to grow and mature. You have become outstanding parents and will continue to grow into that role as your kids grow, develop, and change. You are adaptive, creative, and loving in all the ways that are good and right. Each of you has married well and your spouses have grown into excellent parents as well. To see two melded into one and your parenting as a team pulling equally at the traces of the craft of being parents is a real joy.

Your children are a distinct please in every way. They are joyful and I love how they put up with Silly Opa. I love them in unmeasurable quantities just as I do you. Well done children, well done.

This is a glimpse of what it means to me to be a dad on Father’s Day.

Thank you.

Again, I love you.

Dad

Dear Mom and Dad

 

June 1, 2022

Dear Mom and Dad,

There is nothing I would love better than celebrating your 70^th Anniversary with you, sitting around with family and friends grouped around the lawn, the pond, up on the deck. We would raise a glass in a toast, Mimosas likely, and thank all who were there for celebrating such a rare feat of 70 years of marriage, and rightly so.

It might’ve been a bit cool when we started but don’t worry mom, it’ll warm up nicely. In the meantime, we’d be bundled up a bit and be warming each other with fond memories. Dad would be right next to you practicing his favorite pastime, keeping you warm; he was a great one for seeing you comfortable. Snippets of conversations would reach us and just as quickly, smiles would appear on our faces written in family script, age lines, some would call them, we prefer smile lines and expressions of joy accumulated over a life well lived.

I am so thankful for the legacy the two of you established for us. Cindy and I will be celebrating 46 years of marriage this year, Ashley and Matt notched their 20^th this past December, Lauren and Taylor will hit the 9-year mark in September, and Daniel and Ani just tallied up 8 years this past April. Not bad, not bad at all. Thank you.

The dance I will always remember is The Wedding Anniversary Dance in 2001 at Matt and Ashley’s wedding. It was a dance of attrition with the shortest marriages coming off the dance floor first. The last five couples were Matt’s folks Curt and Jean, Cindy and I, Kathy and Lee Craw (yet another couple the two of you had great influence with), Jan and Gene Mauk (Cindy’s parents), and you guys. What a testament!

You guys faced down events, trials, and circumstances that could have derailed the marriage. Well done. You didn’t start it off easy by getting married while the both of you were serving in the US Navy with dad being shipped overseas to Korea while mom was pregnant with me. I suppose that made me a Navy brat, short-lived as it was. You built a home in Torrance then made a big move to La Crescenta, no simple tasks.

Vacations! Oh, my Lord, the vacations we had. Bass Lake, a family destination and where we celebrated your lives, has left a multi-generational mark on us and all to the good. We had great times in Bridgeport California, fishing hiking, reading, exploring… Our family vacations with the Murphys at Balboa Island set up another tradition we still revisit from time to time.

But we cannot talk about family vacations without mentioning the trip we made to Kearny Nebraska in the Lemonwood Yellow Chevy Impala station wagon equipped with a 396 cubic inch engine. Dad had some magical way of packing gear on top of the car, one year it was a tarp arrangement and then he built a plywood box with slopped front and painted to match the car. We camped our way to Kearny to visit the Andersons. Four-corners, Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, and driving through a tornado warning we had no idea was in effect. All we knew was that I had to stare out the front and call out obstacles as they appeared during lightning flashes because the headlights couldn’t penetrate the downpour.

Thank you for setting the tone for having family vacations.

I think I will finish this letter with a little about your faith and faithfulness and skip the maudlin part where I say how much I miss you and that all the memories I have come flooding back with the simplest of things, Dad’s intarsia, FB memories with Mom, and all the boxes of crap we took from your house and the treasures we are unearthing from them.

The thing that stands out the most to me is your faithfulness to Jesus, his church, and the needy folks he brought to you, people who lived with us for a time of healing, people who you served when they had nobody else. You both served as Elders in the churches you attended and your elderships had the beginnings in youth ministry as advisors and teachers and went from there to leading and guiding the churches. It has struck be recently that your ministry went from leading as elders to the pure ministry as Deacons, the get down and dirty ministry of serving the poor, the hungry, the lonely. I admire you for that.

Signing off now. 70 years is huge, one of the comforting things is knowing the count keeps growing only now in a place where you both are whole again. Thank God!

In His grip and with the deepest of loves,

jerry