Sunday

UMATILLA INDIAN RESERVATION, OREGON - A year ago exactly, I was on a road trip of a entirely different kind. Shortly before Father’s Day, my father (by adoption) checked himself into a hotel, drank two bottles of gin and hanged himself.

He was a good man. But he was also an alcoholic, bi-polar and a paranoid schizophrenic. My stepmother Alice was handling things by herself and so I drove up to Brattleboro, Vt. to be of whatever help I could and grieve alongside her.

Ours was a strange relationship. He adopted me when I was three years old. And when things didn’t work out between him and my mom, he kept his commitment to me. I spent all of my childhood summers with him in a humble lakeside retreat in New Hampshire. But I never called him Dad, just Pete.

As I became an adult we lost touch, communicating only infrequently. It had been years since we talked and I thought I had lost him forever. Another disposable person in my life. But in the winter of 2001 when I was in Afghanistan covering the invasion and at the lowest point in my life, spiritually and emotionally lost, without hope and, yes, suicidal, my father somehow found me. I’ll never forget talking to him over satellite phone from Kabul, reconnecting and telling him for the first time in my life that I loved him.

Last year I was going to give him a U.S. flag that I carried on my last combat mission in Afghanistan several years later, just as I was deciding to hang up my boots as a reporter. But now he was dead.

His death was not a surprise, though. Please forgive the strangeness of what follows. Two months earlier, I had the strongest sense that I needed to tell him to get help. This kind of thing does not happen to me often. But this was clear and it was specific. I needed to tell him to get help or he would be dead in two months. Two months later, to the day, he was dead.

The thing is, I never told him. I did not trust the still small voice within myself, what I am now convinced was the voice of God. It was too clear and too specific to be otherwise. And even now the guilt wells within me.

I know his death is not my fault, specifically, but even without this strange foreshadowing I know there is more could and should have done. But his sickness overwhelmed me. This is something I have been open about with my wife and with my stepmother and they have both been good and gracious to me. Still, all this year this has lurked in the background, building like a blackwater dam inside me.

And so as I went to church on Sunday, Father’s Day, this was all rising up around me. And as we sang songs of worship celebrating a good and loving heavenly father, the dam just burst wide open. I struggled, usually unsuccessfully, to maintain composure through Peter’s teaching on perfect love, so much of it seemingly spoken just for me. But as we rose to eat the bread and drink the wine, the body and blood of a perfect atonement, I lost all control. Sitting back down I heaved in deep cleansing sobs, my wife wrapping her arms around me as a voice like an angle rose behind me, a man whose face I never saw, singing praise and worship in clear perfect notes resonating directly into my being.

The raw, vile sewage ran out of me, replaced by clear running waters. A fountain of living water.

I know after the last post I am now running the risk of being labeled a Big Cry Baby. I’m okay with that. As I’ve grown older and more honest with myself and others I’ve found the tears flow more readily. I am what I am.

After the services ended, I met with Aram, a pastor at Lookout Mountain who reminds me somehow of a Friar Tuck with a warm and generous smile, deep and searching eyes and unafraid to live on the edge, among outlaws. He listened to my story, encouraged me through my tears, not offering platitudes or empty words, but Christ-like entered into my pain and prayed for God’s help and comfort.

It was like a soothing balm after the painful cleaning of a festering wound.

There was more at Lookout Mountain that was good for the soul as well. We made new friends and got valuable insight in our pursuit of Marley’s grad school, the details of which were remarkably providential. The currents of our life are coming together in some kind of wonderful confluence that is not yet clear, but exciting. It’s hard to describe the specifics, but suffice to say that by what others might call complete coincidence the two programs we are looking at – CCU’s and Mars Hill – are directly connected in ways that we had no idea.

Our day ended breaking bread with Lawdon and Tiffany and their two wonderful girls, our fellow traffic-caught friends from the mountains who had invited us into their home for dinner. Theirs is a wonderful and generous family, real and genuine, and they instantly made their home feel like our home. Capping it all off, Lawdon offered to follow us to our campsite, dropping me and the kids off so that he could then follow Marley all the way across Denver to the airport to drop off our rental car and then bring her back to the RV. We tried to talk him out of it, but out of the pure generosity of his heart, he insisted, adding hours to his night but also richness to our fellowship.

There is a danger in deconstructing a remarkable day into its component parts. Inevitably dissection kills and I worry that I may have done that here. The thing is, Sunday wasn’t a series of singular events but a woven whole, each strand interconnecting with the next. More like notes that together make a beautiful song. It’s hard to write about songs, but I hope I have been able to convey even just a little whisper of the melody.

We begin the last leg of our journey to the West Coast today, already deep inside Oregon. We should be in Seattle by this afternoon.