To: You – From: Dad – Re: Faith

How is it to love someone/something you’ve never really met?

(I mean, hell yeah! Let’s not tippy-toe or tread lightly here. Let’s just dive right into One of The Classics of All-Time without so much as a gander at just how deep the waters are. Volumes, no doubt, have been written to try and tackle that one.)

I hit my 30th birthday this January. That means when I’m 50, you’ll be 20. I just woke up from 20. I remember 20 like it was yesterday. Can’t say whether or not I’ll remember 20 as clearly when I’m 50, that I’ll be able to regale you with colorful stories of reckless youth with picture-perfect clarity. No, the story that I’d like to pass along isn’t about what was in my life when I was 20. This isn’t about photogenic details or tangibles. This is about things that weren’t in my life.

Your mother wasn’t in my life. When I turned 20 your mother wasn’t in my life, I hadn’t moved to Greensboro yet. Yet somehow the planets aligned in such a way, the cosmos burped or fidgeted or sighed and paths ended up crossing. I know that I arrived in Greensboro, unattached and complacent with that fact. But all of that changed by December.

Direction wasn’t in my life. I entertained myself with intricate delusions of grandeur; I could probably waste a good half-hour picturing the Ends instead of the Means. Hell, I couldn’t even make one of the most fundamental decisions someone in higher education needs to make: declaring a major. But at least I can say that that small, trivial-by-comparison decision changed by December.

Those are just two things that weren’t in my life when I was 20. Does that mean I didn’t love them all the same? Does love require presence?

Philosophers and theologians have been wrestling with matters of faith for years now. It’s been said that poets and artists have managed to express insight, wisdom, and illumination a variety of different ways. But sometimes it isn’t what poets write or what philosophers say. Sometimes some things really can’t be expressed conventionally. Sometimes faith defies language. It is something that might wake you from a restful sleep, where you end up sitting and slouching and thinking and wondering until you ultimately yawn and stretch and roll back under the covers. It might come like a Chinese-food hunger: get ready to eat again in an hour! (Which isn’t to say that faith is hunger or insomnia inducing; just that realization can be unexpected.)

Faith is a tricky thing. You read about “people of faith” and you might compare yourself against them and ask things like, Do I have that? What do they have that I don’t have? You’ll hear a world of different answers from this wide, wide world we’re living in. Listen to their stories. Let them express themselves.

I’ve never met you, but I know I love you. (And for the record: only one of those two truths is going to change by December.) This is my expression of faith.