My Father’s Church

A couple of years ago I drove up into the mountains to look for a church. A particular Baptist church, it had been my father’s first posting out of seminary.

I found it on a back road tucked up into a hillside of mountain laurel. It was just as I remembered it from childhood visits, a white painted structure in good repair, with a covered picnic area beside a meandering stream. A path led down to a small pool in the stream, where a rock dam had been built to hold enough still deep water for baptizing. 

It was a quiet spiritual place and I sat on a rock and imagined my father as a young man, baptizing those in need, followed by a covered dish afternoon church supper fit for the good Lord himself. Fried chicken, ham, potato salad, green beans, squash casserole, deviled eggs, corn bread, and a jello fruit salad I’ve never learned to like. 

I recalled riding in a church member’s wooden Chris Craft while he water skied behind on Lake Rabun, a beautiful mountain lake a mile from the church. Still an Adonis of a young man but now with a wife and three small children, paying rent and buying groceries on the salary of a pastor of a small church in a rural Georgia town. And what must have been the gradual shock of it all. An idealist and dreamer coming to terms with the responsibilities of family, needy parishioners, and a grocery list of peanut butter, macaroni and cheese, and diapers.   

I wanted to know him better but he kept so much to himself, with his books and notebooks, the difficult childhood of an abusive alcoholic father and passive mother. Pretty much self-sufficient at thirteen, a paper route gave him lunch money and the beginning of college savings. He was on his own and accepted that, doing what had to be done. Paying for education, a leg up in the world, and the chance to do some good.

We never talked about personal things, but could always bond over a ball game. Baseball, football, basketball, whatever was in season. He loved and played sports, had been a Division 1 college pitcher and basketball player. Even had a love for boxing which I learned to share. And though I never boxed, I was well bloodied once when his illusive floating knuckleball jumped over my glove and hit me square in the mouth. 

Years later at another, larger church, I walked in to find him crying at his office desk. Missed mortgage payments, the threat of foreclosure. A shaggy haired self absorbed teenager, I had never seen my dad cry. I was just there to borrow twenty bucks. We locked eyes and he waved me over, held me in a long embrace. Then he opened his wallet and gave me the $20. 

So there that day, alone beside the creek, in the shadow of the empty white church, I finally understood my father, and the tears welled up like rain. I missed him so much. And I thought of him there, a youngster himself, waist deep in the stream, holding some expectant soul’s nose as he dipped their head beneath the water. Passing along something like grace, and hope in the face of the storms.