my father, my father, i learned you in a thousand ways. all the pieces of you that come like breathing, entering my lungs before i knew to soak it in. before i understood what any of it meant. i’m sure it was instruction at some point, but it’s all long since settled into instinct, into the way i breath too.
the way you raise your communion cup, just an inch or two, before you tip it back. the bread too. a quiet toast, like this quietness is worth its simplicity. sharing the moment with the Lord like it’s just as important as sharing with the church.
i think i might have been born with the phrase “how can i help” embedded in my bones, just dormant. you repeated it like a hammering in the background, shaping the way i step into a room. my hands go in first, my heart a moment after, both open and searching for something to carry.
it wasn’t a conscious thought, when i started to mirror you. the way my hands move the same way and my voice pitched the same, carrying laughter across a room. questions i heard you ask half a million times, tumbling from my lips without giving you credit. i offer myself in the same quiet ways, a hand on a shoulder or a head bowed in prayer.
your faith is never something you felt the need to announce with fanfare, not something you had to prove. it just existed in the background, like the ocean, like the tide. steady and unremarkable and unrelenting and shaping the very way i move though this space.
you didn’t call it leadership, either. there wasn’t ever a bulleted list for me to follow. you just stood where people needed you to stand. stepped forward when something needed to be carried. raised your hand first, so that others didn’t have to. stepped back when the space was needed. i think that’s what it means to lead. it’s not trying to be seen, chasing spotlights out of spite. it’s just making room, only speaking first when want to to second, listening long enough to understand what is being asked.
that’s what love looks like too, the kind that Christ had. the kind that doesn’t insist or demand. instead it simply offers, stays, shows up so consistently it almost disappears. you try to imagine the absence of it and realize it was a pillar holding up the sky.
my father, my father, i did not try to learn to be you. i did not know that faith could look like this, feel like this. so quiet it feels lesser than breathing, so loud it shakes your bones.
perhaps that is where everything else begins to begin. not in sermons or declarations, just in the steady unending repetition of a life choosing to love whoever comes near. again and again and again. until the choice to do it is carried forward, inherited without asking.
i almost wonder if this is how i learned to understand God. not in the abstract language that marches across a page, matching the voice i hear on stage. but in the way i watch you live. in the way i’ve always watched you live. the way love looks when it has hands and an open smile, asking how can i help and meaning it.
