Hope: My Father's Prayers

My father and I are two very different people. And that has always confused me a great deal.

I love to talk. To communicate. To express myself. Most of you who know me know that is an understatement! I am a very vocal person. It is just my nature. I thrive off of conversation. Exchange of ideas. Disagreement. Challenge. Well-worded statements. Poetry. And when I have something happening in my life—good or bad—I like to talk and write until it all makes sense.

But my father is not like that. He doesn’t like to talk. Rarely is he deeply engaged by the beauty of articulate self-expression. It is just not his style. And whenever he has something going on, he never tries to figure it out with words. He likes to be alone. He lets the ideas work instead of his mouth. So he fishes. He plays golf. He does yard work. All of this when there is something going on in his life. All of this alone.

I like to think that my father is praying when he is alone.

Robert Frost said the something quite similar about the tree in his poem Birches. But he knew it wasn’t real. I do not. He invented the boy to make reality bearable. Doable. Liveable. Interesting. Alive.

I do more than invent a man’s faith, I hope. I acknowledge it. I hope that he prays through those experiences. I hope that he is growing closer to God each and every moment he spends alone. That in some way his “alone time” is not alone time at all, but is an outlet for communion with God.

I like to think he prays alone.

Didn’t Jesus do that every now and then?

I wrote this on Father’s Day, 2007. And I love my dad.