What Goes Around Comes Around. Part 2. - A Father's Day Reminiscence

(Cont. - Read Part 1 first)

And as Paul Harvey was prone to say,

…”And now the rest of the story.”

For you see, dear reader, the rehab facility, or nursing home, or whatever we choose to call it, to which I admitted my father, is one and the same location in which one of those meetings I alluded to occurred so very long ago.

Oddly enough, though my dear pastor’s wife has long since gone on to her reward, the same office, first door on the right, still boasts the same sign on its door. “Director of Nurses.”

And strangely enough, just ten paces across the hall, I sat down with the admitting clerk and enrolled my father in the facility.

4 meetings. 50 years.

Daddy – 2

Yours Truly – 2

But in life of a family no scores really exist.

Not among those who love and care and exercise good will.

Funny how roles change over the course of a few short years.

The father fathers the son

The son fathers the father

(I wonder if this trend with continue in the lives of my own son and I).

My father’s stay in that all too familiar building was all too brief. Three weeks after having been admitted, and having walked further down those meandering hallways that day, than he had since he’d been admitted, he sustained a fall, and

“slipped the surly bonds of earth, and touched the face of God.”

You may recall I had previously labeled my dad an agnostic; one who believes that if, in fact, a Creator exists, He has washed His hands of mankind, and gone on a proverbial vacation.

But as my pastor has been prone to say, “It doesn’t take all that much for a man to make his heart right with God” (and) “I believe your dad was ready to meet his Creator.”

For you see, virtually every time my pastor prayed with my father, my dad would respond with, “Pastor Kern, you’re the best pray-er (noun) I ever knew!”

That of which my father had once been so suspicious, and just short of cynical, he

…now loved and respected.

Did I mention that my mother now finds herself living in that same facility where my father spent his last days, and that our own dear Pastor Kern sometimes visits with and prays with her?

Mama has been known to speak well of my pastor, and that little Bible college, (now a university) where the keel of my spiritual foundation was laid. And where, ultimately, decades later, I was given the inestimable privilege of

…serving on the faculty.

And if there is a rest of the rest of the story, it is that my dear daddy’s memorial service was conducted in that same church in which he and I met with his own pastor so many decades ago.

I was given the privilege of telling a poignant story of how his and my relationship metamorphosed with the passing years, and how that near the end we had fostered and nurtured something we had lacked at the beginning. And having honored my father with a few fitting words, I closed my allotted time with the national anthem of the Christian faith,

“Amazing Grace”

I think our Lord has a sense of humor. At least, in this case it seems so to me.

Both Poignant and Ironic.

Truly, “What goes around comes around.”

(By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "(Mc)Donald's Daily Diary" Vol. 4)