Religion

“Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your country,

Four year old Ivy wants to dance in church. As the pastor’s wife, I’ve been in the habit of sitting on the front row for many years now, and when those guitars get going and that little preschooler starts to want to twirl and kick, well, I spend a good portion of the service talking her down from putting on a mighty fine performance at the front of the church.

Sometimes I think about how different my mom’s childhood was from my own, not because she was born almost three decades earlier, but because her dad died in an accident when she was only four years old. She lived her whole life without knowing the love of a dad or experiencing the unique ways that good dads tend to challenge and encourage us. She had a good one. But she missed him.