Several years ago, I accepted a “Focus on the Family” sermon series challenge to write a “Tribute” to both of my parents while they were still living and to present it to each one on a special occasion.
Why do we so often wait until we are separated in death to offer the gift of memories through words that should be expressed in life?
This question pierced my heart, and so I readily accepted the challenge.
It was one of the most meaningful exercises I have ever participated in. (I would challenge my reader to consider it if one or both of your parents are still living.)
I delivered “A Tribute to my Father” along with “Fisher Road and Fireflies” to my dad on Father’s Day, 2014.
Seven years later—in August of 2021, my father departed this life—with nothing between us left unsaid.
My dad is numbered among countless Americans who died at home during “Covid” from a fairly benign illness— having had no access to early treatment (or any treatment as he would not be separated from my mother to receive care) as a result of “Covid” Public Health Policy.
If I did not believe in the sovereignty of God in life and in death—I would be angry and bitter.
I have chosen, instead, to find meaning in his death and to work relentlessly to keep it from ever happening again.
Dad, you live fiercely in my heart, as I know I lived in yours.
Mom and Dad 2021
Dad’s Bible…
A Tribute to my Father, June 2014
As close as I am with my mother, when I dig deep into the memories that make me who I am, I find it strange that my earliest childhood memories are actually of my father.
The father of my childhood was a man of few words, but I think it may have been clear to me even as a preschooler that he was a dreamer.
Most of my father’s dreams centered around my mother and our family and almost always when I close my eyes, we are all together underneath a structure somewhere that my father was building or rebuilding or repairing.
My father’s dreams often took the shape of houses.
They say that smell is the sense that ties us most closely with our strongest memories and I believe that this is true.
To this day, the smell of coffee, Old Spice, and fresh cut lumber reunite me with my father.
I can remember as a very little girl studying my father with an intense curiosity.
I have the most vivid memories of his morning coffee routine. I can still close my eyes and see him standing in the kitchen having just poured his morning cup.
He always stood perfectly still and took a sip while staring out the kitchen window to the fields just beyond our farm.
I don’t know when I quit studying my father, but I am certain I witnessed a repeat of this coffee routine at every home we ever lived in, long after we’d left the farm.
I always thought that Dad was reflecting or praying or having some deep thought.
I now realize that it is more likely that he had simply overfilled his cup (as I have a tendency to do the same.)
I also realize now, as an adult, and a deeply committed coffee drinker myself, that one of my father’s most intentional acts of grace toward me also involved coffee.
I was probably six or seven years old when I started making it a Saturday morning habit to brew and bring my dad coffee in bed.
I can only imagine how horrible it probably tasted and how Dad probably desperately wished that I had not interfered with his morning coffee routine.
But he never once refused it. He never once went behind me and remade it.
And he always smiled and thanked me.
And he drank it.
Being the only girl in our family (sandwiched between three boys), I always felt like I was the one most disconnected from my dad so the pride that would swell up in me throughout the course of this routine is difficult to describe.
Coffee somehow connected us. And it still does.
My father was abandoned as a child after his mother was killed by an abusive step-father and after having already been abandoned by his biological father.
His childhood was anything but easy.
I imagine his most constant companions to be loneliness and uncertainty.
Separated from all three of his siblings and bounced back and forth between the homes of multiple family members beginning at age eleven, I don’t know that my dad ever knew what a real home was until he made one with my mother.
I have no idea how my father rose above the ashes of what was his childhood to become a man much less a good man and a faithful husband and father, but he did.
I think he resolved very young that the cycle of abuse and dysfunction that he had grown up in would stop with him.
And my father never once wavered from his resolve.
Aside from an incredibly hard work ethic, my father taught me honesty and integrity.
I don’t ever remember him speaking about such character traits.
He really didn’t have to.
He modeled them.
I do not believe I ever witnessed my father tell a lie or attempt to deceive any one for any reason. I always admired this about my him, and I always will.
1 John 3:18 says that we shouldn’t just SAY that we love one another but that we should show our love in deed and in action.
My dad was not the kind of man to express love with words, but I always knew he loved me because he showed me.
Whether it was graciously accepting a cup of coffee, teaching me how to shoot a basketball, fixing my car, teaching me to drive, or helping build my home, Dad was always there.
He never once refused to help me do anything.
When I was in high school, my father took a long term substitute teaching position on the same hallway where I took most of my classes.
I pretended in front of my friends that I was mortified by my father’s presence in my school, but really, I never felt safer than when I knew he was just a few doors away.
That was my dad.
He was a presence.
And everyone was safe in his presence.
At 6’2, 200 plus pounds with uncommon physical strength and athleticism, it was easy to forget that Dad was human.
Even most of my friends viewed him as something of a cross between Paul Bunyan and Samson.
I was 32 when my dad got really sick.
Within the span of only a few weeks, he went from being able to strap 80 pounds of shingles on his back and climb up a ladder to roof a house to laying in a hospital bed in ICU wasting away from an acute form of viral encephalitis caused by a mosquito bite.
It was unimaginable to me that Dad would not resurrect from that bed a man with the same extraordinary strength I had always known him to possess.
What I could not have known ten years ago was that my dad had an inner strength that was far more extraordinary than his physical strength.
Today, my father’s life includes the realities of wheelchairs, seizures, and memory loss.
But it also includes a strength of character, a dependence on Christ, and a resolute faith that maybe came only as a result of the loss of his Samson like physical strength.
2 Corinthians 12:9 says that God’s grace is strongest when we are at our weakest.
And God’s grace is what is on display today in my father’s life.
It is a far more incredible strength than any human strength could ever compare…even my father’s.
I have had the privilege because of my father's illness of getting to know him twice.
The father of my childhood taught me love and grace and strength by what he did.
And the father of my adulthood has taught me love and humility and strength by what he allows others to do for him.
The hard-working man with the strength of a dozen has given way to a man who finds his strength in the hope of the gospel and in a deeply personal relationship with Jesus through His Word.
My father has become a man who has the time to talk and who takes the time to listen even when he is uncomfortable and suffering physically.
There is a selflessness to his interaction with others that I cannot help but admire.
No longer is my father veiled behind 200 pounds of brute strength.
He no longer struggles to express pride or love for his children and grandchildren or their accomplishments.
I have said it before, but it is all the more true, that my father stands taller than most any man I have ever known, even from a wheelchair.
I know that we do not get to choose our fathers.
It is God who uniquely knits children together with their parents.
But if I could choose, I would pick my dad over any other man who has ever lived.
A great deal of who I am today, I am because of my dad’s fingerprints on my life.
I dream because of my dad.
I own a small business because of my dad.
I work with wood because of my dad.
I work really hard because of my dad.
And I drink coffee because of my dad.
But more importantly, I value hard work, honesty, integrity, humility, grace, strength, faith, and family because of my dad.
I once signed a letter to the editor of a newspaper, “Tara Ansley Niebaum ~ Proud daughter of Jerry L. Ansley.”
That seems as good a way as any to end a tribute to my dad for a life well lived and a race well run by all accounts.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:1-3
August 5, 2021 you finished your race…and you finished strong.
