An Ode to A Father Figure

To one of the men who stood by us in our times of suffering. To a father figure who practiced biblical manhood and exemplified it in his life and family.

At my sister’s looking-forward-to-marriage ceremony, he came to bid her congratulations. I saw him, I saw him there and had a conversation with him. Would my knowing that death was lurking round the corner have changed the topic at hand? Would I have paid more attention to the chatting that was coming from a place of life? Contrasting with the wedding photos, and baby photos on my social media applications, the morning message announcing the passing on of a father-figure, a man who my parents sought counsel from and who saw eye-to-eye with each other, even heart-to-heart was dumbfounding.

Dumbfounding in a manner too familiar to me, yet still with its stinging freshness, was the news spread this morning. Far from the coolness of a cucumber, my heart was at odds empathizing with my friends, who we grew up with and who called him dad. My daily meditations of the psalms came ringing at the back of my mind, reminding me of the membrane too thin to distinguish life and death. The membrane that echoes back the futility of our thoughts of eternity with the suddenness, perhaps unexpectedness, of death. Death knocked again, somewhere near.

It took me back to the last time I saw him, at my sister’s ruracio. Who could have thought that one of the people in this happy gathering would be gone, albeit “too soon?” And now, another family will deal with the anguish of losing a loved one, in the backdrop of a myriad of memories to elicit both sadness and a hopeful longing.

And the hopeful longing, where hence the ‘hope’ in ‘full’?

God is familiar with no ignorance that hides our hearts from him, which is why one who is in between gloom and glory would say: “O Lord, all my longing is before you; my sighing is not hidden from you.” (Ps. 38:9) We sometimes live ignorant of this thin line of gloom and glory. Satiating ourselves with the latter, we try to numb ourselves from the former reality of life. Most times though, we forget. Capturing this futility which is all too familiar for Adam’s race, David elsewhere reflects again:

O LORD, make me know my end

And what is the measure of my days;

Let me know how fleeting I am!

Behold, you have made my days a few handbreaths,

And my lifetime is as nothing before you.

Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!

(Ps. 39:4-5)

Far from a myopic condescending, the writer can see the hope at the end of his tunnel. Rather than ending with a cold pessimism of life, he looks to his source of hope,

“And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you.” (Ps. 39:7)

He is one in whom hope is not belittled; the one who has slayed even the gloom of death and victoriously breathed life, so much so that he has breathed new life to dead souls in the present; he is the one who graciously and powerfully governs all that happens in the timespan of life and the one who loves even beyond the confines of death. (Rom. 8:18, 25; 2 Cor. 15:54-57; Eze. 36:26-28)

With David, as an ode to my father figure, I say,

My hope is in you, O Lord.