4:32 Mile

Is your father a good person?

The question came on a psych test that we took for Serge a few weeks ago.  I honestly had no idea how to answer.  I know that on one hand, the world saw my father was a good person – talented, brilliant, a great athlete, involved in church.  On the other, he did things that were unspeakably horrific.  Best I can guess, he had learned to compartmentalize his life and to be two opposite people at the same time.

That said, I really know remarkably little about him.  I haven’t done much digging, for fear that I wouldn’t like what I discovered.  But mom pulled out an old box today with an honorable discharge from the Air Force and an article about a running season in college.  His times – a 4:32 mile, 9:47 two-mile, and 22:14 four-and-a-half mile.   That’s seriously fast – though my brother is closer to these times, at my peak I would have been at least a minute slower, and probably more, and he would have easily beat both of us.

I watched a fantastic movie on the plane the other day called Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl.  Brilliant cinematography, funny, insightful, and very well acted.  One of the concepts was about death, and how you can learn more about someone and in a sense know and love them more even after they are gone. . .these discoveries were a way to deal with the process of grief and loss.  “Life can keep on unfolding itself to you, as long as you pay attention.”  It’s certainly true – after someone is gone, each discovery becomes a treasure.

It also reminded me of a recurring line in a great two-book series by AS Peterson – the Fiddler’s Green and the Fiddler’s Gun.  One of the main characters had a very, very shady past and to cope and chase away the darkness would pick up a fiddle and play to “make it beautiful.”  A great concept – of looking at the darkness and low points and not minimizing or ignoring them, but instead, redeeming.

I am in the process of taking a deep look into how the past affects who I am.  The only way forward is to both seek the unfolding of the past and to make it beautiful.  To seek the ways God is redeeming the pain and sadness and brokenness of the past to create an amazing future.  To let abandonment be replaced by faithfulness, to let abuse be replaced by tender love.  And also to acknowledge what good there was and is – like the knowledge that somewhere inside of me, there is the ability to run like the wind, because my father could.