St. Timothy Lutheran Church

"My little girl."  Any father who has a daughter and who also has at least half a heart knows what is contained in that phrase - the love, the caring, the protectiveness, the joy, how you want nothing but joy and happiness for her.  There's pain in that phrase too.  You know that she won't always be little, that someday, she will grow up and become a woman who will fall in love with a man, and she'll leave you for him.  You also know that in the meantime, she's got lots of experience to gain and lessons to learn, and not all of it will be easy, and some of it will harm her.  "My little girl."  It's a strange trio of words that brings together the extremes of happiness and sorrow so that you almost can't tell them apart - almost.

Mine is four now, nearly five.  She's a blonde haired, blue eyed dancing whirlwind of laughing and chasing and curiosity.  When she's happy, she exudes joy, and when she's not, she makes sure that we are under no illusions to the contrary.  There is no middle ground for her.  It's as if someone taught her what "carpe diem" meant in utero, and she embraced it like a disciple.

As I write this, I've just returned from the emergency room.  I was sitting in the living room with my father in law, when I heard what sounded like someone dropping a very heavy box onto a hard floor, followed instantly by screaming.  I ran into the hallway where I found my little girl sitting on the floor waving her hands and shaking her head vigorously, still screaming.  Her hair was covering her face so I moved it away.  Blood was running down her face, dripping off of her chin, and there was a large gash in her forehead, over her right eye.  

Vividly, I recall this sense of finality as I saw it, the realization that this was not a thing that could be undone, that we had passed a moment in time that had brought her great fear and pain, and that we could not go back and avoid it, but how greatly I wished that we could.   

My wife and her mother showed up, and there was a flurry of activity – stopping the bleeding, realizing that we need to go to the ER, realizing that we don't know where the closest ER is (we're new to this town), figuring out where it is, trying to find the cell phone, getting in the car, and driving there very quickly, and all the while, I hear her screaming and wish I could take the pain away from her, my little girl, my poor, hurting, frightened little girl. 

I learned later that she had been running down the hall to say "good night" to me when she had tripped and fallen into a corner of the wall.  In the end, it wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things.  They used this kind of glue to hold her cut together, so she didn't have to have stitches.  By the time they were done, she was happily singing into the kazoo the nurses had given her.  She will, however, have an inch and a half long scar on her forehead for the rest of her life.  

We call God "Our Father."  We are even told by Jesus that we can call him "Abba," the Greek equivalent of "daddy."  He calls us His children, His little boys and girls.  Becoming a father myself gave me a new understanding of all of this, of just how much He loves us, how much He wants for us to know only joy and happiness – to know Him.  

The Bible also says that He is close to the brokenhearted, and that He sympathizes with us, that He isn't apathetic or indifferent about our pain and suffering.  After tonight, I have a deeper understanding of this, though it came with a price.

I know this kind of talk leads to a deeper issue, but this entry is getting long and I'm tired.  I've had a rough night.

...to be continued...