The Return to Blogging (and a tribute to Dad)

Hi, everyone! I bet you thought I abandoned this blog… I’ll be honest, I wondered if I did for a while there.

This post is going to be a little bit different. It’s been a really tough few months for me. It seemed like it would be trivializing everything that happened to jump on into a post about toys or language. As I reflect and work through everything that happened, I keep coming back to how it all makes what I do-- my work, speech therapy, being a mom-- that much more important.

I’d like to think of myself as a writer. When I was in college, I would feel deeply moved by nature or The Lord or by songs or conversations, and I would make sense of it all by writing. This is me making sense of 2018 so far.

My dad passed away suddenly in early January. He started feeling crummy on Thursday, so he went to the doctor and was diagnosed with flu (even though his test was negative and he’d had the flu vaccine) on Friday afternoon. He continued to battle and ended up at the hospital early Monday morning. He fought hard for 27 hours and we lost him on Tuesday morning. Everything happened so suddenly, so fast. It was hard to believe it all was real.

When my mom called me to come up to the hospital, as things weren’t looking good, I felt such a mix of emotions. I wanted to go for a run. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to wake up from what must have been a dream. My dad wasn’t old. My dad was healthy. None of this made sense. It still bothers me to talk about him in the past tense.

When dealing with such sudden grief, your priorities radically shift, and the things that are truly important shoot up to the top, like a rocket taking off. I’ve never been more thankful for my faith in God and knowing that dad knew Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. He was unconscious when I got to the hospital. There would have been no time to share with him. I’ve felt a heavy burden for those in my life that don’t yet know Him and a deep motivation to share. In my 20’s God took my faith that was so based from emotions and molded it into something  much more factual. In 2011, I was mentored by a friend of mine at church. I remember vividly telling her that I felt that The Lord was preparing me for some type of situation where I would have to trust in Him. He was making truths about Himself so clear to me… that He was good, that He was faithful, that He was sovereign, that He was love. I know now that He has been preparing me for the past 7 years for these times. Although I’ve questioned a lot of things, I’ve never questioned Him.

My dad wasn’t perfect (none of us are), but I think he was pretty darn close. As I think back on the 30 years I was given with him, I can’t really think of anything that he did wrong. The things that I remember are funny...most of them are just daily things that probably didn’t seem like a big deal to him, but were a big deal to me. When I was in kindergarten, my dad would take off for half a day every Wednesday and take me on a fun adventure. I remember going to Putt Putt, the zoo and to see awful kiddie movies. I treasured that time with him. I always knew that my mom, my sister and I were his priorities.

My dad owned a business in the town where I grew up. For 20 years, Elite Car Wash was a huge part of my life. As I remember back, I believe this was one of the ways that my dad influenced me (and continues to influence me) the most. My dad loved every person that worked for him. He dealt with each of them with patience and treated them with respect. When he slipped up and didn’t, he was the first to go back and apologize. That always made such an impression on me, that the boss would go back and apologize to his employees and ask for forgiveness. He was the most humble man I’ve ever known.

Dad looked at his car wash as a ministry. He helped countless people during their hard times. He loaned his cashier money to buy a car, he helped guys who made a mistake get out of jail and back on their feet. He treated each customer as if he or she was always right. He shared the love of Jesus not only in words, but through his deeds. I know he’s in heaven, praising Jesus now, and I can’t even imagine how many people he’s meeting that are there because of the way Dad loved those around him.

I spent most of my college years at a variety of moral crossroads, the biggest of which being “What was I going to do with my life after I graduated?” I majored in Speech Pathology and minored in Religion. Just about every semester, my roommate and I would figure up my GPA and if I could switch my major (I went back and forth between the two) and still graduate on time. My senior year, I took an Intro to Ministry class, where I interned at a children’s ministry at a local church. Each Wednesday, before the children’s activities, I would eat dinner at the church with my mentor and one of my professors, a Speech Pathologist who started the special needs ministry at the church. One particular Wednesday evening, my mentor was busy, so I ended up just visiting with my professor. I told her of my dilemma, of how I felt God’s call to ministry, but wasn’t sure that working at a church was where He was calling me. I will never forget her response… “But Kristin, being a speech pathologist is a ministry. We minister to the families that we serve each and every day.” That moment was defining to me. I stopped my seminary applications and focused on graduate school apps instead. I think of that conversation most weeks, particularly when things get difficult at work.

Which brings me to today. I’ve done a lot of thinking about how to honor my dad’s legacy, and I can think of nothing that would make him more proud than seeing me love and serve people like Jesus did, and like he did. I think he would love to see me think of my job more as a ministry than as a way to make money. My hope for this blog in 2018 is that it brings you some encouragement. We are all in this together as parents, and it isn’t for the faint of heart! The joy and the tears and the tantrums and the precious giggles that make everything worth it. I hope that as I write and as I practice both at school and privately, that I look at each opportunity as a way to be the hands and feet of Jesus. And I hope that each of you are able to see a lot of Jesus and a little bit of my dad in me.

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” -Ephesians 2:10