Six years ago today–February 23, 2020-was the best day I had had in months. But I did not know then that it would be the last time I would hug my dad.
My wife and I were foster parents then, and almost a month before, a young boy we will call Paul (not his real name) came to live with us. Paul had just turned 7, and was full of energy and spirit, and Mom and Dad had heard so much about him. They had decided to come to Jackson to meet him for themselves.
It was a Sunday, and like today, it was a nice day, and the sun was shining. I had to preach that morning, and so my parents (who lived two and a half hours from us) got here in time to meet us at a local restaurant, and then they came to our house.
Paul showed off his room, and my parents oohed and awed in all the right places. I had told Mom how much Paul loved playing with Legos, so she had brought a huge bucket of Legos from when we were kids, and so she and Paul played Legos and talked about our cats, and then he and Dad went outside and my father who never once tossed me a baseball played catch with this kid he just met.
I made a big pot of chili and a huge skillet of cornbread that day, and we ate it for supper around our dining room table. Paul told jokes-he was a master joke teller- and Mom and Dad told him stories about me when I was a kid, and about the hoses they had, and how much they were looking forward to his coming to visit them.
When it was time for them to go home, we went out to the car and did that thing you do when it was a good day and you don’t want it to end. Paul got hugs and said how much fun he had had, and we all were talking about us going to see them one weekend soon.
That had been a really rough winter for us. We had major unplanned expenses, the chaos of the foster system, and car problems galore, all on top of the ever-present depression. But this? This was a good day. In my journal for that day, I said it was the best day I had had in a very, very long time.
In a few weeks, of course, the world would change forever. School shut down, and travel stopped, and we were all hunting for toilet paper and there were COVID projects and remote learning and we prayed this would all be over by Thanksgiving so we could all gather together.
But then in October Paul got sent back to his family, and two days later COVID killed my dad and I would not smile again for months.
But I didn’t know any of that on this day, six years ago. On that night, as I watched the red taillights disappear at the end of our street, I only knew the aching in your sides that comes from laughter, the hope of future plans, and that I had come from love, that I was loved, and was filled with love in return.