Stronger January 16, 2011

I run in just a little late like I always do these days after having a baby. I hand Eden off to my dad. He smiles, admiring her face while she excitedly reaches for his styrofoam cup. Leave it to babies to like cups, spoons, and paper more than toys.

I quickly walk up to the stage and take one big step up to my spot at the mic and immediately began practicing for worship with Lance singing and playing right beside me.

Nothing is any different this Sunday than all rest: always busy, familiar songs, typical practice.

I turn the page and we start to sing the song “Stronger”. It’s one of my dad’s favorites so I look up to see if he realizes that we are playing “his” song.

With the light of the sun bursting in behind him, I see the silhouette of my father, holding my daughter with her little cream tutu and leggings bulging out around his shirtsleeves.

I can’t hear him over the roar of the music and the sound of the monitors in my ears but I knew what he was doing.

With one arm holding up my child and another raised in the air, he was singing the song to her.

Their faces were just a few 6 or so inches away as he convictedly sang in his nothing fancy, holding a tune in a bucket voice. sincerely, he looked at her and she intently studied his face.

With the sound of the electric guitar, piano, and percussion behind me, the sound of my husband to the left, I couldn’t help but watch him sing those precious words to my child.

“You are stronger;
You are stronger;
Sin is broken
You have saved me
It is written
Christ has risen
Jesus you are Lord of all….”

In my predictable fashion, I couldn’t help but to well up in my eyes a bit. Between the chorus end and the next verse, I ran over to Lance’s mic to tell him to watch them on the floor.

When the chorus played again, sure enough, my dad raised his hand and sang to Eden.

I watch Lance.

He glances at me.

We both smile, thankfully, back at one another for a brief moment.

It’s hard for me to describe what it does to me to see three generations there on the church floor: me on the stage, and my dad holding his grandchild on the floor.

There was something about singing those words and watching that take place that moves me. I felt a simultaneous gratitude to God for who He is and who He gave me in my father, and then for my father and who he has been to me and is being to my child some 28 years after I was born to him.

I felt an intense feeling of being rescued by the grace of God in my life both spiritually and the earthly grace I had to be raised the way I was. When I was just a little baby like my daughter with no choice or control in the world of who would take care of me, he gave me my parents.

It was another one of those moments in my life where I’m standing in the middle of the result of my parent’s faithfulness and God’s provision.

When he is gone, I will remember him in that mid-morning light singing God’s grace over my first-born on a regular Sunday morning.

Some days God’s faithfulness is apparent immediately.  Sometimes, it takes life times, and even generations to see clearly.  Three to be exact.

When that song finished, my dad and Eden ran up to me before the next song began and he said, “Some time when no one is around, I’d like for you and I to sing that song together up there.”

I smiled in a sort-of tickled way and said, “Okay”.

Eden and my dad went walking out of the sanctuary and I think to myself, “Sometimes he just doesn’t know how good of a man he is.”

As they disappeared around the corner, I’m so glad I do.

Advertisement