A Father’s Threads of Living Faith

We now live states away, but if I close my eyes, this is still how I see him: he’s sitting in a local coffee shop—not at a table but in a cushioned chair, the ones you sit in when you welcome conversations with a stranger. His coffee (black, no cream or sugar) rests on the table next to him and his Bible sits open on his lap. Every once in a while, he stops to joke with someone he knows or talk with someone he doesn’t. In this way he’s unlike me, who would rather say “thank you” with my head down, a string of people I’ll never meet left in the coffee line. 

For my dad, this would never do. He is sociable, sure, but this is only part of the reason. He wants to tell others about what he’s reading from that open Bible of his. He talks about what he’s reading with anyone who might listen, and it always leads back to Jesus. 

When I was young, I was convinced he lacked fear. Now I know it’s that he possessed courage about all the right things. 

This Father’s Day, I can’t help but reflect on the threads of my faith, which lead back to my dad. I know not everyone has this gift—I’m sorry if this is true for you. Still, we each have our own stories of how God intertwined our spiritual life with his Son’s. As I reflect on mine, I trace those gossamer threads back to the moment God entangled my dad’s heart and made it his own. 

Threads of Spiritual History

My dad was twenty-one years old when he became a Christian. The effects of his conversion rippled out to family members and friends, changing the course of his life. He once lived a life entirely committed to himself—then he didn’t. He began attending a local church and reading his Bible. 

He already worked hard, but I’m convinced this is when he began working with unparalleled integrity. 

My life now is fruit of this integrity. He and my mom married young and divorced young, but I was born somewhere in the middle of this. Divorce proceedings meant custody hearings. I was too young to decide for myself where I would live, so a judge decided it for me. My dad’s lawyer strategized the best ways for him to keep me, each one devolving into unkind and untrue words against my mom. My dad refused. Their relationship was severed but his conscience wasn’t. 

He invited prayer and enlisted friends from his church to watch me while he attended court dates. I never saw him in the courtroom, but I imagine him standing there, boldly, doing what he could to honor the Lord yet still fight for me. It was almost unheard of for a father to win custody of his young daughter during that time, but he did. Maybe the judge saw who I know him to be—a father who loved his daughter, who wanted her upbringing to be better than his own. 

Of course, this upbringing would include the faith that changed my dad’s life. In a room decorated with bears and balloons, he encouraged me to memorize Scripture. Prayers peppered mealtimes and bedtime. The integrity that emerged in the courtroom flourished in his work. My dad worked (and still works) with his hands. His work was always fair and always good, a reflection of the change God wrought in his life. He worked long hours and many days, but there was one morning he never worked—Sunday morning. 

Threads of Communion 

Attending church was a way of life growing up. We didn’t talk every day about faith at home, but we never missed a Sunday to talk about faith at church. We’d pile into the van and my dad would turn on worship music—the entire morning was committed to worship. If it happened to be a communion Sunday, he’d lean over and ask the same question each time: “Do you know what this means?” As we grew older, lightness tinged the question, as if it were an inside joke. Of course we knew, we’d groan. Still, he’d walk through the elements, making communion personal. 

“The bread represents Jesus’ body,” he’d say, holding the bread where we could see it. Then, “The juice represents Jesus’s blood.” He’d search our eyes while repressing a smile, waiting for us to nod our acknowledgment. When we did, he’d lean back in his seat, satisfied. We took communion as a church, of course, but in this way, we took communion as a family, too. 

Even now, when my kids are in service with us for communion, the question threatens to roll from my tongue like a childhood liturgy: “Do you know what this means?” That’s the thing about Christian fathers—their faith rubs off on their kids whether they like it or not. 

Threads of Spiritual Life

Though my dad now lives many states away, his influence is still here. It’s present in the verses we teach our children and our nightly prayers. It’s evident in my commitment to preach the gospel to my four children, even when they groan and feel they’ve already heard it. It’s displayed in the Sunday mornings reserved for worship service and the music we play beforehand. 

As a child, I’m not sure how I would have felt about this. I believed that I could outpace my father in the race of Christianity. Isn’t this what we do as children? We believe we know more and do more. We believe that our way will be even better than what our parents were able to accomplish with what they had. We fix our eyes on shortcomings and shrug off their many strengths. 

I know better now. I now know that a thread connects what I believe and what my children might one day believe, a thread that leads back to that moment God changed a twenty-one-year-old’s life in a little church. A thread connected by a faith lived out in many coffee shop moments—a thread firmly attached by a father’s boldness and integrity. 

Do you know what this means? 

Each time the communion elements pass my children by, old enough to know my father’s faith yet too young to make it their own, I pray they’ll remember these moments. And maybe, in a church thirty years from now, they’ll hold up the bread and the cup to their own little ones.

This bread represents Jesus’s body. This juice represents Jesus’s blood . . .