dimming of the day

The person I have learned the most about grace from is my Dad.

It’s him, just how he is, that always made me feel the most that it was okay. Just okay. To not go out for high school volleyball anymore, as if that were an indicator of my worth. To fail in a relationship. Or a job. Some aspect of my faith. To leave Africa, when I do, because I can't handle it anymore, the aloneness mostly, so much built-up loneliness, and the dying. He’d just say, a far distant tinny voice whistling in wires across the expanse of Asia, submerged through the Pacific Ocean – or shooting across outer space probably - then landing on Mozambique’s coastline, traveling inland and upward in elevation until it arrives at me, a short, anxious figure on a beat-up couch in the veranda of a little house, desperately figuring things out. “It’s alright then, honey. Just go home if it’s time.” An echo of the past: “Well, $600 is a lot of money to drop the class now. But it’s just money.” Always: “Do what you gotta do.”

It’s so immediate, his reaction, as if proffering a daughter grace is his modus operandi. There’s no hint of irony, manipulation, or theatre. No footnotes. No pregnant pause. Just simply and immediately, okay. He means it.

What relief. So much grace it makes me want to cry. It imbues freedom to rise after faltering, to keep going. It takes a long view of living, when that’s what is needed. I’m fed up with struggle, which is mostly what life is; but I keep from drowning because of grace; and what I know of it, intimately, comes from my family, all of them, my mom and my sister, and especially, from dad.