The ever teacher in her wanted me to learn to tell time by the hands. “If you can learn to read this, I’ll buy you a digital one” she said. It had a red band with black buckle. The face was red with a black frame around the edges. It had other designs on it that allude me with age, but for a child it was the perfect watch. And I did learn to read what the hands meant. I was proud of it.
We arrived home from a little league game that night during my first season playing. At that age there really wasn’t much I could offer the team. I’d like to imagine that none of the children did, but some of them were prodigies. They would go on to bigger and better things. I, on the other hand, was content to count the dandelions in left field with my finger comfortably lodged up one nostril or the other. Who were they kidding? No kid my age could hit a baseball to the outfield anyway. I can’t image the game was that enthralling for my parents either. In the age before smartphones and the internet as we know it, there really wasn’t much they could do but muster enough enthusiasm to cheer on their child as he tried to swing futilely at a gingerly lobbed ball. After enduring hours of this exercise in a now purely symbolic sport, we piled into the van and drove home. Upon arrival, I discovered that my watch, my marvelous, fantastic, brag-to-all-my-friends watch, could not be found. We looked in my room and under every toy, “But I had it at the game!” So we looked in and under the seats of the car, but alas, it was not there. Finally, in a moment of desperation, I pleaded that we return to the field where it lay alone and dejected on a dugout bench. My father took me to the car and as we drove, I counted the seconds that it was out there. Fear nearly overwhelmed me as we traveled. I could only imagine that someone else found it first and had taken home. I feared it may have fallen underfoot where it was totally destroyed. Driving those miles in the Arizona desert gave me plenty of time to dream of its untimely and unfortunate demise.
I burst forth from the front door and ran to the fence. I couldn’t see anything from this distance. Dad arrived a few steps behind me and hoisted me to the other side of the locked gate only to follow moments after. I ran straight to the dugout and looked on and under the bench. Nothing but dirt and a lost baseball, forgotten by its own owner, remained. I turned back, my father was pacing back and forth across the field. Looking at all the places where I had walked. Nothing could escape his eye. I returned to his side and together we walked the entire field. We searched until after sundown and when the light finally faded and we could no longer see the ground upon which we walked, he took me, heartbroken and helped me back to the car.
And that was the last day I ever saw that watch.
At a red light, nearly twenty years past, the watch returned to me. This time it was but a memory. As the light turned from red to green and I continued on to home, I remembered not only the watch, but the circumstances in which it vanished into nothingness.
What was it that motivated him? As a child I believed his determined searching was for the lost watch. How could he not desire it found as much as I? But from a son twenty years wiser, I realize his searching was for my benefit. He knew the watch was never to be found. After a long afternoon watching his son fail miserably at America’s Pastime, the last thing he wanted to do was wander around an empty baseball field that evening. With the time spent and the gas it took to drive that distance, I have no doubt he could have purchased a new watch five times over. Yet he did it. It wasn’t about the watch. He did it for me.
He always did it for me.
While that night may be nothing more than a snap shot of the normalcy that was my father’s love, it’s exactly that. Everything I know about my God, my Father, is because I had a dad willing to spend his days with his sons in the seemingly unimportant moments. It wasn’t about the watch, the broken action figures, the flimsy field goal erected in the backyard, or the carefully build model rockets we launched into the desert skies. No, those moments my father was paying a low cost investment to change lives.
The most amazing part of realizing this now is that he never planned it that way. Day in and day out, with a thousand moments like those, his character shown through and created a lasting image of what a caring, firm, gentle, and honorable man of integrity looked like. I am grateful that my Heavenly Father granted me a fallen man, who by desperately chasing the heart of God, became an incredible example of the character of the All Mighty.
It is through this gracious blessing that I look up with admiration to You and say, thank You, Father. Thank You!