Tucker’s Telegram

Tucker Henderson

If there’s anything I’ve learned in the past few years it is that time keeps marching on, with or without you. Despite all of our best efforts to preserve our favorite parts of our lives, extend deadlines at school, work, and home and tempt fate with all of our unfinished business, time will steamroll right over our best-laid plans regardless.

Never more have I felt that until the past two months. As many of you know, both of my paternal grandparents passed away in the last few years. It was difficult for all of us, my mom and dad, my uncles, siblings, and the rest of the family to wrap our heads and our hearts around the fact that they were gone and wouldn’t be there to help us along.

As a Christian, grieving for my grandparents was not a torturous process, though it had its difficulties. I believe that with God’s promise of everlasting life and my grandparents’ confessions of faith, I will see them again after I inevitably pass from this life one day. I find hope and comfort in that promise even.

This spring we were starting to figure things out and were getting close to working a lot of the details out with my grandparents’ estate, keeping their property maintained, and making sure everyone was happy with the way things turned out. Everything seemed to be going so well until June 14 when my world flipped upside down.

As many of you know, my dad suddenly passed away from a heart attack on June 14. He was at an elevated risk for it and knew it might happen one day, but as our family has gotten to know a little too well these past few years, one day is always just around the corner. Our time on this earth is not promised and we all have a day when our number will be up.

Dad was only 53, so it’s been a much harder death to grieve and to process. Unlike my grandparents, he didn’t have the chance to see all of his kids graduate, be able to retire, or reach the age of a senior citizen. He was still working five days a week, preparing his home for winter, working through his parents’ probate, and had only just met his brand new granddaughter less than three weeks prior. He had so much life that he was still looking forward to.

We all take life for granted. When we are kids, we are taken care of by our parents. When we’re teenagers, our parents are constantly putting out the fires that we start. When we’re young adults, they help us fix our mistakes and try to share their experience with us. Parents never stop loving us. This is certainly true for my dad. As a friend of his said at his celebration of life, “he would move heaven and earth to help somebody in need.”

I remember as a teenager, my dad would often step far out of his way, leaving his own projects neglected, to help remediate situations my older siblings would get themselves into out in the world. These situations, I thought at the time, were so stupid to have gotten themselves into in the first place. Well, when I graduated high school and then moved out of the house, I felt the benefit of my dad coming to save the day when I got myself into situations that were just as easily avoidable.

Just this past year, I was trying to keep my grandparents’ house maintained and fought to keep up with the insatiable appetite of my grandpa’s wood stove. I was not even remotely prepared for this past winter, despite the mild snow and cold, my wood pile looked like the dregs of my grandpa’s previous wood piles. I continued to cut wood during the week and add the meager loads to my pile, just for it to be burned up in a few nights by the wood stove.

Unannounced, my dad and my younger brother showed up at my house many weekends last winter and dropped off large truckloads of heavy oak. Without any request from me, my dad, out of his love for his child, made sure that I would stay warm and not be without in those coming weeks. He had his own wood stove to feed at home and yet, there he was, emptying his truck of the best oak from his own wood pile onto mine.

My grandpa cut firewood all his life up until he died at age 75. His father and forefathers before him did the same. My dad cut wood his whole life too, though he hoped for the days when he would be able to retire from it. I, too, have cut wood for one wood stove or another for practically all of my life, so I thought I knew the amount of planning, effort, and time it took to cut wood, load wood, unload wood, and burn wood. I did, after all, participate in most of the varying aspects of the process at different times of my life and was ever present when it came time to start the cycle up for the year and I was always glad to see it finished when the warmer weather of spring finally came. It’s safe to say I was a little too confident in my own knowledge.

Though I have been cutting firewood on my own for the past year, I feel like I only really stepped into my dad’s shoes two weeks ago as an opportunity to load as much heavy oak firewood as we could haul came up here in New York Mills. The city cut down a number of trees around Smith Park and that large block around the ball fields. The firewood was open to anyone who wanted it, provided they could cut it up and get it home themselves.

“Easy, no problem,” I thought as soon as I got the green light to carry it all off. Sure, we used to cut and haul many loads of wood when I was a kid. It never seemed impossible then, how hard could it be, right? I think my dad and grandpa are still laughing from Heaven.

We cut and hauled about eight loads of wood between eight of us in four days during the last week of July and into August. All of it was heavy dead oak. Not too green to burn, but still wet enough to squat the tires of my dad’s wood truck. After the first load with blisters and scrapes, aching muscles, and sweat pouring down my face, I wondered how on earth my dad did it all those years. This much work, just for this one load of wood! Dad cut hundreds of loads of wood just for us to keep warm each winter.

If you grew up cutting wood, or maybe you still do, you know how taxing the process can be on your body and how much energy is exerted for each load of firewood you collect. Though we may not look at it this way, it is a sacrifice we make in time, effort, and sometimes well-being to heat our homes for the winter season. I now realize it’s not only a sacrifice, but an act of great love.

Now, if you are a Christian, you may know where I’m going with this story. As a Christian, I love my dad, I love my family, but the most important one in our lives is God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I also know that God’s ways and the suffering and sacrifice of Jesus Christ cannot be equaled. Therefore, analogy can never match up to the reality of God. However, I also know Jesus taught with parables, so let this story about my father’s love remind you of the deep love our Father in Heaven has for us and what Jesus sacrificed and suffered through for us.

John 3:16 reads “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” This is by far the most famous Bible verse, but how many of us misunderstand the simple verse based on the way it’s written and regarded?

God so loved the world… Does that mean that He loved the world so much that He did this? If God had loved the world just a little bit less, would He have not spared us from our sin? No, oftentimes that’s what we think it means when we read that verse, but in truth, it just means that God loved the world in this way. He loved the world in such a way that He would send His Son to the cross and through hell for us, His children. 

My dad so loved me that he brought me truckloads of firewood to last the winter. He never dropped firewood off for my other siblings, does that mean he loved them less? Actually, he did a lot of things differently for my older and younger siblings. Maybe it was me that was somehow lower on his list? No, he loved us in different ways, but it was equally so. He so loved me that he dropped off firewood last winter, but he loved my sister so that he fixed her lawnmower. Perhaps they were different ways of showing that love, but not in any way was that love less. Now, here is where the analogy may just fall apart, like I thought it might. God loves all of His children in this way that He sent His Son to die on the cross for each and every one of us. 

Doesn’t that make you feel special? To know that you, an individual who makes mistakes, sins against your neighbor, and knowingly commits evil deeds, have someone who loves you so intensely that He would sacrifice His only Son, to let Him endure the excruciating horrors of hell, to save and redeem you? I can’t help but feel totally and completely unworthy of that love, knowing full well there is nothing I can do to deserve it or to pay back that debt that was paid in my stead and yet, I know that like my earthly father, our Heavenly Father never expected us to pay back that debt to Him.

He simply longed to see us prosper and to maintain a relationship with Him. No strings attached. Just as our earthly fathers care for us through their provision and their unfailing and unconditional love, we should take heart in the fact that the same can be said about our Heavenly Father by whom our dads were intelligently designed for us.

Since dad passed away on June 14, we missed him more than ever on Father’s Day, June 16. It was like salt on the wound for it to be so close after he passed. Perhaps you were missing your dad on Father’s Day this year too. Whether he’s been gone for two months or two decades, it’s a hard thing to lose your dad, at any age. May you be comforted to know that we have Another Who is always with us and never forsakes us. God’s Peace.