"behind every great man there is a greater woman..."

so i looked into the bleacher and there he was...

a couple of years ago a friend and i were talking about the void in people's lives a father can leave. i blogged about it, and told him how great i thought my dad was and later the friend and i had a conversation.  i told him i had a hard time understanding his situation, because i really felt (and still feel) that i have one of the greatest earthly fathers of all time, so it occurred to me it was really hard for me to get the perspective of a bad dad... 

backup... one of the biggest reasons we returned to the mission viejo vineyard (almost 15 years ago moving all the way from the least coast to the left coast) was to try to get a handle on the masculine perspective and "father's heart of god".  at the time i really felt like i got it, mostly because all my life it had been really appropriately modeled to me by my dad.  and i knew from predictions of divorce rates and cultural divorce statistics, that the currency of our generation would be memories and stories of fathers who were great.  so because of this i really wanted to make sure the message of god's love as a father figure had soaked in.  then and even now fathers and mothers that are present and married are a rare statistic.  i guess we spent about 7 years in MV total and we did our best to soak up all we could of that message.  i will have to say that even spending all that time around many broken people who were in many ways fatherless, i still couldn't really relate, because i just (thankfully) had never been in their shoes... 

i have been talking to a few friends; people that i really respect and their dad's are wonderful men too... i can't help but wonder if that's one of the reasons i feel such a sense of koinonea with them and what they produce.

so i was recently asked about my dad... by some folks... he has ALWAYS been there supporting.  from building my first projects (actually i think mom gave me the nails and hammer) when i was 4-5ish, to watching him make the best treehouse in the neighborhood, to driving from ski hills (sitting waiting ALL day then driving to hockey games) from driving a 100 miles one-way just to bring me batteries for a video game... (to knowing that both my parents were sacrificing their lives and putting many of their ambitions on hold), i have always felt like he loved to be there for me and he has always been there cheering me on, supporting without words and demonstrating with action.

flash back... leaving a hockey game when i was around 10 or 11 i remember seeing these really old guys suiting up to take the ice for their old man hockey league... i remember thinking to myself... someday when im that old that would be fun...
ffwd... so as it turns out a couple of the guys i played with when i was 7-12ish are now in an "old man's league"  they invited me to play and literally on the way to the first game (which we had last sunday morning and i had to leave the house at around 6am)... i thought to myself wow, i must be an adult now... i'm finally here on my own, alone, going to an old man's hockey league... i was in the locker room at 6:30am  there were a bunch of scrappers from various abilities and in dispersed physique, and mentally i confirmed to myself, yep i must be an adult...

so hows is this for a metaphor of god's love?
i step out onto the ice, pretty rusty and at first struggling to make some plays happen... we had been playing about a half hour, i was sucking wind, and my buddy (now 36), who i played with when we were kids, (over 25 years ago) says

"hey did i see your dad?" (i was surprised at the time he would remember what he looked like)
"when?" i said
"this morning?
"you saw my dad this morning?"  we both started laughing... i said
"where?"
he said "he's been sitting over there for a while", pointing across the ice into literally up into the empty bleachers... empty all accept for one man... one man... sitting in the stands alone (and it was freezing) watching still cheering me on"
i laughed and said "well i guess you did"... he said it reminds me of when we were little and he was always around...

how true.

++thanks for letting me have such a great father++

Three generations of Keck men, (l. to r.) Tom, Eric's dad, Eric and his son, Thunder.