The pages made a difference.
Happy belated Father’s Day! We had so much fun celebrating Chris yesterday! He woke up to an AMAZING handmade card by Lifa - broken elbows and all. (He’s on the mend! Hardly wearing his slings at all anymore.) Benjamin and I wrote him a card, and we all proudly marched up to Dad’s desk before he got busy with 3 online church services. (Chris preached an amazing message on Sunday. Click here to see it!)
Chris is a man who loves all things handcrafted and leather. He was blown away when he opened up a locally handmade leather journal, engraved with truth right on the cover: “Hero of our Home”. The bottom says, “For our dad, Chris Ladd. Father’s Day 2020”.
Lifa and I each wrote him a letter inside and filled several pages with pictures and memories from his first five years as a father.
Here’s the title page to his story:
Part of my letter to Chris said,
“One day we will sit around a table with our grandchildren and listen to our kids tell stories about the family moments that shaped them. I’m so thankful I get the seat next to you at that future table and at our current table, where those stories are being written... My hope is that this book stays around and gets pulled out for generations to come. I hope it becomes weathered and filled with pictures, stories and memories - a memoir of your incredible fatherly love.”
It was so fun to flip through the pages and recount memories - especially the colorful and creative pages Lifa made. I have to confess that, on Saturday, right after I wrapped the gift in the most beautiful wrapping paper, I marched up to Chris and whispered, “Father’s Day is cancelled. Everything is ruined.” (I am exactly as emotionally mature as Benjamin.) I couldn’t tell him why because I didn’t want to ruin the surprise. I was disappointed in the pages. No matter how many times I told Lifa not to color with marker or push down too hard, he just had to. His creative nature NEEDED to fill every empty space on the page with color. Thick, page-saturating color. When I looked at those pages, all I could see was markers bleeding through to the memories before and after them.
Lifa spent hours working on those pages, pressing down so hard with every marker he could find. I had spent hours pouring through my collection of photos and narrowed it down to my favorite 120! We were busy! Each photo and every page gave Lifa an opportunity to remember the moments that made us a family and how loved he is by his dad. I stepped away to make breakfast while Chris poured through the pages. I listened to them giggle as they remembered. “Oh yeah, I remember that disaster when I tried to teach you how to make eggs!”
Chris loved the book. He loves the idea of having it around forever and having a place to write a legacy. That same night he decided to clear everything he could from his computer to make space to download the game Minecraft so he could have a way to relate to Lifa in an activity he likes. My two big guys watched a ridiculous kids show on Netflix and played Minecraft giggling all night. He’s intentionally already. But it was like he was even more thougthful about what he wanted next year’s pages to say. It was the best.
I think the pages made a difference.
It’s easy to feel like we’re just crashing though one day after another, trying to get through this or to that. I wonder if we would live any differently if it we marked our life with pages? What if there was a big book stamped with your truth and purpose sitting on your desk? What if it had pages filled with the ways your daily choices had already began fulfilling those purposes when you thought you were just making eggs? And what if today and tomorrow were not just days to get through but blank pages for you to choose how to fill?
Or what if you got to fill in someone else’s pages? What would you choose to press through so hard that colored the moments before and after?