Love Without Understanding

George Mason wasn’t the first person to tell me I had a problem with my dad, but he was the first person I listened to. We happened to be leading a week-long camp together and though we had never met we stayed up late every night talking in my room. That’s when he brought up the thing about my dad. He asked if I’d ever considered letting go of some of the baggage.

“It’s that obvious?” I asked him.

“It’s obvious,” he said.

For weeks I thought about what George had said, but what could I do? My dad had been dead for 10 years. I called George in Dallas. He asked me where my dad was buried.

“In the panhandle of Texas,” I told him. “In Plainview between Lubbock and Amarillo.”

“Let’s fly over there and see him,” he said.

So we did.

We got to the cemetery late in the afternoon. It was rainy and cold. Every grave marker is flat at Roselawn. Great for mowing, not so great for finding your father. And if that’s not enough, the grass had been mowed the day before.

So George and I went from marker to marker raking off the wet grass with our fingers and looking for Joseph Perry Wood, USAF.

I was carrying 15 pages of things I wanted to tell him. I hadn’t held anything back.

An hour later I found him. I knelt down in the grass and began to read. George was there beside me with his hand on my shoulder. I was losing it big time. I gave up after page one and shoved the rest in my pants pocket.

Everything I had written on those yellow pages, the raw and ragged sentiments I had carried in my heart seemed smaller. I’m not saying they were little things. I’m just saying they weren’t the main things. The main thing was that I loved him. However flawed he was I loved him.

There comes a time when you finally begin to let the pain go a little at a time. Underneath the pain is love. Not understanding, but love.