Topography

Pastor’s kid. The perks and pitfalls are well known by all six of us kids. Unrestricted access to the church's dessert freezer and compulsory attendance of youth group weeknight events served as the backdrop to our most formative years. Being a pastor’s kid is a defining feature for each of us. We are marked by the rhythms and realities of church life. By God’s grace, we are all choosing to continue to live our lives built on church cadences.

God’s grace as evidenced through the faithful predictability of our preacher Dad. The Dad that preached sermons in a suit and tie was the same dad that winsomely dialed the phone to order Pizza Hut on a Sunday night (despite mom’s reminders that we still had leftovers in the fridge). Dad is the heart of a pastor...he wants to see his people believing and walking in the truth. We really do feel like we, his family, got to be his “first church.” Perhaps the place Dad must fully revealed his personality was in his musings on the back page of the church newsletter. Within these articles, the significance of the pastoral role and the intimacy of his role as father often met to reveal the witty and sentimental side of him we all know and love.

These back page articles represent a journey tied to specific location and events. His thoughts were never abstract but deeply tied to place and patterns. Summer backpacks, fall yard work, winter basketball, and spring cleaning projects. His words express the topographic map of our lives.

Reading these articles over a decade later, it’s striking how intentional Dad was. He was someone who planned things and did things rather than tell us about the “why” behind them. Without being totally aware of what was going on, we were shaped by the way our dad thoughtfully oriented every aspect of our family life toward Gospel principles.

Dad is someone to be relied on for noticing the significance of a moment, reminding us all that he’s seen the cycle of things before, or for concluding “that’s just not right” with simple clarity. His lens is astute and poetic, he excels at observation and interpretation. To those who know him as a pastor, these letters are a reminder of his faithful dedication to noticing Gospel truth in every sphere of his life. To his kids, these newsletters bring us back to the beginning years of our family. We are rooted in the moments and insights outlined in these letters. To us, these collected articles are a reminder of our early years as a family and a testament to how being “the pastor’s family” shaped us all. Thank you, Dad.

“For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for His name in serving the saints as you still do.” Hebrews 6:10.