To Daddy, on your 66th birthday.

For almost exactly six months, I will be exactly half your age. I try to imagine cramming my life full of the exceptional accomplishments you have achieved in the past 30 years, and the effort makes my head spin. You set a pace and a standard that has everyone in your vicinity marching in double time just to keep up! But if anyone ever thought being your child, colleague or friend would be exhausting, they’d soon learn that nothing could be further from the truth. Your mind exists on a plane most mortals can’t see for the clouds. Yet you delight in leading others in such a way that they come away being able to see something they couldn’t see before. They are just that much quicker and brighter. It’s like you have the Midas Touch, but instead of turning things into lifeless metal, your touch quickens thought and understanding, changing ideas set in stone into rivers of quicksilver finding new, impossible paths. Your children benefited so much from your incredible intellectual generosity. You played Mrs. Malaprop to our hysterical laughter and enriched our vocabulary. You asked, “What do you think?” whenever we just wanted an answer to write down and developed our reasoning. You gave me a reading list one year with 20 of the most thought-inducing, enlightening books I’d ever read before or have read since. If I wanted to be surprised by a unique political theory or take on religion I would ask you because I could never predict what position you would take!

Every morning when I open my closet doors, I glance up and smile. Sitting on the shelf are two teddy bears, hugging a heart between them. The words, “I love you” are stitched in gold on the heart. If it’s already starting to be a bad day, I reach up and squeeze the heart, and it says “I love you!”. Twice, you know. “For good measure”, like you said when you gave it to me four years ago on a hot summer night in Doha. You’d just come back from somewhere and I remember trying to act pleasantly surprised instead of moved to the point of tears to still be getting teddy bears from you even though I was staring 30 in the face. We sat in garden chairs out on the terrace, the hot breezes ruffling your curly hair and mine.

Just a few years later, you made one of my biggest dreams come true when one warm summer night in Texas you asked me just how badly I wanted to go to Trinity Western University. I poured out my heart to you about how desperately I wanted to go into Biblical Studies, how deeply I felt the need to pursue Scripture intellectually as well as spiritually. You looked at me thoughtfully and said “Then that’s what you’ll do.”

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to articulate the depth and breadth of what that enormous decision on your part has done for me and my entire life. Your fatih in God and your belief in my abilities overwhelms me. Your spiritual growth has been a tremendous joy and inspiration to me. How I treasure those soft, dark evenings in summer breezes listening to your stories and ideas, your thoughts and your music. No one wastes a minute when they spend time with you. Whether it’s your sister (the overwhelming majority of whom adore you), a brother, a son or daughter, a colleague, a friend or some lucky random soul you meet in a restaurant, your ability to connect with them and say the exact thing they need (not always want! but need) to hear is only one of the thousand wonderful things that you do every day without a second thought. The fact you deflect the praise these things bring you, saying “not from me, but through me,” and turning the true praise back to God only reinforces the beauty of your nature. God’s lovingkindness is truly visible in your life. What daughter could ever hope for a better example for her own life?

I’m only one of the countless people on this earth whose life is warmer and immeasurably brighter every day that you are here. Today, on your 66th birthday, I celebrate your life as a continuing gift to everyone blessed enough to be within your reach!

Happy Birthday, Daddy.