Thursday morning I remembered that this Sunday was Fathers Day. Something about being divorced seems to make that day less important, and much less of a thing to be celebrated. Although divorce didn’t end my role of father to our three children. Just changed it from being in house to out house. But the family has stayed more than not intact. I have two older daughters, who have moved out own their own, one married with new grandchild in Florida, the other in Elkhart teaching dance and night manager of a coffee shop, and a teenage son, who spends as much time as he can at dad’s on the more powerful computer. Keelings don’t let something like divorce end the responsibilities or binds of family. My father would never have allowed that.

As I remembered Fathers Day was only a few days away, and that my own father has now passed on for several years, a strange emptiness came over me. You’d think over time that emptiness would go away but it doesn’t. The night he died the emptiness first arrived and I wished I had died with him. My father had always been an important part of my life, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, but always there.

John Calvin Keeling developed polio at a very young age, walked with a limp, with a brace on his right leg most of his life. He followed his father and older brother into the carpentry trade as a young man, then, in his 30s, became one of the first second career folks to go to college and graduate school, and, in 1964 become a minister in the Church of the Brethren. He was a big man with burly chest, powerful arms, and a charismatic manner that always made him seem larger than life. Everyone who knew him had strong opinions about JC Keeling. He could be compassionate, funny, sarcastic, confrontive, demanding, and sometimes angry to the point of rage.

One of the last things he said to me as he lay in the last bed he’d ever be in at Memorial Hospital in Bakersfield, California, was: "I've loved you for a long, long time." One of the last things I did for him was sing Johnny Cash’s "I walk the line." When he had become so weak that even breathing seemed to exhaust in once powerful and animated body.

While attending Bethany Theological Seminary 20 years after he did, and studying from a number of the same professors, a fellow student accused me during an evaluation of hating my father. She went on to say that’s why I wanted to go into the ministry so that I could be in competition with him. How wrong could one human being be. While there were times I hated my father, we never felt in competition with each other. It was my father who tried for 15 years to get me to consider ministry as a vocation and I wanted nothing to do with it. Who knows, had it not been for his urging I may have become a minister sooner.

We never had an easy relationship my father and I. Both strong willed with our own male views of how things ought to be done. I doubt we ever really understood each other. But with all the water under the bridge that we swan up current against, with all the pain we caused each other, the world just doesn’t seem as enjoyable or as awesome a place without him in it.

So let me lend you some advice. If you are so busy right now that you have almost forgotten fathers day, or if you don’t think you have the time to spend with him this Sunday, think again. Because he may not be around next Fathers Day.