I know he was not trying to hurt me when we spoke yesterday. He can’t understand, really – not yet.

But he is trying to understand. Sometimes fumbling, sometimes awkward, but he keeps showing up.

His second message said:

“We should not have ended our conversation like that. Please call me back.”

I could hear his now-familiar gruff voice on my voicemail. He sounded calm, but maybe – just maybe – a little worried.

I was satisfied when I heard the worry.

“Good. Be worried,” I thought. “I hope it hurts, just a little.”

This anger rose up, up, up. It took me by surprise. I threw my phone against the van door. I screamed expletives at him, at God, at my mother.

If I could put all of this back in the box, would I?

He said one thing in our conversation yesterday and my voice – up to this point so consistently eager – turned immediately icy.

“You don’t know me,” I said stonily. “So you really have no idea how I feel.”

The conversation ended quickly, ended badly.

I was left alone with my anger.

Hugh says we aren’t fighting each other, not really. “Your mother links the two of you, her illness binds you,” he said, touching my hair as I cried. “You guys will realize that she hurt you both…you didn’t hurt each other.”

I called him back. “Speak to me,” he said when he picked up.

I vomited words all over him, “Well, I think you shouldn’t have said…and done…and I wish you would…and can you please…and don’t you really…”

He listened. “Some of what you’re asking is hard, but I’ll do it. Now it’s your turn to listen.”

I sat in silence while he talked.

A few minutes later we hesitantly talked about something else.

Then a few minutes after that we laughed.

Later Lucy pranced into the room, talked to her new Grandpa, and responded that “okay” she would like a nickname from him.

We laughed some more, shared details about our lives, then hung up with a promise of talking again in a couple of days.

My first fight with my father.

I was angry, I talked with him, I got over it.

I have miles to go with him.

But now – after a lifetime without him – I have started the journey.

Why would my father want to keep getting to know me?

It turned out that he was calling me. We spoke for about a half hour and it was delightful. We’ve spoken about five times now. Every time we speak I grow to like him a little more. He seems smart and funny. He is engaging and a little crazy.

Earlier this week he invited our family for Easter. My children are extremely excited – especially at the thought of having a grandfather again. They haven’t had a grandfather since David died three years ago. As Lucy said, “Mommy, I didn’t know that people could have TWO grandpas!”

I hope for their sakes, too, that our big reunion goes okay.

Yet each time I talk to him I’m starting to believe that it will.

When I was a little girl, I never dreamed about my father returning. Ever. I never had this fantasy that he would show up and want me. That my dad would say, “I was wrong and I’m sorry and of course I love you and come see me for Easter.”

It was a dream that was so deeply buried that it was dead.

But this dream is resurrecting. So maybe Easter is the perfect time to see my father.

The day when dead things come to life.

The day when God makes all things new.

Risen, indeed.

The last conversation I had with my father-in-law was about writing. “How’s your writing, Dad?” I asked him as he sat on our couch surrounded by Curious George books.

“It’s in my head.”  He smiled softly, his eyes crinkling as they met mine. “I think about it…a lot.”

“Never a day without a line,” I told him, earnestly. “You need to write every day. I’ve started writing…at least a little. I, uh, have a blog.”

The words tumbled out. Surprised me. I’ve blogged for almost two years and never told him about it. I was embarrassed, I think, for him to read about my depression and my struggles. But I wanted to be honest with him. I wanted him to know me a little more. Maybe it would encourage him to write, too.

Though his days were full of law and farming, in the deepest part of his heart, my father-in-law wanted to be a writer. His office was full of writing books and stacks of old copies of Writer’s Digest. Piles of paper and pens waited for the words he had not yet written. He was going to start soon – that was his careful plan.

He would write his books when he retired. One day he would look out over the fields he both loved and hated and write the stories locked away in his quiet soul.

“Well, Jess,” David said as he was packing up that Sunday, “do you think you could email me the link to your blog? And the website where I could get a blog of my own?”

Never, never, never had he listened to me about taking an immediate step towards writing. I grinned, and a deep feeling of love spread up from my gut.

“Yeah, Dad. Of course.”

Wednesday morning he was dead. As we drove the horrible ten hours to Indiana with our crying children, one of the thoughts that kept occurring to me was:

“He never got to write his book…He never got to write his book.”

The thing I didn’t really understand until I lost him is that death means…you’re gone. My father-in-law’s work on this earth is finished.

I want to learn this last lesson from him. I don’t want to wait. I want to pursue the dreams that I, too, have tucked carefully away. I want to be bold even when I am afraid of failure. I want to write and laugh and fling my arms out to the world without fear. Without pause.

I don’t want any words left when Wednesday comes.

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Proverbs 31 Ministries is offering a scholarship to this year’s She Speaks Conference.  She Speaks is a two-day series of workshops and seminars on writing, speaking, blogging, and ministry.  Some of my favorite people will be speaking there.  But more then hearing their words, I want to catch their vision of living boldly.

I want to listen and to learn. I want to take notes and meet new people. I want to have women challenge me to write, to speak, and to hope in the gifts God has placed in me.

I want to live unafraid.

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I think that whether I win or not, David would be proud of me for trying to go.

Never a day without a line, Dad.

That goes for me, too.