I experienced my first water crossing at the age of eight. My father made it happen.

My mother wanted to visit her sister in Muskegon, MI. We lived in Chicago. So, instead of taking the mapped route – driving through northern Indiana around the bottom of Lake Michigan and up to Muskegon – my father booked us on a car ferry that would carry us from Manitowoc, WI to Ludington, MI over Lake Michigan.

When the four of us that included my younger brother arrived at the ferry port in Manitowoc, a porter drove the car onto the ferry boat. We boarded and headed up to the top deck. The lake passage would take four hours.

Seeing the size of the boat, the cars rolling aboard, the expanse of water all around, the sunset and then the harbor lights on the other side and hearing the booming blast of the ferry horn, smelling and tasting the earthy lake air, and running around the decks wearing the white captain caps with black bills that my father bought for me and my brother –  I was no longer in the bathtub with floating toys.

Dad liked to drive back roads to get to destinations. The car ferry was another. He liked to explore and put himself in new situations. My mother liked the familiar, the safe familiar. She expressed her concerns and then went with dad.

My father put himself in positions that would stretch him. After attending the Moody Bible Institute with my mother (I was born while they attended as married students), he pastored a tiny church in the frozen north of Minnesota. But, with me and then a brother coming along a year later, a better paying job was required.

My father, with family in tow, returned to Chicago. He studied traffic management and was hired to work as the shipping manager for ServiceMaster. As the family grew, he went on to work various jobs, mostly in sales. There were times when he worked a second job at night. He did what he had to do. He worked to provide for us. My father made that happen and he did more.

While the jobs paid the bills and provided for those under his care, he continued to stretch himself. This latter was not a fear of missing out on some experience. This was, perhaps, a fear of missing out on the desire that brought him to MBI many years before. He served as a Sunday School teacher, as a church chairman, as a village trustee, and then as village mayor.

Dad and mom served on the missions committee of the church. On Sundays after church, they hosted meals for furloughed missionaries from all over the world including Ecuador, Japan, the Congo, and Wycliffe Bible translators from New Zealand. They also hosted professors who spoke at our church, professors such as classical Christian apologist Norman Geisler from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Those meals in our home exposed me to a bigger-than-me world, just as the car ferry passage did.

That water crossing was not just exposure to a novel experience, it was exposure to my father’s heart, to his momentum to see beyond and go beyond. There were other experiences with my father: going to Riverview amusement park in Chicago, going to a Cub’s game at Wrigley Field, playing taps on my trumpet at a Memorial Day event where my father, as mayor, gave a speech. The Bach trumpet I played was a gift from my father before I entered high school. And there were the aforementioned times when I was present to the man who took on serving roles.   

My passage from the pre-adult pre-parenting years with all of the childish outsized expectations, demands, and responses to that of becoming a parent and a context of doing what must be done day in and day out and also stretching myself to be more began with the transit across Lake Michigan. My father, now in the presence of the Lord, made that happen.

~~~