The last time I laid eyes on my daddy was a Monday afternoon, June 21, 1994. He came to take me to lunch at Western Sizzlin’ in Bedford, Texas. He lived in Dallas, and I lived in Fort Worth, but I worked in Bedford. I was 26 years old and 7 months pregnant with my youngest. My husband, now ex-husband had been thrown into a rehab facility 6 days earlier strung out on meth and dad was checking on me.
Dad choked on his steak. Like full blown choked and vomited up his lunch right there on the table. He was embarrassed, and just said he thought it was his hiatal hernia that caused it. We went on about our dinner, after cleaning up, enjoyed visiting for a bit and then hugged each other goodbye. Two days later he was dead. He had a massive heart attack on June 23rd, 1994.
Life is fickle; ever changing, ironic, paradoxical. It is full of sadness, loss, excitement and surprise. It is also different than even my young eyes believed. We all see things from our framework and perspective at the time. Daddy left us when I was around 10 years old, died when I was 26 and I remembered the abuse when I was 40.
He moved to a rat hole apartment in Dallas and made very little money. He paid an occasional child support check, but, very infrequent. We lived in squalor, sometimes with electricity and water, sometimes without. Sometimes we even had food to eat and occasionally we had some change to walk a mile or two to the local laundry mat to wash some clothes. Most of the time we washed them in the sink and hung them out on a chair in front of the stand-up furnace we had for heating. We even used laundry soap when we had it.
At 26, losing my daddy was just icing on the proverbial cake. The continuation of the tornado of chaotic events in my young life. But, then just like Mary Poppins bringing her joy into town as the wind changed, Jesus met me on the floor, the bottom, the end of a life, the end of a marriage. In tears, in fear, in pain, I accepted the things I could not change, the things I could change, and a Savior cracked open the doors to new life.
Since that day I have watched 28 years of seasons changing. I have beheld snow falling and blanketing a sheet of white over the ugliness in the world. I have watched leaves morph into beautiful shades of autumn and dance as they fall, embedding themselves softly over the scorched dry earth. I have witnessed the double rainbow that shines brilliantly in the sky after a storm. Standing in the cool ocean water I have felt the warming of my skin as the sun burns brightly over me, only to scoop some water over the skin to do it over and over again.
As much as we want to forget, run, stifle, ignore, omit the emotionally destressing, traumatic, embarrassing or even shameful happenings or choices of our life, it is deeply at the core of how you have moved through this world. Our life is all-encompassing, fully driven, overtly changed by all of it. Redemption comes when the snow falls in a land where snow doesn’t fall. When you think, “Never in a million years….”
A few years back I received a phone call from a long-lost cousin on my father’s side of the family. My grandmother’s two brothers who passed away in 1988 and 1991 had willed mineral rights to my grandmother, who passed in 1993, which then led to my father and his brother who passed in 1994 and 2015 and then to us four kids, our aunt and our step-mother who passed in 2020 during the legal battle to read the wills, distribute the minerals and officially become owners of a very tiny portion of the full mineral rights my extended family owned.
As we were going through this process Covid hit the world. The new president shut down oil production and we just kept on living our life in the daily. Well over a year later we receive notification that my brother’s and I were officially owners of a small number mineral right acres. At the end of 2021 we were contacted by a couple oil and gas attorneys offering us contracts. In January of 2022 we accepted an offer and signed a contract on our acreage with royalties. We received the initial check which was our first taste of redemption. Then silence.
A check came in the mail today, including an accumulation of production through September and a check will continue to come in the future monthly. Although I know it is fluid and can stop anytime. I can continue to hope and be ready for whatever God decides is good. But the reality is, it doesn’t matter. The check was thousands of times more than what I expected, zip. 100% more than I ever thought I would receive from my father.
Never in a million years would I expect money to come out of nothing. My daddy never had nothing. One of those great uncles used to send me Colorado lottery tickets in the mail when I was a young girl. I never won, but it was always fun to scratch them off as a child. He did not know when he willed those mineral rights to his sister, that they would land in our hand’s decades later. But God did.
We left Denver, Colorado in 1977 when I was nine. My dad’s side of the family all died when I was young except lost cousins and an aunt and uncle I last saw at my daddy’s’ funeral in 1994. We are now re-acquainted with our aunt and many extended family members we never even knew existed who are all receiving these checks for their own inheritance. My stepsister mailed us our daddy’s things that her mother would not give to us when she was alive. We found our daddy singing on tape, his flag from his funeral, his degrees, his report cards, keepsakes and pictures.
Money is not everything until it is. Money is not always the root of all evil, sometimes it is the redemption of a life short lived and ill given. The mighty dollar is just a piece of paper. But, for me it is the “Never in a Million years” record of the redeeming grace and mercy of a God who loves me and pursues me at every turn of my life.
You might not see it unless you look back and follow his footprints in the dry scorched places where he carried you. He is there redeeming your life sometimes in those unbelievable, overwhelmingly, miraculous, only God ways. The next time you think that you might never in a million years believe it, pray you will see it. I am fifty-four and this was a redeeming day in a plan that was started when my uncle’s wife’s great grandfather chose to purchase land in Colorado.
The check arrived in a letter from Denver, Colorado. My birthplace. I wonder if it was post marked before I was born, I certainly know God stamped the envelope.
Susanne Moore 