From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
Recently my 13-year old was feeling nostalgic and asked to see some videos I’d taken of him as a child, so I rigged up the now long-antiquated camcorder through our TV, popped in one of the dozens of unlabeled mini cassettes from a shoebox and pressed play. It was my son’s 5th birthday, and he was first laying his eyes on the “big boy” drum set my siblings had chipped in on for him. He immediately sat down, grabbed the sticks and went to work with unbridled aplomb, and there was an explosion of laughter and cheers from behind the camera as we reveled in him. He was beaming there behind the drum heads, and I was beaming now, laying next to my son and watching this much younger version of himself.
I was lost in replaying the joy of that moment when I heard it: a sound that stopped me in my tracks. It was my father’s voice just off camera. He’s been gone for five years, but suddenly there he was, full-throated and laughing, talking to each of us in real-time. He wasn’t in the past in that scene—he was just alive. I didn’t have to try and recall what he sounded, like because he was speaking for himself. We were not a family living for years with this terrible attrition, we were whole again.
I thought I’d missed my father but I didn’t realize how much until I could hear him again.