Daddy Day

Some people hate April 15. Dreaded tax day and all that. I happen to love April the 15 because in my world, it is a reason to celebrate. Everyone gets to celebrate Christmas (if they choose to) and Mothers Day is there for everyone. Easter, Valentines, the list goes on and on. But Daddy Day belongs just to me and my Daddy. It is the day that I officially and forever more became his girl.

I always knew my story. I always new there was another "dad" out there somewhere. I never knew him and he never sought to know me. But I always loved hearing mom tell of how MY daddy hitch-hiked from North Carolina to Georgia to be with her after I was born. I remember her telling me that just a few weeks into their relationship, he called me "his" baby. One daddy left but God gave me someone better in his place.

I struggled with this part of my life for years. I felt it shaping my heart and I wanted to fight it...to struggle against it and yet I didn't know how. Despite a loving father who kissed me on the forehead every morning before work and came home to play with us each night, the hole in my heart felt so big. I lacked for nothing. But still there was that whisper in my heart that I had been left and never sought after and try as I might to overcome that, it shaped my heart.

It wasn't till I was an adult, tidying up at my parents home that I found and really studied the adoption papers. I had seen them in earlier years but never really studied them. It was in that moment that all of the healing God had done over the course of my life, all of the steady love, steering guidance and faithful friendship that Dad had poured into me for so long truly absorbed into my heart and closed up any hole that had been there. I read those formal words and they jumped out at me. They etched on my heart and burned into my soul "...that on this day April 15, 1977..." so official. Like God's hand reached from His seat down to earth and stamped His seal on the document and on my spirit. Something real and physical change inside me. I felt that in that moment I couldn't possibly be any more his. In that moment, I fell in love with my Daddy and thanked the Lord that He never let me suffer unloved.

I resolved then that I would mark this day each year. Because this is the day that God changed the course of my life. This is the day I became the daughter of the greatest man I know. The apple of his eye and the joy of his heart.

Thank you, Daddy. Happy Daddy Day.