The day before Thanksgiving Sunday this November will mark exactly 50 years since my father passed away. Half a century has gone by, yet one regret still weighs heavily on my heart. There was something I should have told my father but never did. “Dad, I never hated you.”
In the early 1970s, my father pastored a small church with fewer than 20 members. As an immature college student, I was embarrassed by his ministry. I didn’t want to go to church on Sundays, so I would stay out drinking and come home early Sunday morning. Yet my father never once scolded me. Had he slapped me or even gotten angry, I could have used that as an excuse to stop going to church. But because he never said a word, I would still go to church on Sundays and help him, even after staying out drinking until dawn.
Then, on Thanksgiving Sunday, November 21, 1976, my father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while preaching and passed away that evening. What has pained me throughout my life is that I never got to say those few words to him.
In the early 1970s, many immigrant families lived separated from one another for more than a decade. Ours was one of them. My father came to America when I was in elementary school. I was not reunited with him until high school, and he passed away while I was in college. Altogether, I lived with my father for only three years.
After his death, I became angry with God, even cursing Him, and walked away from the church. One day, my mother handed me a box of my father’s diaries, which he had kept throughout his life after fleeing North Korea to South Korea. She said, “You’re the eldest son. I want you to take care of these.”
As I read his diaries, I discovered something that changed my life. The very ministry I had been so ashamed of—the small church where he received no salary and had to work nights to make ends meet—had been the happiest time of my father’s life.
Every entry in his diary ended with the same words: “Sola Gratia, Sola Fide” — By Grace Alone, By Faith Alone.
During my junior year of college, while reading those diaries, I fell to my knees before God and made a vow. “God, I was wrong. I’ll become a pastor.”
When we love someone, we need to tell them before it is too late. Tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Fifty years have passed, yet I miss my father’s love more deeply than ever—the quiet love of a father who waited for his son to come home at dawn without ever saying a word.