The love of a Father
Today is my Dad's birthday. Tom Spillman passed away 2 years ago this past October and he would have been 71 years old today. This is my favorite story about my Dad:
When I was in the fourth grade, we had a contest at our school. It was a phone book drive, and whichever class brought in the most old phone books to recycle, would win a pizza party at Chuck-E-Cheese's. Which, in elementary school, is a big deal.
Well my dad knew how much I wanted to win the contest … So we spent the next few weeks collecting phone books from our neighbors and raiding recycling centers for old phonebooks. He'd lift me up, put me inside the recycling bin and I would find the phonebooks people had already recycled. Then we would load them up and take them to my school. I was determined to win.
Well finally it was the last day of the contest, and I had gathered a decent amount of lute but not enough to win. There were some classes that had dozens more than I did. And I thought, "That's it. It's over. We lost the pizza party."
I was sitting in class that afternoon, drowning in my sorrow, when a voice came over the intercom: "Ms. Gilpin, please send Bryan Spillman to the office."
I nervously walked to the front lobby of Norman Binkley Elementary. I'll never forget rounding the corner to see my Dad standing there.
I asked him, "Why aren't you at work?"
He looked at me and said "Come outside with me, I need your help with something…"
As we walked outside, he slid open the door of his old beat-up Dodge Caravan and out poured hundreds of old phonebooks! I mean we were swimming in em. Needless to say we won the contest and I was hailed a hero. And my hero was driving away in his mini-van that smelled like old phonebooks.
That's just how my dad lived life everyday. From the moment he adopted me when I was a couple days old until the day he passed into glory, he loved me with an extravagant love. With an outrageous, never giving up always and forever love. It's as if his heart was so full, because he was so proud of me, that it just burst forth everyday and poured out in some little measure of extravagant love.
And it was my Dad's love for me that was the single most thing in my life that pointed me to the love of Jesus. He pointed me to a God who loves me extravagantly simply because I'm his. Because I belong to him. A God who has found me, and rescued me, and adopted me and made me His son. A God who has gone before me, and done what I could never do on my own … and the celebration is for me. What an amazing love.
My dad was far from perfect ... but it was his love for me that pointed me to the perfect Father. A Father who will never leave me. That was my dad's most sincere hope for me ... that I would know God as a friend and as a Father.
I've discovered, that in death, we're tempted to glorify people. I've wanted to say things like, "He was the greatest dad who ever lived!" Well if Tom were here, he would quickly refute that sentiment and tell you that such things are a statistical impossibility and therefore cannot be measured. And maybe that's true. But I do know this about my dad:
He was the best dad ... for me. God was so kind to me that he would pluck me out of a family and literally place me with Tom Spillman. He is the most faithful friend I've ever known outside of Jesus. And He was my biggest fan.
I'm grateful that he is home now with the Father whom he taught me to love. I believe that my dad is more alive today than he ever was as I knew him. He is a child again. Free from cancer and fully healed. I believe in the resurrection of the life and in the power of the blood. I believe he has simply passed from death into life, from the shadowlands onto eternal shores.
I love you Dad and my heart longs for the day when I will see you again. Happy Birthday.
This a bale of shredded phonebooks that my elementary school principal made for my Dad to thank him for bringing in the most phonebooks in all of Davidson County in 1995. I found it in my parents house after he passed away. He held onto it all those years.