A FATHER'S LOVE AND PRIDE

I have four lovely daughters ages 24 to 18 -- Leslie, Alexandra, Leigh Anne, and Elizabeth.

Leslie, firstborn and now 24, is getting married October 20 to a very nice young man, Noah, and it was apparent when I met him at a nice lunch meeting in Middleburg, Virginia, that they are madly in love and a good match. Noah is terrific. All a father can hope for.

Pastor George H. Fletcher of First Baptist Church in Winchester, Virginia, where they will be married, was most kind in agreeing to sit me and friends discreetly in the general population of the church, not with the family, as Leslie’s mother and I divorced ten years ago and she does not like me one bit, nor I her.

But this is Leslie and Noah’s day, and we have to get past all the rancor to celebrate their love, marriage day, and future life together, and children. I’ll finally be a loving grandpa.

Pastor Fletcher, who had just come off vacation, was great in our telephone conversation. We discussed the ugly divorce initiated by Leslie’s mother ten years ago and her remarriage to a nice Jewish man from Tel Aviv, also divorced, and the issues their courtship and ultimate marriage caused for my four daughters.

A father and Christian minister have to discuss these things to figure out the protocol and keep focused on the day of marriage between two lovely young people, one’s daughter and her mate, and how we can make this their lovely day despite family differences.

Leslie was always mom’s girl, and controlled by mom’s parents who inherited oil money in Virginia Beach. Materialism was a big issue in my marriage because my father, a champion steeplechase jockey, and his father who won the Kentucky Derby in 1911, and my mother’s champion Belgian jockey father and grandfather left the world without a cent. They were into sport and fun, not money and parasitic acquisition.

But materialism consumed my wife’s father and mother, who ultimately inherited  the Pure Oil money left by Aunt Kitty Landauer and everything Nanna Margaret Smithson had accumulated, and now live in luxury in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on tony Bay Colony Drive, and look down their noses at others in the family.

The great ones in the family have always been the horsey ones – my grandfathers and father, all champion Thoroughbred horseracing jockeys, and mother who was the very first woman to ride as a paid exercise lad at the Middleburg Training Center.

My sister, Valerie, rode show riding with blue ribbons galore on her Thoroughbred-Welsh pony cross, Guineviere, later named Prim And Proper, and taught some of the toniest women riders in America who remain her close friends because she’s a dear classy lady.

The other strong women in my family are Sugi Dewan, my ex-wife’s sister, who teaches riding at Virginia Beach, my youngest daughter, Elizabeth, on the riding team at Hollins University near Roanoke, Virginia, and Ali, my second oldest, who got sick of college professors who bored students to death, left college, went to Graham-Webb, one of the best beauty schools in America, and has done wonderfully cutting hair and making ladies beautiful. She makes more than I ever did. And my third-oldest, beautiful Leigh Anne, who is studying to be a nurse like her mother and waitressing in Alexandria, Virginia, as she goes to school, not a bad place to work and live. Nothing wrong with that. I'm so proud of my girls, they are all terrific, gorgeous, different, and each has God's imprint squarely on their heart and soul. A father could not be more happy.

I did not get an invitation to Leslie and Noah’s wedding, although I am told by a daughter that Leslie wrote me an invitation. Whoever mailed the invitations, I’m told the grandparents –- D.R. and Betty Lou Smithson -- apparently withdrew my invitation from the pack and ditched it before mailing.

No matter. I shall be at the church in behalf of Leslie, my firstborn daughter, and Noah, who will be her husband on Saturday, October 20, in a Christian ceremony as Pastor Fletcher explained it to me.

I shall be joined at the marriage ceremony at First Baptist Church by my sister Valerie, aunt of my four girls, my best friend of 22 years, Tom Moore, and my friend Natasha, who in just the past several months has been a saving grace and true friend as I shall explain elsewhere, as I shall be gone for a month, two days after Leslie's marriage into a retreat home to solve a problem I have, which has plagued me and my family for many years, and which has grown to proportions I do not like, and with God's help will be solved.

Leslie’s mother called me the other evening and told me she would call the police and have me arrested if I came to the after-marriage reception at her home, for which she said I was “uninvited.” Well, I was never invited, and would not want to go to her home anyway. So much for that.

As I write, listening to the lovely strains of  violinist Itzhak Perlman and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra playing Christian Sinding’s A-minor suite, I am resolved to ignore rebuke and proudly and lovingly attend my firstborn daughter’s marriage in support of Leslie and Noah's union as wife and husband, but with Pastor Fletcher’s help to be seated discreetly in a pew in the church in the general population, not with my ex-wife’s family who are controlling the occasion.

Let them write the checks. They claim to have the cabbage. And I’ll sit with the general population and enjoy the ceremony and music apart from pointy-noised judgmental types who spend their lives putting people down. It’s all a lot about nothing. Who needs it?

Pastor Fletcher said during our conversation, and following several counseling sessions with Leslie and Noah, that he understands the family situation and has agreed to help all of us attend the marriage in a discreet way so this will be a wonderful marriage service.

Divorce is terrible, but we have to march on as family members to support each other and the cultural, historic, social, and religious values we share.

There are four books I recommend: Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew (1995, Harper Collins/Zondervan),” Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (1998, Zondervan), Mike Mason’s The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look At Pain And Doubt From The Life Of One Who Lost Everything (1994, Crossway Books), and Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (2001, Fortress Press).

Several passages in famed medical doctor and missionary Albert Schweitzer’s book resonate:

“But he is ‘Messiah-Son of Man.’ He created this expression in order thereby to make known his lowliness. In the moment in which he accepted the office he registered the resolve to suffer. His purpose is to be the suffering, not the triumphant, Messiah.

"It is to the influence which his passion exercises upon the souls of men that he looks for the firm establishment of his kingdom. … This is the only sense in which Jesus thinks of the kingdom as present. He does bot ‘establish it.’ He only proclaims its coming.

"He exercises no ‘messianic functions,’ but waits, like others, for God to bring about the coming of the kingdom by supernatural means. He does not even know the day and hour when this will happen. The missionary journey of the disciples was not designed for the extension of the kingdom of God, but only as a means of rapidly and widely making known its nearness.

“But it was not as near as Jesus thought. The impenitence and hardness of heart of a great part of the people, and the implacable enmity of his opponents, at length convinced him that the establishment of the kingdom of God could not yet take place, that such penitence as had been shown hitherto was not sufficient, and that a might obstacle, the guilt of the people,  must first be put away.

"It becomes clear to him that his own death must be the ransom price. He dies, not for the community of his followers only, but for the nation; that is why he always speaks of his atoning death as ‘for many,’ not ‘for you.’

“After his death, he will come again in all the splendour and glory with which, since the days of Daniel, men’s imaginations had surrounded the Messiah, and he will come, moreover, within the lifetime of the generation to which he had proclaimed the nearness of the kingdom of God.

“The setting up of the kingdom was to be preceded by the day of judgment. In describing the messianic glory Jesus makes use of the traditional picture, but he does so with modestly, restraint, and sobriety. Therein consists his greatness.”