25 Years...

The years have passed by since this very day in 1983 but I have a hard time thinking that it's been thaaat long - 25 years ago today my father, Eric Rozelle, passed away. This post is not for me to get a chance to mope and cry and feel sorry for myself or to get some sympathy but rather to celebrate the legacy that ~ even after the passage of a quarter of a century ~ still lives on. My dad was an amazing man who lived his 31 years for the Lord and I will always be grateful for the time he was here on earth and for his testimony. He was a regular guy who grew up as a farm kid in Maine, rarely met a stranger, liked to fish, who did 'Bert & I' impressions (if you're not from Maine you won't know what that is), rode a Yamaha motorcycle, and who took his young family to the mission field of Chile.

The few memories that I have of my dad are mostly from that year and a half we spent there before he had to come back to the US because of his failing health. The time he let me get a puppy, the time my best friend spent the night and got homesick so he carried her all the way home (I know you remember that, Kris), the times he would mutter something about 'dipsticks' if he came across a bad driver, taking me for a ride on the boat that belonged to the mission and was used for work among the islands in which we lived, buying me some new shoes the day after Chad was born and I was disappointed that he was a boy, falling asleep on the gas tank as I sat in front of him on his motorcycle.Then there are the memories that I've claimed although they are really someone else's memories that have been shared with me. For example, Kristi (same best friend - 15 years later) and I were in a church service together singing "Until Then" when she leaned over and told me that it used to be my dad's favorite song because of that line in the chorus "But until then with JOY I'll go on singing, until then with JOY I'll carry on..." My mom's name was Joy=) Or my husband who remembers my dad taking him fishing when he was just a kid. There was also the time 5 years ago when an older gentleman came up to me and asked if I was Eric Rozelle's daughter, of course I answered yes and he immediately became teary-eyed. "Your father led me to the Lord", he said and proceeded to tell me about a cold, snowy night many years before.Each stage of my life that I've come to has made me miss him in different ways. I sometimes wonder if I would be in a different place or be a bit of a different person if he'd been there all along. I missed him when I became a teenager, when I was in my first play, when I graduated from high school and left for college, when I earned my degree, when I got married and my brother stepped in to walk me down the aisle, when I had his first grandchild.... So today I would like to honor my father, my mother who stepped in and did the job of two parents after he was gone, my grandparents who always remember him so fondly and share their memories all the time, my uncle who stepped in to take his place as my dad in these recent years, and many other family members as well as some friends who made the loss of a dad easier throughout my growing up years. But most of all I'd like to honor the God who my dad served until his dying day, even when he was in the hospital and nearing the end the words that came to his lips were hymns about his Saviour.