Dad

My relentlessly cheerful father has died, exiting this life with the same confidence and joy with which he lived it. He was 97. His anticipated appointment with the Lord of eternity was something he embraced all his life. Despite, or perhaps because of, the historian in him, he leaned forward in faith. “Marty” to most people, “Dad” to my siblings and me, he approached every morning as if it were a fresh splash of grace, a clean slate, an opportunity—granted through baptism—to breathe more life into the world. Guilt and resentment weren’t in his vocabulary. Critique didn’t seem to faze him. He considered conflict not worth the energy.

People often ask what my childhood was like, given this motion machine of a father whose love of people, endless curiosity, and instinct for saying a generous yes to nearly everybody left him so little time for sleep. Three or four nights a week our dinner table became the all-important hub for celebrating family and faith, in part because Dad was on the road so many weeks a year. Seventy years of meticulously kept red appointment books reveal that he delivered more than 3,500 lectures around the world, spoke at nearly 700 colleges and universities, and preached from who knows how many pulpits. An astounding degree of travel by any reckoning, all while holding down a full teaching load at the University of Chicago and assorted leadership assignments at other institutions.

My mother, Elsa, was the quiet support behind his ferocious pace in the early years. She nurtured our young family in ways that were centered in love. I think all of us in the family had a deep sense that Dad, with his towering intellect and irrepressible wit, his encyclopedic mind and pastoral heart, had a calling much larger than just our family. We understood that, accepted it, and—like so many others—felt connected to the breadth of it. Mother’s untimely death from cancer after 29 years of marriage opened the door to another beautiful marriage, this time to Harriet for 43 more years.