4 & 3. Willow Creek Christmas Eve 2005 and My Parents Wedding

This Christmas, my parents came to Illinois where Dena and I had been staying while we built our support as missionaries. It’s sort of become a tradition with Dena and I that we go to the Christmas Eve service at Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, IL. They normally have a beautiful service that brings you back to the true meaning of the Christmas season. This year, Dena’s mom and step-dad already had plans and so it was just Dena, my mom, my dad and myself. This was something that I’d have never imagined just a couple years before. When I was about 12, my parents divorced. My dad had had a heart attack 3 years earlier and after moving from the busy life of Ontario, to Nova Scotia, things became rocky in our family. For 12 years, my brother and I bounced from one place to the next for holidays and my father eventually had moved back to Ontario to try and begin a new life. Though I won’t get into specifics, there were many times in those 12 years that I said to God, “That’s it. It’s over. Even you couldn’t put my family back together if you wanted to.”

In 2002, I traveled to Durres, Albania tow do an internship and still remember the sunny day as I walked down a dusty road, my cell phone rang and it was my dad. He told me he had a bit of a surprise and after explaining a little told me that he and my mother were dating, my mother having moved back to Ontario the previous winter. Two years later, my brother and I stood with my parents at the front of Trinity United Church in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada as my parents committed to each other, brother and I that they would cherish one another till death, and this time… no excuses.

Fast forward to December 24, 2006. Willow has a tradition at the end of the Christmas Eve service. During the singing of “Silent Night”, Pastor Bill Hybels encourages everyone to take that exact moment to turn to the people they are with and tell them how much they mean to them. I was sitting between my parents. My parents who loved each other, who had recommitted their lives to each other and who had come together, to celebrate Christmas with us. It was all we could do for my father and I to hold each other and cry. Neither of us are really the crying type, but we both just realized how incredibly blessed were at that moment. I had never imagined that my broken family could be put back together, and at that moment, I realized, without a doubt that it was.