My Father-in-Law’s Face
The wages of sin are paid in this world, too.
My father-in-law was born on December 31, 1918, in (I believe) Lebanon, Indiana to a working class family, and died on January 5, 2006. His father died when he was 12 years old, and he, his mother, and his three younger siblings fell into desperate poverty. She took in laundry and ironing, and to keep warm in winter they fired their stove with tarpaper scraps from the town dump.
As an adult, he worked hard at a meat packing plant, sheared sheep on the side, became more prosperous, was able to buy a house, and eventually build a new one. Although he had escaped poverty, he never really believed he had. His house was cheaply furnished, they got all their clothes from Goodwill, and he never bought anything except the very cheapest he could find. When his roof leaked, he painted over the leaks with tar.
He was Pentecostal, in the Full Gospel tradition. I’m an evangelical Christian, and though I believe in all of the Gifts of the Spirit, including the Gift of Speaking in Tongues, I draw the line at chaos during worship, for which Pentecostalism is sometimes known. He was however, the most openly joyful Christian I ever met. He testified regarding his faith to everybody he met.
I admired this quality, and he was one of the witnesses who eventually led me to salvation. He would eagerly tell everybody about the day in 1957 when he received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, the day his burdens were lifted- except they weren’t all lifted.
In his youth my father-in-law was a carouser, hard drinker, and womanizer. After his marriage to my mother-in-law he changed from a womanizer to a serial adulterer. After five children and countless “ships passing in the night,” she finally kicked him to the curb. In all fairness though, this was before his conversion to Christianity.
My wife was was the youngest- only about two years old when they split, so she has no memory of their marriage except the stories her mom told her. They weren’t exactly bedtime stories.
After the divorce, he married the crazy woman he had been involved with, and as justice decreed, she treated him like a dog. She was terribly jealous of “his other family,” and possibly as a direct result of her bullying, he paid no child support, even after his conversion. This was in the 1950’s, when nobody was made to pay child support. He never apologized.
My mother-in-law worked two jobs in order to keep the family intact, and it was barely adequate. My father-in-law was building a new house at the same time my wife and her four siblings were having a “welfare Christmas,” receiving Christmas gifts from the local Lion’s Club. My wife was forced to wear her two sisters’ “hand-me-down” clothes, and her more prosperous schoolmates knew it, mocking her mercilessly.
When she was ten, her father and that “crazy woman” adopted an infant girl, and she never saw him again until she was fifteen years old, when she dropped in to see him! At our wedding it would have been too awkward to invite him, so she didn’t.
We only saw him infrequently in the ensuing years until his “crazy woman” died, and he was old and sick. In direct opposition to the emotional baggage she carried, my wife and I agreed to take care of him as long as he stayed in his own house. So there he was- old, sick, alone, and haunted by the years he neglected his children.
Before he passed on at age 87, he was frail, mostly blind, and confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home. His face was deeply lined, crinkled with the weight of his decades of poverty and bad choices. He had suffered greatly from the guilt and shame of his actions and inactions.
The morning he passed, my wife called me at work with the news, and asked me to come home. After I got home, we went to the nursing home to speak to the staff and get his body released to a funeral home. When we went into the vacant room where the staff had laid him, I was astonished by his appearance. Almost all the creases and lines in his face were gone, he appeared twenty years younger, and his countenance was one of complete peace.
His burden had finally been lifted.
