We tend to copy what we’ve seen-or (since the soft, secure everyday mundane reality of marriage is unknown) idealize what we’ve never had. Especially when those children come from educationally disadvantaged homes, they are less likely to marry. Unsurprisingly, when children from single-parent homes grow up and have their own children, many of them will pass on the cycle of marital instability or not get married at all. One of the problems with growing up in a “broken home” is that you never get to experience a two-parent one. In the world we grew up in, the type of picture we had carefully painted in our minds was, to our peers, a social oddity. But coming up, neither of us had seen these things lived out in front of us. Shai and I knew we wanted children, if the Lord would provide, and more than anything we wanted to raise them in a loving, God-filled home. I went from Wingo to Linne and I was now, for the first time, part of a married household. But I was hoping that grace and forgiveness could make up for those many years in which I had been left to walk down the aisle of my life alone. He was there to give me away but had not been there to raise me. I love watching a father walking his daughter down the aisle because of all it represents: a father who has walked along his daughter in life, protecting and shepherding her until he places his precious child into the hands of a man who will take equally good care of her.
He was the beaming father by my side, handing off his 27-year-old daughter to Shai on one of the most important days of my life.
Despite being a Jehovah’s Witness who does not often step foot in a Christian church, he gladly came. Among the invitations that went out, I invited my father to walk me down the aisle.
I married Shai four months after he got down on one knee. The iron sliver I thought I’d die from.” (Li-Young Lee) I watched his lovely face and not the blade. My father recited a story in a low voice.
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