Hi, I’m Bevan Houston. I am a former Journey staff member, now living in Tulsa. Clark offered me the chance to post today.
David Foster Wallace told a good joke in his commence speech to Kenyon College in 2005. I’ll paraphrase – two young fish are swimming along and come across an elder fish who says, “Morning, young’ens how’s the water?” One of the younger fish looked at the other and said, “What in the heck is water?”
This little joke resounds with us so much because as humans we’re particularly capable of missing the obvious in the midst of our everyday reality. I’m a fairly in-tune guy when it comes to media and news and I have no memory of anybody sounding the warning sign about the housing crisis until it had already arrived. In hindsight it seems pretty obvious that lending billions to under-qualified people was a poor strategy but nobody really seemed to speak up until it was all over.
I got the chance to hang out with Clark a little today. He and I drove over and looked at a lot I’m thinking of buying and ate some Mexican food. I purposefully didn’t engage him in “grieving” talk. I’m not particularly good at that, and I trusted that if he had something to say, he would.
He was driving me back to my house and we passed an intersection. Clark pointed in one direction and said, “I think my parents used to live right over there.” There was a pause and then He said, "this is exactly how you remember that your dad is no longer there, when you can’t call to confirm some piece of info like that."
It hit me then and even more now that the full realization of losing a parent doesn’t come over you at one moment in time. It comes to you in little bits and pieces. It hits you in the phone calls you can’t make to confirm some little piece of information, just as much as the holidays or birthdays without the parent.
For me this is like the fish realizing all the stuff around him is water. I’m very blessed that my dad is alive. I’m also very blessed that I get to work with him every day at our company. His presence is the water that surrounds my life. I talked to him last night for over an hour after midnight about a power point presentation he’s giving today in Salt Lake City. I don’t have any idea what it would be like to not have him around, because I always do.
So, I ask you to pray for Clark. Pray for the little moments of mourning that he will have today, tomorrow and all of the days to come. Pray that God will comfort him in the days to come and the weeks that will pass. And I ask you to do as I’ve done today, call your Dad and say hi.
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