This afternoon I found myself overwhelmed with love. With the desire to love and have compassion on a man named John Leonard. To love him as a human being and not a representative of all the mistakes he has made and all the hurt he has caused me. Today all I wanted to do was call him up and tell him that I loved him, and that my search for understanding, has birthed in me this deep compassion for him.

I received an envelope in the mail today from my mom. She told me she was sending it to me on Saturday, so I knew it was coming, but I had forgotten to expect it. When I brought in the mail this afternoon, I saw it there, and I knew exactly what it was. While looking through her bible she had come upon something my dad had written during one of his many rehab stays. It is entitled "Family" and in the pages he wrote he talks about his childhood and what his family was like as he grew up. Most of the stuff that he wrote, I already had a general idea about.

But when I sat down this afternoon and read his words for myself, something in me broke. I reread them and read them again. And the only conclusion I could come to, the only thing that I kept thinking, was that I simply wanted to love him. To love him as a person, to love the broken man that his life has made him.

I thought about calling him to tell him all this. But then I wondered whether he would care that I had come to this revelation. I wondered whether or not it would matter to him that something pretty huge had changed in me. I wondered how awkward the phone conversation would play out . . . how I would progress from the "Hey, how are you?" which has been the only words we usually exchange to sharing my heart, to telling him that I love him. I wondered why he has not commented at all (not even to my mother) about the letter I sent him last week. Part of me wondered if he even cared about the letter I sent him, or if things (things being our relationship) are just too far gone and lost in the past to be healed.

A big part of me really wants to feel hope about all this . . . but hope and expectations are such delicate things . . . so easily shattered. One can only allow herself to be shattered so many times.

But I do love him . . . I love him more than I am angry at him, I love him more than I feel hurt and abandoned. I love my dad.