Excerpted from A Father for All Seasons (1998)
by: Bob Welch

n Washington's Cascade Mountains, a newspaper photographer and I pulled to the side of the dirt road, stepped out of the car and scanned the utter bleakness that was once Mount St. Helens. We had come to this spot in southwestern Washington five years after the May 18, 1980, volcanic eruption whose force was more powerful than any atomic bomb. The once-graceful peak lay scattered in jagged heaps; 1,300 feet of the mountain had been blown off. Downed trees in the distance looked like scattered match sticks. Spirit Lake, once a deep blue jewel on which canoes glided past woodsy cabins, was now a primordial greenish-gray. No birds sang. No wildlife scurried. The scene was eerily still, suggesting death. It looked like a war zone. Across this landscape of destruction, something small and seemingly insignificant caught my attention: a twig of columbine poking through the ash. And not far away, a few patches of sword ferns rose up from the rubble. They were reminders of healing and hope. Indeed, within a few years 90 percent of the plants common to the area re-established themselves. Elk and deer returned. And most of the 53 lakes and 298 miles of streams affected by the eruption were resurrecting themselves. There is a time to heal, Ecclesiastes says. And that healing goes beyond nature, to people. To fathers and children, sometimes after explosions have turned their relational landscape into something that looks like a war zone.           It happened in what may have seemed like an ordinary, happy suburban family in Dayton, Ohio, in the '60s. But looking back, Jeff Schulte, now 35, remembers a childhood like this: "I picture my dad bouncing me on his knee, coaching me in Little League, showing me how to shine my shoes, helping me reel in my first fish and telling me stories about his early days as an undercover detective on the Dayton police force. I hear him saying, 'Son, I love you.' I see him messing up my hair, wrestling me on the floor and sharing a hot dog with me at a Reds game. He would do anything for me - I am his son and he is my dad."           But the childhood Jeff longed to remember lived only in his imagination. What really happened? When Jeff was 3, his father left for another woman, walking out on his wife and six children ranging from 14 years to 3 months old. When that relationship faltered, he remarried Jeff's mom. " I remember my mom asking us if we wanted him to come home again," Jeff remembers. "Of course we did." But nine months later he left for good. Jeff's mother raised the family on her own. Jeff saw his father only twice in the next two decades, when he was 11 and 25. The man showed up for a daughter's graduation and another daughter's wedding, then was gone. Meanwhile, Jeff won an academic scholarship and played football at Yale, from which he graduated in 1984. He got married. He joined Campus Crusade for Christ. But the years with an absent father could not dilute Jeff's sense that he needed to somehow reconnect. In 1989, at age 29, he decided he must see his father. He drove from Little Rock, Ark., to Sheboygan, Wis., arriving in a snowstorm. And, at his father's workplace, he sat alone with the man who had left him and the rest of the family. He did not confront his father or chastise him. Instead, he reached out and touched the man's hands. He looked his father in the eye and asked, "Do you love me?" "Of course I love you," his father said. "Did you miss me?" "Of course I missed you," his father said. "I needed to hear that," Jeff said. "As soon as I touched his hands, I knew those were the hands that I had dreamed would hold me, tickle me, and wrap around mine, to show me how to swing a bat, how to catch a ball."           But until that moment in 1989, those hands were never there for Jeff. For some, that reality leads to bitterness. For Jeff, however, it led only to a desire to heal the wound. His father, he came to learn, had been raised by a philandering father and an alcoholic mother; he had left home at 17. "My dad," Jeff said, "simply gave me what his dad gave him. It was as if he were living life in a wheelchair. I couldn't suddenly demand that he get up and walk." Instead, Jeff decided to love his father with the love of Christ. As he did so, the brittleness between father and son softened. And that softening spread to his siblings, some of whom vowed they could never forgive. But they did. In the summer of 1996, Jeff's brothers and sisters were reunited with their dad. For the first time, Jeff's father broke down and wept. He admitted he had betrayed them and their mother. On the invitation of his children, he moved back to Dayton to be closer to them. He had 16 grandchildren he needed to get to know. A while later, Jeff, his father and two brothers played nine holes of golf together. On the last green, Jeff gathered the group and told them to stop and drink in this moment. Did they realize, he asked, how amazing this was? "I can't believe how all six of you kids have forgiven me," his father said. "It's unreal." "What's going on is bigger than your kids, Dad," Jeff explained. "It's about a God in heaven who gives second chances, who wants you to experience His love and His forgiveness."           Looking back, Jeff considers his mother "one of God's heroes," a woman who refused to give up. Occasionally he feels angry when he considers the years without his father. "What a waste," he says. "What a waste." But in the end, he had to get beyond his anger to the hurt. He had to realize that in setting someone else free, we free ourselves. "I thought a mountain range separated me and my dad, but it was actually just a curb. I'm not saying there weren't issues, but forgiveness is all that separated us." Now a speaker for Family Life Conferences who lives in Nashville with his wife and four young children, Jeff recently spoke at a church in Dayton. In walked his father. Until that day, his nearly 70-year-old father had never attended an event his son had been involved in, be it a graduation, a game, a speech. "I wasn't there for you then," his father told him recently. "I am now."           Sometimes relationships explode with atomic-energy force, leaving once-graceful peaks scattered in jagged heaps, leaving a scene of devastation, leaving little sign of hope for the rejuvenation of life. -- "But it is never too late," said a little boy whose father was lost but now is found. "Never."

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