The basic problem with all of this, of course, is that Jim Richardson never liked to draw attention to himself. The challenge of eulogizing a man who never liked to draw attention to himself, or be in anyone’s way, inconvenience anyone in any manner, are hard enough. But then there’s the next complicating basic problem: I’m just like him. [It’s not that I don’t have plenty of Jim Richardson stories to share to illustrate all that low-key, self-effacing humility, the kindness…but when you have two guys who cultivated a life of going under the radar so we could just be free to be ourselves, how do you talk about it?
I loved that guy. He loved me. He loved Jesus. He was never big on insisting that I do the same, he just showed me a lot of ways to do it. I was a curious and questioning kid growing up. And he was the smartest guy I knew.
I went into psychology and I went into Biblical Studies. And he loved reading The Bible, but I never talked to him about the academic study of The Bible. When I started really reading it when I was 18, I’d decided I was just going to read it from front to back, and if I had any questions I was just going to write them down and ask him because he was one of the smartest guys I knew. And I knew he could take it. I felt safe asking him these things. I felt safe questioning. I felt safe doubting. And when I started asking all of these questions about the random things that come up early on in The Bible, and he could see that list of questions I’d made, I could see that he was a little overwhelmed and he just looked at me and said, “What have you gotten yourself into?” But I’d ask ‘how do you make sense of this and of that?…If this thing is true, how can that thing be true? And finally he held up his two thick forefingers and said to me “1) We’ll never really know and 2) It doesn’t really matter.” Which might leave you with the question of ‘What really matters?’ But I never had to ask him what really matters. He always just showed me. He loved his neighbors. He loved his God. He loved Melanie. He loved Susan. He loved Marilyn.
And that was his way. That was his preference. The last thing I said to him in person before I left two weeks ago as I leaned down to hug him was “I love you. Thank you for being my dad.” He couldn’t stand, but he squeezed me back and said “I was glad to do it.”
