Last night Hope said; “Dad, even if you were fat I would still love you and I would still hug you and snuggle with you.
When Kyle was a little boy he rode a school bus for one school year. In the morning I always brewed a pot of coffee and I would walk him out to the road where we would wait for the School Bus. I always hated seeing the little guy in his neat school clothes and mother-attended hair climb up the steps into the big yellow diesel dragon and drive away. I would stand and watch until the bus drove over the hill and out of site and then walk slowly back into the house.
When the bus returned in the afternoon I tried to be there to meet him with a basketball, or a baseball and glove, or a football. Skipper, our white golden retriever would be with me. We would play. He is a married man now, but then he was just a small boy.
One day he got off the bus and said; “Hi, Dad. When the other kids on the bus say ?Your dad is fat’ I say, ?He is not, he’s just right.’ As you can imagine I had mixed feelings about that comment.
It is nice to have someone who is willing to defend you, even in the face of obvious evidence against you. That’s the kind of loyalty that warms your heart years later when you still brew coffee but you drink it alone and your little buddy no longer sleeps in the next room or tosses a football with you on a late-fall afternoon.
I talk to a lot of people about being fat. It hurts. Being fat it is easy to believe that people would love you more if you could just somehow be slender. It’s even hard not to believe that God would like to more if you were a slim. But satisfaction in God and freedom from the bondage of gluttony requires a deep settled satisfaction in your soul that God loves you already and longs to be your satisfaction.
Ken Pierpont
Riverfront Character Inn
Flint, Michigan
August 17, 2005
