This past Monday, with all the commotion of Kari being in the hospital, I messed up my work schedule in my head. So I showed up to work at 9:30am and wasn’t supposed to be there until 4pm! Not a good start to the day. Well, it was snowing and I had a lot of time to kill so I decided to use a gift card I had and go to a movie. I saw Grand Terino.
**CAUTION**
Quick warning. The movie does have language and racist comments, so if you are sensitive to that don’t watch it. It actually would not have been as good of a movie without it. It is necessary to paint the character that Eastwood plays. Also, if you are planning to watch the movie do not read the rest of this post! I will be discussing the main point of the movie. Come back and read after you see it. OK you have been warned 
Clint Eastwood plays a character that is a war vet and has spent the rest of his life working the Ford lines. Thus the Grand Terino. One would think that since the movie was titled after the car that it would be about the car, but it’s not. Anyways, he is retired and the movie starts at his wife’s funeral. Now I’m not going to explain the movie in detail. I’m not a critic. But what really hit me in this movie was important and I think it is worth sharing. After his wife’s death, the priest that spent time with her before she died comes to see him. He tells him that his wife made him promise to get Clint to go to confession. Clint being the old fart that he is, blows him off. Over and over the priest comes to him trying to get him to confession. The whole time, through the dialog it seems that he made a huge mistake that he can’t forgive himself for and it is shared within the contexts of all the awful things he did in Vietnam. However, at the end (remember I told you not to read this if you hadn’t seen it), he builds a rapport with the priest and he goes to the confession. And then the bomb drops. The sin that was unforgivable; that was eating at him and made him the bitter man that he was….. can you stand the suspense? His unforgivable sin? He didn’t know his children and they didn’t know him. They grew up with him, they visited him, but they had no relationship. At the end of his life the biggest regret was not having a real relationship with his kids and their families. This hit me like a ton of bricks.
Most of you, that would be reading this, know that my dad was there but not there in my life. Two things tweeked my heart. One, does my dad regret missing a lifetime of knowing me and I him? Like Clint does he want it to change but not know how? Part of me hopes so. Part of me would be afraid that I wouldn’t know where to start either. Secondly, it made me reflect on my relationship with my own kids and I realized that I have more lost moments than I care to have. I too often rely on Kari to inform me about my children, rather than talk with my children and get to know them first hand. This was a wake up call to me. Dads we get busy with life; work, bills, honey do lists, hobbies, etc. It’s natural, we’re task oriented. But in the end I think we all will look back at the same thing. Do we know our children and do they know us? How do we start? It’s been said that a jug is filled one drop at a time. I think we need to be intentional each day to invest in our relationship with our kids. It’s not the big events like vacations and family days, it’s the small drops each day that fill us with the knowledge of others. It’s the “how was your day” and mean it moments. The playing a game together, doing choirs together, let them doing things with you when it would be easier to not have them “in the way”. I think you get the point.
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