Beyond Repair

Speaking to a church congregation just before Christmas, Pastor Wilson Knox holds up a little wind-up toy he found in the parking lot, broken and tossed aside because it was no good. Christmas, he says, has a way of surfacing not just broken toys but broken people, and he tells the story of a young woman he calls Alicia, whom he met through Angel Tree, a prison fellowship ministry that serves the families of inmates.

Wilson sits with Alicia at a table in a prison visiting room, where she is waiting to see her father for the first time in fifteen years. Her nerve is failing. She is sure her father does not want to see her, and as they wait, Wilson asks her to remember something good instead. She recalls the Christmas when she was ten: snow falling, a real tree in the house, and her father, Jared, arriving at the door and pretending not to recognize the grown-up princess standing there. He gives her a necklace with a real diamond and tells her, "You are the diamond." But right after dinner, while Alicia is helping her mother with the dishes, he slips out of the house. She chases him into the snow without shoes, begging him to stay and play the game he promised, but he drives away on sudden "business," leaving her crying in her mother's arms. That, she tells Wilson, is how it always went - even the good times turned sour.

When Jared appears at the visiting room door, he looks right at Alicia without recognizing her, and she lets him walk away rather than call him back. Bitterly, she says her father has never really seen her. She remembers another Christmas, the night of her school concert, when her mother had to tell her that her father wasn't coming: he had been drinking, crashed his car into another one, and been arrested again. Alicia asked her mother to take the reserved sign off his empty seat, then told her classmates he was away on important business in Paris.

While an officer goes to bring her father back, Alicia tells Wilson how her faith began. When she was sixteen, an Angel Tree volunteer named Pastor Juan visited with his little daughter, Sandy, bringing a basket of goodies, presents, a Christmas tree, and a gift her father had asked Angel Tree to deliver from prison. Alicia wanted nothing to do with it, but Sandy - a cheerful girl whose own mother had died - told her that believing in God is like climbing a tree: near the bottom the branches block everything, but the higher you climb, the more you can see, and everything looks different. Something in Sandy's sweetness stayed with Alicia. It took a while, she admits, but she finally climbed high enough in her own tree to see out, and the two still keep in touch.

Then Alicia tells Wilson the real reason she has come: she hates her father, and she intends to say it to his face and cut him out of her life for good. She even quotes a psalm about God erasing the memory of evildoers. Wilson borrows her phone - not to make a call, but to use the calculator. If her father let her down twenty times a year for five years, he figures, that is only a hundred times; divided over five years, 490 would require far more. When Alicia asks where 490 came from, he explains it is seventy times seven, the number Jesus gave when he taught his followers to keep on forgiving - not a real limit, but a picture of forgiving without end, because however badly people fail us, we have failed God worse, and he still forgives. Alicia has an answer ready: forgiveness is for people who ask, and her father has never asked, not once.

Jared arrives, older now, and gently tells Alicia she has her mother's eyes. When he tries to say what he has prepared, she cuts him off - this is her time to speak. She pours out years of hurt: the little girl who kept hoping he would change, always waiting and always disappointed; his selfishness, his excuses, his lies. She is done with him. But instead of defending himself, Jared quietly agrees with every word. He has been meeting with the prison chaplain, he says, and the foolish man she described is not who he is anymore, or who he wants to be. "Alicia, I'm sorry." He tells her he knows she can't forgive him, that he will leave her alone, but that she has to know he loves her more than anything, and that is not a lie. "Goodbye, Princess," he says, and walks away. Stunned, Alicia asks Wilson if he knew this would happen. He didn't - but she had asked why she should forgive her father now, and Wilson tells her the answer: for the first time, her father asked for it. Alicia breaks down in tears, whispering, "Daddy."

Back before his congregation, Wilson admits he cannot report a storybook ending. Alicia did not run after her father and forgive him on the spot, and Wilson has since learned that Jared has been diagnosed with cancer while Alicia is still working through her feelings; he hopes she sorts them out before it is too late. What God asks of us, Wilson says, is to be the Juans and Sandys of the world - people who offer a helping hand and a kind word and let God begin healing the broken. As for the little wind-up toy, he has nudged its mainspring back into line, and it works just fine now.