When God Wrapped Fatherly Love Around My Life

📍 Story Moment: Auckland, New Zealand — May 2026. A laptop, a birthday post, and two vintage photographs that stopped everything.

📖 "The righteous man walks in his integrity; His children are blessed after him." — Proverbs 20:7 (NKJV)

🕯️ I wasn't expecting it.

I sat down this morning to post a birthday wish for a man I love — a man who turns 80 today, a man who is in palliative care, a man whose road home is drawing near. My heart was already full before I even began typing. Full of gratitude. Full of tenderness. Full of the particular kind of grief that comes when you love someone deeply and are across countries, too far away to pop in for a visit.

As I typed his name, a thought came quietly — almost like a whisper. I remembered a photograph. A large, framed photograph that once hung on the wall of my room. His face. His smile. The man who had become a father to me in one of my most fragile seasons.

I'd carried that photograph through years and countries, through moves and new beginnings — until one day, in all the motion of life, it was simply gone. Displaced somewhere between one chapter and the next. This morning, as I sat with his birthday on my heart, I found myself quietly aching for it.

💔 I grieved that photograph more than I expected to.

🕊️ I posted his birthday wish. Then Facebook did something it does sometimes, quietly and without fanfare — its birthday reminder suggested photographs. Old ones. Ones I hadn't thought to look for.

There they were. Two photographs, vintage-toned, faded at the edges the way memories sometimes are — snapshots from two different moments in time, about two years apart, yet bound together by the same golden thread of grace.

In the first, taken around 1991, a young woman stands smiling in a white dress, holding a balloon. She's wearing glasses. There's a plant in the corner of the room, a stack of books behind her — and on the wall, there he is. His photograph. Enlarged. Framed. Exactly the one I'd been thinking about. Still there. Right there. On the wall behind a young Trixi who had no idea yet how much her life was about to change.

📖 "I thank my God upon every remembrance of you." — Philippians 1:3 (NKJV)

The second photograph — taken two years earlier. My baptism. In the river at Haasvlake. November 1989.

🌱 Two people standing in the water, a thick canopy of trees behind them, the sky open and vast above. A moment I have never forgotten — the water, the surrender, the sense that something was being sealed in the heavens over my life.

I sat at my laptop and wept.

He saw me thinking about the photograph I'd lost. He saw my heart reaching toward a man I love. He knew what I needed before I asked for it.

So He gave it back. Not the physical print — that may still be somewhere in a box, waiting for its own discovery — but something even more precious: the memory alive again, vivid and full, on the very morning it mattered most.

🕯️ Some people pass through your life briefly, while others leave fingerprints on your soul that time itself cannot erase.

Oom Leon is one of those people for me.

Not merely for what he did, but for who he was — and who he helped me become — in one of the most fragile seasons of my life.

There are people God sends not with grand gestures or impressive titles, but with something far more precious: presence. Steady, consistent, unhurried presence. The kind that says, without words, you are safe here.

When life felt unstable — when despair had grown familiar and hope felt like something other people got to keep — Oom Leon and Tannie Jacobi opened not only their home, but their hearts. In that season, they became spiritual parents to me, and in many ways, physical parents too.

Inside their home, something sacred began to grow again.

🌱 Joy returned. 🌱 Hope returned. 🌱 Faith returned.

It was there, in the years that followed, that I gave my life fully to Jesus. It was there that I experienced one of my first true deliverances from the heavy darkness of depression. These aren't small things. These are the pillars upon which everything I am today has been built.

✍️ Looking back now — with the clarity that only years and healing can bring — I realise how profoundly Oom Leon shaped my understanding of fatherhood, leadership, faith, and love. Not through perfection. Not through performance. Simply through presence.

Through prayer. Through wisdom. Through consistency. Through a kindness that expected absolutely nothing in return.

There were seasons later in life when despair whispered loudly again. Seasons where I honestly wondered if anyone would notice if I simply disappeared. Yet somewhere beneath the ache, the seed of love and hope planted during those years remained quietly, stubbornly alive. A still small knowing kept whispering: Don't give up until you find God as Father.

That seed mattered more than I can fully explain.

🪨 Years passed. Life unfolded across countries, losses, rebuilding, motherhood, ministry, and healing journeys I could never have imagined as that young woman standing in the river at Haasvlake, or smiling in a white dress with his face on her wall. Yet even decades later, hearing Oom Leon's voice again carried the same warmth of safety and spiritual covering I remembered so well.

One message he sent me recently still rests deeply within me:

"Patrizia, beloved royal daughter…"

Those words were more than encouragement. They restored something. They reached into a place that still, even now, sometimes questions whether it belongs — and answered it with grace.

There are fathers who give life biologically, and there are fathers who help restore life spiritually. Oom Leon carried that second kind of influence in my story, and I am forever marked by it.

🕊️ Some people preach sermons. Others simply become one.

Oom Leon, your life has preached faithfully, quietly, and consistently — through the way you loved, the way you guided, the way you prayed, and the way you stood firm in truth long after it would have been easier to let things slide.

Thank you for seeing worth where others may have overlooked it.

Thank you for creating safety where fear once lived.

Thank you for modelling the Father heart of God with such gentleness and such integrity.

Thank you for helping to shape the woman I would one day become — and through her, the ministry that continues to carry broken hearts to the feet of Jesus.

🌱 Your influence didn't end in those early years, Oom Leon. It continues to ripple outward — through every heart I now encourage, every story I write, every prayer I pray, every creative gathering I host, every broken soul I remind that they are still deeply loved by God.

That is legacy. That is fruit that remains.

🎺 Some lives become ancient wells others keep drawing from long after the season has passed. Yours is one of them.

🕯️ A note written on the eve of your 80th birthday

Tuesday marked eighty years of your life, Oom Leon. Eighty years of faithfulness, of fathering, of quietly pointing others toward Jesus. You are in palliative care now, and the road home is drawing near — yet somehow, even in that, there is something profoundly fitting about a man who lived so close to eternity already being called toward it with such dignity.

I pray that God sustains you in this season — not just in body, but in spirit. That His nearness would be tangible and warm, like sunlight through a window. That the seeds you've sown would rise up around you like a garden in full bloom, and that you'd see — even now — something of the fruit your faithfulness has borne.

Go well, dear Oom Leon. Heaven is gaining one of its finest.

✍️ Story in a Sentence: "I thought God had let me lose a photograph — then He gave it back on the morning I needed it most, to remind me that He forgets nothing, not even the things we grieve in silence."

💡 Reflection

You don't have to have it all figured out to begin. Your story matters — even the parts that still hurt, even the chapters you'd rather skip. Take a moment with these questions and let the Holy Spirit lead you gently…

• Is there something you've grieved losing — a person, a season, a memory — that God may be inviting you to receive back in a different form today? 🤔

• 2. Who has been an "Oom Leon" in your life — someone whose steady presence helped anchor your faith in a fragile season? Have you ever told them what they meant to you? 🤔

• What seeds of hope, faith, or love were planted in you during a painful season that only became visible much later? Can you trace where they're bearing fruit today? 🤔

• When you think of the Father heart of God, whose face or voice comes to mind? What has that told you about how God has been pursuing you, even in the hard seasons? 🤔

• Is there an act of honour, a word of gratitude, or a letter of love you've been meaning to give to someone who has poured into you? What would it mean to offer that today, while there is still time? 🤔

🎺 Affirmation

You are not forgotten, and neither are the things you've carried. God sees every displaced photograph, every grieved memory, every silent ache you haven't been able to name aloud. He is the keeper of the things time scatters — and His timing is never accidental.

You are the beloved daughter of the Most High King, shaped by grace, carried through storms, and destined for a flourishing beyond what the difficult seasons could have allowed you to imagine. The fingerprints of faithful people on your soul are part of your story — and your story is still being written, one beautiful, redemptive chapter at a time.

🕊️ "And if this is your story too — even a fragment of it — know that you are not alone. God sees. God knows. God redeems."

🙌 Prayer

"Lord, I lay this story — all of it — at Your feet. The beautiful parts and the broken ones. Take it, and let it be of use…"

Father, thank You for morning surprises — the quiet, precise moments when You remind us that You see. Thank You for the people You've placed in our stories whose faithfulness has outlasted every hard season. Thank You for Oom Leon — for the home he opened, the river he stood beside, the prayers he prayed, the love he gave so freely. Thank You for the photograph You gave back this morning, in the only way that mattered most.

Sustain him in this season, Lord. Let Your presence be warm and tangible around him. Let him know — in whatever way his heart can still receive it — that his life mattered far more than words can say. Let honour rise around him like a beautiful fragrance. Surround him with Your peace.

For every reader who has lost a photograph of their own — a memory, a person, a season that slipped away in the moving — meet them here. Remind them that You forget nothing. Restore what has been scattered. Make all things beautiful in Your time.

In Jesus' Name, Amen.

🕯️ There are photographs God keeps for you — not always in frames, not always where you left them, but never truly lost. He sees what time displaces. He remembers what you grieve in the quiet. Sometimes, on the morning you need it most, He simply gives it back.

Go gently today. Hold what is precious while you can. Say thank you while there is still time.

🕯️ This is my story. This is His glory. And it's still being written.

🌸 A Gentle Call to Action

If this reflection spoke to your heart, I invite you to take it deeper:

• Journal your thoughts and prayers as you process these truths.

• Explore my Devotional Collection for more writings that weave Scripture and creativity together.

• Visit my This is My Story page, where I share the deeper journey behind my art, writing, and ministry — a testimony of God’s restoring love in the broken places.

• Consider joining one of my Healing 💔heARTs💖 gatherings or paint parties, where we create, share, and heal together in God’s presence.

Your story matters. Your freedom matters. And most of all, you are deeply loved by the One who sets captives free.