From the Cross to the Cross

On Friday night, just after the Sabbath hours began to settle softly over the room, I placed my hand on my father’s chest and felt the final beat of his big, tired, beautiful heart.

He had held the hands of many dying people through the years. As a pastor he had prayed beside hospital beds, wrecked lives, broken marriages, frightened friends, and exhausted caregivers. He had stood at gravesides in the rain and preached about the resurrection hope with conviction shaped not merely by doctrine but by survival.

Now it was his turn to rest.

My father, Donald Richard Blythe—though most people knew him as Pastor Rick—was “Papa” to us.

Five weeks and five days earlier, on his seventy-fifth birthday, we learned that he had stage four liver cancer. The doctors were stunned by how aggressive it was, especially in someone without prior liver disease. The church gathered around him, elders anointed him, and friends traveled long distances to pray over him.

But the cancer moved with terrifying speed. In just four weeks the tumor that had once measured roughly the size of a fist had spread rapidly, filling much of his abdomen. We packed our bags and drove the long nine hours to Alabama knowing, deep down, where all of this was heading.

When I walked into his room, Papa and I both understood. He was still himself—still joking, still observant, still wanting one more conversation—but he was growing tired.

Papa was not afraid to die. He just wasn’t ready yet. He still had stories to tell. Questions to ask. Computers and ham radio equipment to tinker with. Theology to argue about. Songs to sing. Souls to reach. He loved people with an intensity that could exhaust you and inspire you in the same afternoon.

The Only Crosses He Knew

My father came from violence.

Long before he became a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, before evangelistic meetings and mission stories and Sabbath sermons, he was a frightened boy in rural Alabama growing up under the shadow of terror. His father was the Grand Dragon (the highest ranking state officer) in the Ku Klux Klan[1] in Alabama, a position of enormous power and influence in that time and place, who desperately wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Hatred hung in the air around their home like humidity before a storm—a storm that was always coming.

As a child, the only crosses my father knew were burning ones.

When Papa was still very young, he and his younger brother and sisters were thrilled to be taken on a train ride. At the station he ran excitedly toward a water fountain to get a drink. Suddenly he saw stars as his father’s heavy hand cracked across the back of his head.

“No!” his father roared. “Don’t you ever drink from a colored fountain![2] You don’t know what kind of disease you’ll get!”

The little boy stared up at the “For Colored Only” sign he was too young to read.

Yet even as a child, something in my father quietly resisted the hatred he was being taught. He secretly admired the brilliant Black scientist George Washington Carver and hid books and stories about him from his father whenever he could.

I think much of that resistance came from my grandmother Mozell. She was always a “green thumb”—and that included growing hearts. She planted seeds of kindness, curiosity, and faith in her six children and in nearly everyone around her.

Abused and afraid, she still somehow managed to create tenderness inside a home filled with fear. Papa told me that when he was just a baby his mother dedicated him to God, and his great-grandmother predicted he would become a pastor someday. It would have sounded impossible to anyone looking at that battered family then.

Like his childhood hero, Papa wanted to become a scientist. He loved learning and pursued education before he understood how unlikely that dream was for someone from his background. But trauma has a way of hunting a person down and redirecting their future.

One terrible day, trying to protect his mother and siblings, Papa shot his own father during a violent confrontation. In the chaos his younger sister Janice was accidentally wounded too. Papa was taken to jail.

But the story wasn’t over. After Janice recovered enough from surgery to tell investigators what had happened, it became clear that Papa had acted to protect his family. He was released from jail, and the charges were dropped.

The Lord still had other plans for his life.

A Road Away From Hatred

His mother had become interested in Sabbathkeeping years earlier through radio broadcasts from Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. My father grew up torn between competing worlds—violence and mercy, hatred and truth, fear and faith.

Eventually he joined the Navy, trying to outrun the life he came from.

Early in his Navy career, in California, he met an electronics engineer named Kurt Davies, a man deeply committed to his Seventh-day Adventist Christian faith. My parents would laughingly admit later that Kurt stretched the boundaries of appropriate workplace influence considerably by relentlessly encouraging this young Southern couple to attend an evangelistic series.

And there, Papa gave his heart fully to Jesus Christ.

My mother was thrilled. Though initially uncertain about some Adventist beliefs herself, she later said the doctrine that finally settled her heart was learning that God was not planning to torture sinners eternally in hell. The gospel became beautiful to her there.

As a child, the only crosses my father knew were burning ones.

The Sabbath became most beautiful to my father. Not merely as doctrine—but as refuge.

He often spoke about Desmond Doss and the courage it gave him as a young Adventist serviceman facing pressure in the military. If another Adventist could stand faithfully before military opposition years earlier, then perhaps he could too.

And stand he did.

For more than 40 years my parents served joyfully in ministry together in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. They planted churches, held evangelistic meetings, counseled hurting people, and raised three daughters in a home filled with faith, curiosity, humor, music, and constant conversations about reaching people for Jesus.

My mother was the quiet strength beneath so much of his ministry. While Papa filled rooms with stories, theology debates, and singing that was far more enthusiastic than accurate, she brought beauty, order, discipline, and real musicianship into our home and churches.

It softened a man who had grown up surrounded by violence. Some of my earliest memories are of hearing my mother play piano while my father sang loudly nearby, completely unbothered by how gloriously off-key he usually was.

Violence may have shaped my father’s childhood, but love shaped the man he became.

Rebuilding What Storms Destroy

Eventually he and a few friends invested in his hometown and planted the Piedmont Seventh-day Adventist Church community he had dreamed about for years. And in one of those strange full-circle moments only God seems capable of planning, the same Desmond Doss whose story had strengthened my father as a young Adventist serviceman later became one of the founding members of that church in his old age.

Years later, after a devastating tornado destroyed the church building only days after the congregation celebrated paying off its mortgage, it was rebuilt again—stronger this time, including a tornado shelter for the surrounding community.

My father spent his life helping rebuild things storms had torn apart.

The frightened Alabama boy who once thought the world was defined by fear and violence eventually traveled far beyond it through ministry, including years serving in the Marshall Islands. There, the truths my parents had built their lives around were reinforced again and again: people are people everywhere, souls matter deeply, and the kingdom of God is infinitely bigger than hatred.

My father especially loved messy people. He loved broken people—people like the frightened boy he once was. He believed deeply that nobody was too far gone for grace. Perhaps because he knew how far grace had traveled to reach him.

He believed in evangelism until the day he died. He believed people were still searching for Jesus. Every waitress, mechanic, cashier, neighbor, stranger, and radio operator was a potential friend. A potential soul. A person worth slowing down for.

Until Morning

Surrounded by family who loved him fiercely, Papa lay down to sleep as the Sabbath began.

For my father the Sabbath was never merely a theological argument or a line in a doctrinal statement. It was rest. Refuge. Mercy. A weekly reminder that human worth was not measured by fear, striving, or performance. Somehow it felt deeply fitting that the man whose life had been shaped so deeply by the peace of the Sabbath would fall asleep just as those sacred hours began.

As a little girl, I remember my father proudly asking my sisters and me to sing for guests in our home. If we protested that we didn’t know what to sing, he would laugh and loudly declare, “Sing ‘Amazing Grace’! You can always sing that!”

And he especially loved the line “I once was blind, but now I see.” He usually sang it slightly off-key and with enormous enthusiasm.

After his death, the eye bank called. My father had donated his eyes so that two other people could see clearly again.

That feels almost impossibly symbolic for a man who spent his entire life trying to help people see beyond hatred, fear, pride, despair, and the crosses this world lays upon us.

Papa’s life often reminded me that life changes people one conversation at a time, one act of love at a time, one surrendered heart at a time. A frightened boy raised beneath the shadow of a burning cross spent the rest of his life leading people gently toward the cross that heals hearts instead.

From the cross to the cross.

See you in the morning, Papa.

[1] The Ku Klux Klan is a White supremacist hate group in the United States formed after the Civil War to oppose freed Black Americans’ rights.

[2] “Colored” was the term used to designate Black Americans at the time.