When God Wrapped Fatherly Love Around My Life

For the man who carried the heart of a father when my world needed one most

📖 “The righteous man walks in his integrity; His children are blessed after him.”

— Proverbs 20:7 (NKJV)

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

I’ve been sitting quietly with that thought this morning, a warm cup of tea in my hands and a photograph on my heart — two images of the same man, separated by decades, yet carrying the same thing in both: those eyes. Still, steady, and blue as a summer sky. Eyes that always seemed to see more than they let on. Eyes that looked at a broken young woman and reflected something she hadn’t yet believed about herself.

Worth. Dignity. Belonging.

Today I want to honour Oom Leon — a father to many, and especially to those of us who found our way to Deo Gloria back in 1999, when the world felt uncertain and my own heart carried more heaviness than words could hold.

✍️ I’m writing this not because it’s easy, but because some stories deserve to be told while there is still time to tell them. Some people have poured so much into us that silence would be a kind of ingratitude. This is my small act of remembrance — an offering of love and honour for a life faithfully lived.

🕯️ There are people God sends into our seasons 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.

Oom Leon was one of those people for me.

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 that I gave my life to Jesus. It was there that I was baptised. 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 — and Oom Leon’s home was one of the places God chose to lay those foundations.

📖 “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.”

— Philippians 1:3 (NKJV)

🕊️ 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 at Deo Gloria 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 sitting in Oom Leon’s home. Yet even decades later, hearing his 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 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.

Sunday marks 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.

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