Two months ago, I talked with my dad on the phone for the first time.

No, we don't have some horribly strained relationship. And, no, he doesn't have some psychotic phone phobia. It's quite simple, really. He's deaf.

For me, having a hearing-impaired father is the same as having a dad who wears glasses or has red hair. It's part of what makes him him. Childhood illness (an unidentified fever of some sort) made my father the kid in school with the humongous hearing aids. In lieu of sending him off to a deaf school where he would join deaf culture and learn sign language, his parents opted to keep him in the hearing world. So, he had a relatively normal childhood, replete with music lessons and verbal sibling fights (in fact, he even once used his hearing aid battery as a weapon against his older brother).

By the time he headed off to college, he was fully acclimated to a world where he missed every fifth word, guessing his way through. He didn't know a lick of sign language, but he read lips like it was his job.

But it didn't mean his hearing loss didn't get in the way from time to time. When I was growing up, I remember many times when someone would tell him something and he would turn away, not noticing their moving lips. Embarrassed, I would tug on his sleeve and point to whoever was speaking to him. My father would politely tell the store clerk, or whoever it was, that he was deaf and could they please repeat themselves.

Ten years ago, sound re-invaded his world.

Through the cochlear implant, a device that is changing what it means to be deaf in the 21st century. A magnet inside his head connected to some electrodes in his inner ear made hearing possible again. My dad heard me play the piano for the first time in his life and finally discovered what we kids sounded like.

While the implant has drastically affected my dad's life—ability to hear music, to know when someone behind him is talking, and the capacity to catch most of most sentences—it hasn't been without its traumas. Five years ago, it stopped working. It simply just stopped, and my dad entered the world of silence again. They performed the surgery again, and he was back in business. Problem solved.

Until three months ago, when it stopped again. His doctor told him he'd never had a patient whose implant had malfunctioned twice. My dad responded patiently, as always, and checked himself back in to the hospital. I, on the other hand, was livid.

Something must be wrong for it to keep breaking. It must be the surgeon. It must be the shape of my dad's head. It must be a sick joke.

Actually, it was a gift from God's hand. Less than a month after the surgery, I got a voice mail from my dad telling me he wanted to see if he could hear me on the phone. This'll be interesting, I told myself. But, I picked up the phone and called.

"Zoe, can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can hear you."

"Zoe, can you hear me?"

I hung up.

A minute later, he calls back. "Let's try this again," he said.

So, I slowed down, and began again.

This time, he heard me, almost every word. We talked for the next 45 minutes about our days, books we'd been reading, and the election in Zimbabwe.

That day my father entered my world in a new way, thanks to this third surgery and God's faithful hand. What I saw as a huge interference in his life, actually became the thing that would open up an entirely new world of communication between us, and between him and the rest of the world.

Since, then we’ve had several lengthier phone chats, and I’m still pinching myself—a pinch that reminds me that my other Father has never stopped hearing me.

Abbreviated from a post on The Point blog.