Happy Birthday, Dad!

Dad's can mean a lot of different things to different people who have had different experiences growing up, and if there is one thing that is difficult to talk about, it's the whole Dad-kid relationship. We've all had our share of uncomfortable moments, but thankfully those aren't the ones we remember after all the dust has settled.

Oddly enough, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of my Dad is not really my Dad, but my grandmother, Frances. I got to know her late in life, but it is a relationship I treasure greatly, not only in coming to know her, but also because she told me a lot of things about my Dad that I'd never known before. And one of the things she told me about my Dad that I've never forgotten, was that he always wanted to be a preacher, ever since he was a little kid. I don't really know if that's true, but it's what she told me, and it's something she believed, and was really proud of, that her little boy grew up to become a minister in the church, teaching and preaching the Truth. Every time we talked about it -- and you can bet we talked about it quite a bit -- her unseeing eyes were just shining, and she was smiling to beat the band.

It must've been true. My Dad gave up a steady job as a public school teacher to go to preaching school, and dragged the family clear across the United States in the process. And my Mom supported him every step of the way.

My Dad made sure we went to church every time the doors were open. We listened to the gospel stations on the way, and we sang along with the radio, and we sang in church, and we learned four-part harmony. We went to all the prayer meetings, and he made sure I got a chance to go up front and lead prayers and lead songs. And when we got to Richmond, he made sure I got a chance to go up front and do a lesson now and then, even if it was just a quick five-minutes on a Wednesday night. And he took me to Men's Breakfasts and Men's Retreats.

He also took me with him on evangelism campaigns, helping out with the door-knocking and with the demonstrations (where he'd be the Bible study leader and I'd be the student).

We spent a lot of time talking in the car to and from various events, and it was always a thrill to talk to him about serious, deep subjects.

I remember being a bit panicky though when he wanted me to go through the Open Bible Study with him. I knew quite a bit about the Bible already, so it wasn't like starting over from scratch. But it would mean the end of goofing around, this coming to accept Jesus in baptism, the beginning of a serious path in my life, and I wasn't sure if I was ready to do that. It would be the start of Growing Up.

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Growing Up was something that Dad expected of us. He wasn't going to be our babysitter. He was there to make sure we had the tools available to get the job done (so to speak), and he wanted us to have good work and study habits, and he wanted us to understand that we were being given wonderful opportunities and should take advantage of them. And try to enjoy them, find a way to make them fun. He taught me that it could be fun to clean house, to dig ditches, to wire a house, to cut and nail boards, to shingle a roof. Not fun in the fact that there was a lot of hard work involved, but fun in learning a skill and being able to do things for myself.

One of the most 'impressive' things that we did together, was to tear down and rebuild those Volkswagen engines. I sometimes shake my head these days when I think about it -- nowadays the simplest engine repairs are so complicated. But we used to take those VW engines apart and put them back together in just a weekend, and they'd actually work when we were done (except that time we installed the distributor 180 degrees out!). That kind of thing gives a person confidence.

Perhaps the strangest thing about my whole life was that my Dad gave me my career early on, by allowing me to continue something he'd started but never finished. Long, long ago, he'd started one of those correspondence-school electronics courses, back before integrated circuits had really taken hold, and he did a few lessons but I guess it just wasn't his thing, and he dropped it. Years later, I found it somewhere in the house, and I took to it like a fish to water. It was the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen in the whole world. (Wasn't too long after that I discovered Radio Shack, and the rest is history...) And he let me do it. Right then and there, I knew exactly what I wanted to do as a vocation.


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Dad has always set the example of a servant. He gets great joy from helping others, making them things, visiting them, sometimes just listening to them talk. And he's always smiling. I've tried to be like that, spreading joy wherever I go, and have been somewhat successful when I can keep my native cynicism at bay. But he's just amazing.

He's always had a garage full of projects he's working on, projects for other people, projects for the family. He's always been incredibly busy, always with something to do, and I can't count the number of church buildings he's built or helped to build.

That's another one of my fondest memories - helping him remodel the church building in Ridgeway, Arkansas. He took all us kids out there and we helped, even though we were very young. Of course, our favorite part was when he took us down to the local general store and let us get soda and candy! But we were still quite impressed at all that he was able to accomplish with four kids running around and getting in the way, and the building looked so beautiful afterward, even with the outhouse in the back.

There are many other great memories - driving up and down the hills of Mariposa, walking through the snow in Yosemite, raising the roof and expanding the attic in Richmond, building the first barn garage there. Driving to California in Bill's VW van. Standing in the middle of a rest stop in the desert in the middle of the night, looking up at the stars and seeing the Milky Way for the very first time, right beside my Dad.

But the best memory of all is sitting in Grandma's living room years later listening to her tell me how proud she was of her son the preacher, and feeling a swell of joy inside knowing that this dear lady was happy because she had raised her son right, and he had brought so much to so many people, and this made it all worthwhile.