A Loving Father

Because of my father, it was easy for me to understand the concept of a loving God. It is easy for me to understand that when things go wrong, after a short period of self pity, I can realize that the person who sinned and fell short of the expectations of a loving God, is the one I am looking at in the mirror.

Although we attended the local Methodist church every Sunday, and Dad was an usher there, I don't think he ever heard the Gospel until I returned home from my first year of school at Hardin-Simmons University, and shared with my loving father what I had learned in the Baptist church I attended while going to school.

For those of you who are children of alcoholic fathers, it must not have been so easy to accept the truth of the Gospel. Neither of my parents drank. I have one great memory in this regard. My father's sister lived in Seattle. One year we went out to visit her. There was some kind of regatta going on in the Puget Sound. We were guests on the boat of some doctor friend of my aunt. Alcohol was being served to the guests. I was a young teen or tween, and my Dad was sitting next to me at the back of the boat, and he decided to have some fun. He told me to watch him closely. Drink after drink was served to him. Soon other people began to comment on "how well he holds his liquor." What only he and I knew was that he was only pretending to drink the stuff, and when others were not looking, he was dumping the drinks into the Puget Sound! That was an unspoken lesson to me that drinking to excess is ridiculous, that people can have fun at parties without having a drop of alcohol in their bloodstreams.

I was obsessed with the game of golf as a teen, and got pretty good at it. Dad would drive me to tournaments. One day, before the start of a Sunday tournament, I felt the need to sharpen up a bit by hitting practice balls, while my Dad retrieved them and brought them back to me to hit some more. When I was a little boy he hung a hoop in our tiny basement, so I could play basketball all throughout Iowa's bitter cold winters. He often played the foil, allowing me to drive around him for a score.

He was a very hard worker, and a wonderfully sincere man. As a teen I loved nothing better than to sit with him on the couch at night watching the Johnny Carson, George Gobel, or Perry Como shows. When I was younger, the whole family would gather around the radio, eat popcorn, and listen to the Jack Benny radio show. We did not get t.v. until Howdy Doody came into my life when I was about ten years old. Even then, though, my heroes were Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger, and The Shadow. The Shadow knew! All of these figures were wonderful role models for a young boy.

But none of them were needed to show me the way to manhood. I had a loving father who did that.