Meet My Father

We as a society are accustomed to the obituaries. Obituaries are "advertisements" of sorts, a review of a person's life generally given at the time of one's death. We try to remind each other of the landscape that was that person's life. It is given at the time of death primarily because that landscape is still in flux while he or she is alive. He might do more, greater things or she might do something really scandalous. So we'll wait until they're done.

It's Father's Day and I'd like to give you the lay of my father's land. I'm not going to wait until he dies. He has been a remarkable son, a model husband, a wise father, and an exemplary Christian. You would do well to meet my father.

Dad grew up in a Christian home. It was no downstream Christian home. It was seriously Christian. No dancing, no movies, no playing cards, church every Sunday ... his parents were serious about Christ. (His sister and youngest brother went to the mission field ... serious about Christ.) When he graduated from high school, he had a plan for his life. He wanted to fish and camp. Now, you can't make a living fishing and camping, so he and a friend signed up in college for the classes needed to become a forest ranger. When he got home with his list of classes, his father took a look and asked, "Where's the physics? Where's the math? Where's the engineering? Go back and change your classes so you can be an engineer." And my father went back and became a civil engineer. (It worked out for his benefit. He worked for the county of Los Angeles, retiring early with an excellent retirement package and a retirement bonus, allowing him at a relatively young age to travel and camp and fish to his heart's content without worrying about money.)

As a husband, Dad proved to be a marvelous example to his children. I never saw my parents fight. I never saw my Dad be unkind to my Mom. There were times, Mom tells me, when he really drove her crazy. You see, my father was a practical man. His decisions were rarely (if ever) emotional. He decided what was practical and carried it through. Mom tells me of one time when she didn't like it. When they went to bed that night, he rolled over and started to go to sleep. "Hey, aren't we going to talk about this?" she demanded. "Don't worry, honey," he assured her. "You'll feel better in the morning." She wasn't exactly ecstatic that he was right ... she did feel better in the morning. And while my father proved in this way to be sometimes exasperating, it eventually became an admirable and enjoyable character trait. My father wasn't going to make emotional decisions; he was going to make the right ones.

My father was not the disciplinarian at home. That was Mom's job. But my father made the situation clear when discipline did fall to him. "What were you thinking?" was his question. We, of course, never had an answer. "What makes you think I was thinking?" was obviously not the right answer. But I got the point. "Think!" And sometimes Dad would rub me the wrong way with his practical nature. I was more emotional than he was. Understanding me wasn't easy for him. But he never wavered in his task as a father. He worked at teaching his children what we needed to know. I remember one year when we wanted to go to summer camp, Dad required us to earn our way. Now, keep in mind, we worked for him. In other words, he did pay our way to camp. It was just that he wanted us to get the sense of having earned it rather than merely given it. In that, we received blessings from camp before we ever went. And I will never forget the day my father stood in front of the door blocking my way as I tried to leave home to move in with a girl. "Dad," I told him, "I'm an adult. You can't stop me." Do you know what he told me? "I love you, Stan. If I saw you on a raft in a river and I knew that there was a waterfall ahead, I would do everything I could to pull you off that raft, even if you didn't want me to." In the end, I won ... and lost. He was right; there was a waterfall on that river. But I learned (again) that 1) Dad loved me and 2) he was right. I did all I could to destroy our relationship at that time in my life, but my father loved me through it and was there with open arms to receive me back ... much like a father you might know from a story of a prodigal son.

My father modeled other necessary values to me when I was growing up. He routinely ran off to skid row in downtown Los Angeles. He would go to the Union Rescue Mission to volunteer or out onto the streets to witness to the folks out there. On occasion he would take me and I got to see him at work sharing the gospel -- not the usual image one gets of his father. He would invite people we didn't know over to the house to give them a meal and the plan of salvation. He believed that what he had was the Lord's and he shared it with others. To this day my father can strike up a conversation with anyone at almost any time and it isn't unusual for him to end up sharing the gospel. No one is "safe" from his evangelism. He cares that much.

I told you that my dad wanted to fish and camp. He didn't give that up by becoming an engineer. He just made it his hobby. We routinely went fishing and camping when I was growing up. I've fished from Mexico to Alaska in streams, lakes, and the ocean. We've hiked into the Sierra Nevadas to fish where no one else was and flown to remote towns in Baja California to fish the Sea of Cortez. My memories of fishing, however, are a bit odd, I suppose. I can hardly remember my father ever fishing. It seemed like it was a constant barrage from his two sons, "Dad, I need bait", "Dad, I'm stuck on something", "Dad, my hook is caught in my brother's face", that kind of stuff. Through it all, despite the fact that he rarely got to do what he loved -- actually fishing -- I never saw even a hint of exasperation from my father. He was the epitome of patience, never complaining, never yelling, never upset. That was a model I have worked hard to live up to.

When I was growing up my father was not a particularly emotional man. This and many other aspects became clear marks of change, absolutely irrefutable evidence of a man whose Savior was at work inside. I will never forget the time when he called us all into the dining room and sat us down to apologize to us, his family, for not being the father he should be or the man he should be. My unemotional father wept over his sin in front of his children. He has become more prone to tears as he has aged and God has worked. Now a good testimony or a reminder of God's kindness to him and Dad will be off again with tears of joy. Dad was always reserved with Mom when I was growing up, but that's another place that God has worked, making him into the kind of husband any woman would want.

My father is a remarkable man, one who I would be proud to emulate. He has more than taught me Christianity; he has modeled it. He always tried to do what he thought was right. He never shirked his own responsibility and never denied his own failures. He has always been willing to stand for what is right even when it was unpleasant. My father is a young 78-year-old with many years remaining in his life and I am pleased to be his son, delighted to have him as the grandfather of my children, and woefully short of the man he is. Happy Father's Day, Dad!