Honor our Fathers

As we celebrate Father’s Day, I want to honor my dad. Growing up in Indiana I was very fortunate to have a father that loved his family very much. My dad grew up on a Indiana Dairy Farm in the little town of Amo, Indiana. He passed on many of the things he learned from his dad.

He had good ways of teaching my brother and me lessons. If he caught us fighting (what brothers don’t fight) 😊; he would say if you had enough energy to fight, then you have enough energy to pull weeds. He would have us go into a soybean field and walk the rows and pull weeds. A common weed in Indiana was Milk weed. It had a white milky sticky substance on the inside that made your hands sticky. We would last a row or two, but dad got the message across to us. Stop fighting.

Dad taught us kids a good work ethic. We lived on a small farm and had chores to do each day. We used our allowances to buy small Hosteen calves from my grandfather and raise them for sale. Nothing was real hard, but it had to be done. Feeding our calves and dad’s cows after school, well that sounds easy, but in the wintertime in Indiana that meant we had to break the ice on the water tank, so the cattle could get to the water. Then feed them grain and hay. Luckily in the summer months there was grass in the pastures that the cows could feed themselves. The chores had to be done before we ever thought of playing. However, dad had no problem with us kids playing and would often shoot basketball hoops with us or hit us fly balls.

In elementary school, I had some of the same teachers in school that also taught my dad in high school. One of the joys of living in the same town your dad lived in. I was always being compared to how good a student my dad was. That was fun. 😊

Dad was the person who dropped me off at the Navy recruitment office when I headed off to boot-camp. It was a hard ride for both dad and me that morning. He knew that our relationship was moving into a new phase (never to be the same). I think I was too young and nervous to realize it. I also went through the same drive when I dropped my son, David off for him to go to Coast Guard bootcamp.

My dad had two sons in the Navy at the same time and was faithful about writing letters to us boys while we were out at sea in the Navy. This was the time before cell phones or the Internet. There was one time dad commented in one of his letters that it was fascinating that his two sons weren’t that far from each other when you looked at a globe, but we got there different ways. I was in the Indian Ocean on patrol off the coast of Iran on the Aircraft Carrier, USS Kitty Hawk and my brother was in the Mediterranean Sea on patrol on the Aircraft Carrier, USS Nimitz during the same time. I was home-ported out of San Diego, Ca and my brother was home-ported out of Norfolk, Va.

Dad also was the man that made sure that us kids went to church growing up. I have shared this before I had my mom, my grandmother, and aunts be my Sunday School teachers at some point or another. Mom and Dad wanted to teach us kids about God’s Love for us. God instructs us fathers to do this.

God’s Word has given fathers a big responsibility in being the spiritual leader of the family. Ephesians 6:4 is a convicting verse to us dads. This verse includes a lot. Are we setting a good example for our children? Are we teaching them about the Lord? This is unpopular in our world today, but look at our world….. The world needs Godly fathers to bring up their children to honor God. Our country needs this. My dad got a check mark on this.

Ephesians 6:4

"Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord."

I was very fortunate to have both a father and mother that loved the Lord. They are both in heaven now and I look forward to the reunion with both someday. But I still have work to do as a father, grandfather, and husband. My prayer is that I will be a Godly influence on my family for the rest of my life here on earth.

Honor our Fathers