My children, listen when your father corrects you. Pay attention and learn good judgment. (Proverbs 4:1 NLT)Father’s Day is tomorrow. As I have mentioned before, my father passed away last February. And I miss him.
There are things that I would love to ask him. There are times when I would just like to talk to him.
He and I were of different eras. We were of completely different mindsets and perspectives and viewpoints. Yet we loved each other.
He was disappointed in things I did that I could really do nothing about. When I left his denomination, it hurt him. There was nothing I could do about it, but there was that separation.
There were brief times when we were somewhat alike. For about a year, we were both construction linemen. He worked all his life as a lineman for the Light Company in Houston, TX. I worked for about a year as a lineman for Bell Telephone in Houston.
For about a year we had the same basic job. And he liked that. We had something in common for just about the first and last times in our lives.
I kept falling off poles and decided that there were better way to earn a living. He stayed on the poles for 30 years, and did well. And again, he couldn’t figure out why I didn’t like it.
There was a short time we went to a Bible school in the Houston area together. That was a good time. There were times we would be together. I would go with him on a job or he would come with me to a ministers’ meeting in Houston.
But the one thing I never did enough of was to listen to him. He knew a lot, even though he was not an educated person.
Of course, he had three years in Sam Houston State College in Huntsville, TX, and was the first in his family to go to college, the first to have an inside job wearing a tie (in the very first part of his marriage to my mom), the tallest in his family – all things that caused his family to be both proud of him and unable to relate to him. He moved beyond the East Texas mindset and tried to make something better of himself.
He had the phenomenal ability to remember everyone’s name. In fact, that was one thing that so stood out when he contracted Alzheimer’s. He began to forget things and one thing he forgot was people’s names.
But even then, he was of such a character that people related to him well. People liked him automatically.
I just wish I had paid more attention to him and learned more good judgment.
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