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I have told you before that my father was a Methodist minister, so my rear end spent a lot of
time on a church pew. I didn't have a choice. His father was a Methodist minister and his
grandfather was also. Unfortunately my dad's father had some mental health issues when I was
growing up as a small child, so we never had a good relationship with my grandfather. His
relationship with my father had always been combative. As a consequence we are all part of
how we are raised. I have laughed before and said I found myself doing things and I didn't like
it when my dad did it.
My father was the kind of person that just hated any type of friction or butting heads with
somebody, and he would just do everything he could to avoid that in our family.
I have had a couple of conversations with my brothers lately about how lucky we were to be
raised in the home where we were. We started every breakfast with the Upper Room devotional,
and when we were old enough to read, we took turns presenting the Upper Room devotional to the
family in the morning.
I think the greatest gift my father ever gave me was he instilled in all of us a positive attitude,
that you can do anything you want to do, as long as you work at it, that you devote yourself to
it as far as work ethic and maximize your potential. The older I get the more I realize how many
people didn't get that luxury of somebody that supported them that way.
I lost my dad way too early. He died when he was my age, a month younger than I was this week.
I wished that I had had him another 25 or 30 years. He was a great grandfather to our children
when he was here and a great father to me. I think I was one of the lucky ones to have that
kind of relationship with my dad.
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