A Father’s Love

Today we honor our fathers. And that’s good. Dads don’t get much respect nowadays.  A doting father used to sing his little children to sleep. This was something he could do at night to help his wife out. And he kept up this task until one night he overheard his daughter give her younger sibling this advice, “If you pretend you’re asleep,” she said, “he stops.” That was the end of the lullabies.

Father’s Day goes back to a Sunday morning in May of 1909, when a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a Mother’s Day sermon. She thought of her father who had raised her and her siblings after her mother died in childbirth, and she thought that fathers should get recognition, too. So she asked the minister of the church if he would deliver a sermon honoring fathers on her father’s birthday, which was coming up in June, and the minister did.

The tradition of Father’s Day caught on, though rather slowly. Mother’s Day became an official holiday in 1914; Father’s Day, not until 1972. Mother’s Day is still the busiest day of the year for florists and restaurants. Father’s Day, not so much.

In today’s Gospel from Mark, Jesus is describing the kingdom of God: “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how . . .”

Now Jesus is not talking about fatherhood in this passage, but isn’t this the very first area in which we participate in the coming of God’s kingdom to earth? It is in the raising of our children. Raising good children is like scattering seed upon the ground.

Of course, there are no guarantees in either raising kids or planting seed. A farmer can do all the right things and still lose a crop. So can parents. The farmer can till the ground at the right time, put in the right seed, and irrigate and fertilize according to the textbook. But that does not guarantee a crop.

Some of you have learned the hard way that there are no guarantees. But generally, if we have done the best we can in planting and nurturing the seed which are our children, God will reward us with children we can be proud of.

So fathers are important.

Those of us who grew up in families in which dad was a positive influence will quickly agree. It doesn’t always work out like that, of course. There are some families in which dad is absent, and it cannot be helped. There are other families in which dads do more harm than good, but most dads do the best they can. And we’re proud to be able to honor them. Fathers are important.

A conscientious father can do wonders in the lives of his children. Many of us have observed this in our own families. A conscientious dad can have a wondrous impact on the lives of his offspring.

My dad taught me about the value of hard work.  He grew up in an orphanage that would loan the kids out to local farmers, who then put them to work in the fields.  Based on that upbringing, it was only natural that my father liked to use child labor for all outdoor jobs around our house.

In the spring, I would be out turning over the dirt in his garden, which took up half the backyard.  In the summer, I would mow the lawn each week with the push mower, which helped build up my stamina.  (No cushy power mower for me.)  Dad had me trim (and sometimes even cut down) trees that interfered with his garden. (All done with hand saws – no chain saws for us.) In the fall, it was leaf-raking and bagging time.  (No leaf blower for us.)  In the winter, it was snow shoveling time.  (No snow blower for the Reeses.)  As an added perk, I also got to start the car up in the driveway so it could warm up for dad.  That was, of course, after I swept the snow off it and chiseled the ice off the windshield.

My payment for all those regular chores?  A pizza every Sunday night from Ralph’s, my favorite pizzeria.  Dad and I would make the three minute drive to Ralph’s, we’d go in and I’d watch the guys toss the dough up in the air and enjoy the great aroma, then I’d ride shotgun back to the house with the pizza safely sitting on my lap.  I can still remember how great it tasted.

So dad showed me that if I worked hard, I’d always have good pizza. I was blessed with a father who had a great work ethic.  He planted the seed that taught me if you work hard, you will be rewarded.

A great dad can have that kind of influence. A conscientious father can do wonders in the lives of his children. There are no guarantees, but when a conscientious man or woman plants a seed and takes the necessary steps to nurture that seed, miracles can occur.

Of course, the love of any parent is but a pale reflection of the love of God. God is the ultimate sower of good seed in our world. We would not even know how to love, if God had not first loved us.

In his book, Disappointment with God, writer Philip Yancey relates a story from his own life. One time on a visit to his mother who had been widowed years earlier, they spent the afternoon together looking through a box of old photos. A certain picture of him as an eight-month-old baby caught his eye. Tattered and bent, it looked too banged up to be worth keeping, so he asked her why, with so many other better pictures of him at the same age, she had kept this one.

Yancey writes, “My mother explained to me that she had kept the photo as a memento, because during my father’s illness it had been fastened to his iron lung.”  During the last four months of his life, Yancey’s father lay on his back, completely paralyzed by polio at the age of twenty-four, encased from the neck down in a huge, cylindrical breathing unit. With his two young sons banned from the hospital due to the severity of his illness, he had asked his wife for pictures of her and their two boys. Because he was unable to move even his head, the photos had to be jammed between metal knobs so that they hung within view above him. The last four months of his life were spent looking at the faces he loved.

Philip Yancey writes, “I have often thought of that crumpled photo, for it is one of the few links connecting me to the stranger who was my father. Someone I have no memory of, no sensory knowledge of, spent all day, every day thinking of me, devoting himself to me, loving me . . . The emotions I felt when my mother showed me the crumpled photo were the very same emotions I felt that night in a college dorm room when I first believed in a God of love. Someone is there, I realized. Someone is there who loves me. It was a startling feeling of wild hope, a feeling so new and overwhelming that it seemed fully worth risking my life on.”

His father’s love, even though he cannot even remember his father, helped get Philip Yancey off to a good start. And, as he would be the first to acknowledge, any parent’s love, regardless of how intense, is but a pale reflection of the love God has for each of us.

Do you understand that God has a photo of you that God looks at every day? That was how Max Lucado once phrased it. “God has a photo of you on his refrigerator . . .”

Fathers are important. A conscientious father can have an amazing impact on his children. But no matter how much our dad loves us, there’s someone who loves us more. Someone gave His only Son on our behalf. Let’s honor our fathers this day. And let’s praise our Heavenly Father, who is the source of all life and love.