Happy 60th Dad (you too Prince Charles)

I was sitting here trying to think of a single story that would serve as a wonderful analogy to my relationship with my father. A story when he passed on some profound truth about our Heavenly Father. There are no shortage of stories. There is canoeing down the Guadalupe River and injuring my foot only to have him tell me that I should not have hung my foot out of the canoe. There is him telling me that I cannot have dinner until I have hit the punching bag 200 times. There is boxing matches that we had at the house on Riverview. There is climbing onto the roof at Riverview with the fisher price telescope to look at the moon. There are family trips in the travel trailer and riding through the mountains outside Red River. There is going to the shop as it was being built. There is him swinging the ball on a rope in the front yard. There are little league games, basketball games, ski trips, mission trips, the trip to Colorado in junior high, the trip to Mozambique, hunting, fishing, wrestling, preaching, teaching, him giving away my baseball cards as prizes to kids at Sunday school who had the right answer. There are solemn moments like after I was injured in Junior high and hysterical moments where there were no deer anywhere near us because we were laughing too hard in the stand. There is him yelling his approval over all the other parents at my elementary play. He is there consoling me after our loss in the playoffs my senior year in high school. He is there preaching my wedding. There when I graduated from College and Graduate school. He is there to give me my first job outside of grad school. He is there telling me how neat my tiny cubicle at SAIC was. He is there holding my firstborn daughter and proclaiming her to be 100% Jeffrey, and doing the same nineteen months later with Brylee. He is there for my job changes. He is there on the phone to talk me through car problems or life problems. He is there holding my son, the next generation of Jeffrey. I started to realize that there is not a moment in my life where he is not there. There has never been a moment where I doubted his love for me. I have never considered a doubt that he would always be there for me. He has always been slow to anger and quick to bless. He readily reminds me that this world is not my home and to remember that all things worldly will pass away. I slowly came to the understanding that while I am sure there were those profound moments filled with wise sayings spoken as the sun set, that is not how my father taught. He was always there. He sought a relationship with the eternal God of unending love, and just happened to model to me what that love is like.

As I raise my own children, I know that there are struggles that will inevitably come. There will no doubt be questions to which I do not have the answers. One thing I will never struggle with is knowing whom to turn to in those moments. Countless memories of my father show him turning to the Lord and putting his trust in Him alone. That is who I will turn to and who I will seek. That is the legacy of my father.