Caring for Neglected Children

We recently had John and Sheryl Emra in our home as overnight guests. For some time they have been missionaries to neglected children in the inner city of Los Angeles. Our visit was short but during the evening we talked animatedly about what their ministry involved.

Their supporting organization was given an abandoned church building. They made the building usable and opened it to the children in the area. Advertising was not necessary. Neglected or abandoned children in the inner city have time on their hands and wherever there are people who care and things to do they show up.

During our conversation, the Emras gave us their summary of the four behavioral commitments they have for these children and how their mission attempts to apply them.

The children need AFFECTION. Affection in this case is a warm sense of caring that communicates itself in wholesome ways. John explained, it may involve buying a child a needed pair of jeans or shooting baskets with an after-school group. It may mean just talking to the child on the child’s level and with their concern. Inner city children, like all children, will eventually sense that they are loved.

They need BOUNDARIES. For all of us, boundaries are where our territory ends and the territory of another begins. Invisible but real, these boundaries represent the emotional and physical buffers that make social interaction possible without jarring conflict. In well-parented homes, a child begins to learn early not to hit, how to keep hands off what belongs to others, how to respect their neighbor’s space, when to say please and thank you, etc.

But children left to run the streets are less likely to have these boundaries. John’s ministry operates on the principle that boundaries can be learned and when they are learned, children are more at peace with themselves and more able to relate in a group.

Children also need CONSISTENCY. Children in the inner city are likely to be deprived of this. Life can be grim there. Contact with significant adults may be limited. Children’s moral compasses are damaged by adult drug abuse, neglect, and brutal treatment. Many years ago two sociologists, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, discovered that inconsistency with children is a great contributor to delinquency. The child who is cruelly abused by a drunken parent one day and then lavishly rewarded by that parent the next — motivated by guilt — becomes very confused about what is really right in their world.

Finally, according to the Emras’ operational standards, children need DISCIPLINE. For the Emras, discipline is training. In their program, children are not just given a safe haven in which to run free. These missionaries are concerned by their discipline to produce specific patterns of character and behavior and to teach that all conduct, whether good or bad, has consequences.

It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ that undergirds this self-giving ministry. Jesus set a child before his quarrelling disciples and said, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes him who sent me” (Luke 9:47) Who can measure the value Jesus placed on the children his life touched?

Recovering Fatherhood

Years ago, when David Blankenhorn published his eye-opening book, Fatherless America, he lifted the veil on the diminished state of fatherhood in the United States. His findings and insights can easily be applied to the whole Western World.

“Scholars estimate,” he reports, “that before they reach age eighteen, more than half of all children in the nation will live apart from their fathers for at least a significant portion of their childhood.” And also that “Today’s trend toward fatherlessness continues to escalate, is cumulative, and shows no sign of slowing down.”

Students of the subject say that a clear vision of fatherhood has been fading for more than 200 years. Some say the fading started with the dawning of the Industrial Revolution. A father’s work and his family life were increasingly separated and as a result emotional bonds between father and child became weaker.

Traditionally, fathers are to play four roles in their children’s lives. They are to be, (1) irreplaceable caregivers, (2) moral educators, (3) heads of the family, and (4) family breadwinners. Viewing it from a Christian perspective, one might add as a fifth, (5) spiritual guides, or priest of the family.

Given the intensity and duration of the trend away from the view summarized in these five points, it is too much to ask fathers dissatisfied with their current role to re-dream the concept as though it could be restored in one giant step. In getting up to speed, perhaps there needs to be a first and second gear, a third, and only then a high gear. For starters, I suggest the following four questions any concerned father might ponder:

1. Have I had conversations with my wife about what the term fatherhood should mean in our situation? Even though the traditional role as given above may need slight adaptations for Twenty-First Century life, it is a good list to consult for these conversations.

2. Do I cultivate an emotional bond with the family? Do I talk to my children regularly on their level about their concerns? If a nine-year-old son were experiencing bullying on the playground would I become involved with him in seeking a solution? When something is bothering my children, do I notice? If a twelve-year-old daughter is having her first crush on a boy in school, would I have something to say to help her through it wisely?

3. Do my children know my basic convictions about right and wrong? Do they see me as both compassionate and honest? Children absorb their first positive lessons on morality in the home.

4. Do I pray with my family on a regular basis? During family devotions? At table? At bedtime? When serious problems arise? In the Christian family, this responsibility should not be left solely to mother, though for her to do so is better than to neglect prayer in the home altogether.

Pondering these questions and intending to act may not start a national revival to restore fatherhood in the world. But if it should bring significant forward movement for one father that would be worth worlds.

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Father’s Day: Beyond Sentimentality

Single women who turn to a sperm bank to start the process of creating human life, in doing so make the ultimate statement about fatherhood: It’s unnecessary; you can have a child and raise it on your own. Some have gone so far as to say fatherhood is a complication that a potential mother is better off without.

It’s an extreme point of view. And it flies in the face of what is known about the contribution a father makes in the life of a developing child. It especially flies in the face of a Judaeo-Christian understanding of fatherhood as revealed to us in Scripture.

There is growing evidence that the wide-spread loss of fatherhood in our culture has created a societal crisis that has been mounting since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. Michiake and Hildegard Horie (among others) make this point in their book, Whatever Became of Fathering?

And David Blankenhorn in his thoroughly-researched book, Fatherless America shows fatherlessness to be a foremost social crisis of our times. He writes that even back in the 90s when his book was published, “… about 40 percent of American children (went) to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live.”

It’s not that there is no interest or passion left for what fatherhood represents. When the late Tim Russert, top-flight newsman, published his book in 2006 about his father, Big Russ & Me, and then made it known that he would write a sequel made up of testimonials from the public, he didn’t expect the in-pouring of letters – nearly 60,000 including e-mails. These were from people who were eager to pay tribute to their fathers.

So, in the midst of this seeming ambivalence – a society that at the same time denigrates and celebrates fatherhood, there are still thousands eager to speak a good word for their fathers. That’s why we celebrate “Father’s Day,” June 20.

Again the church has rich resources to add to this celebration. In the Bible, fatherhood is used both to acknowledge a biological reality and to stand as a metaphor for authority and strength, and oversight.

For example, Abraham for his example of faith is called “the father of the faithful.” The Scriptures of both Testaments refer to the patriarchs, which means “father-rulers.” On the negative side, using the term as a metaphor, Jesus says of the religious leaders, “You are of your father, the devil.” It was not biology that he put at issue here – it was likeness or temperament. And Jesus taught, “When you pray, say Father.” In fact, in the Gospel of John he applies the title, Father, to God about 107 times, the ultimate tribute to the honor wrapped up in the word.

Eph. 3:14 gives us a particularly telling insight into how we are to regard fatherhood in church and family. William Barclay translates the verse, “God is the father of whose fatherhood all fatherhood in heaven and upon earth is a copy.”

What could prompt us more urgently than that word to cultivate fatherhood in the life of the church as a testimony to our conflicted age?

Consider three emphases that could be made in churches everywhere for the health of families and church life?

First, because for many the word has lost its importance, fathers need help in clarifying their understanding of what fatherhood is all about. The role has been seriously blurred. Fathers who themselves did not experience good fathering are likely to suffer from a lack of clarity about what the role entails because the role is learned mainly by example and imitation.

But, if the fatherhood of God is our “copy,” what could be more helpful to us fathers in understanding and enacting our role than to study how our Father God relates to his children? His love is steadfast. His ear is open to us. He comforts when comfort is needed but he also disciplines “for our good.” He is the master disciplinarian, intending his discipline to be a means of instruction. Both Testaments are full of such insights.

Second, a mother is the most important person to lead in cultivating respect for a father. If she honors him, she will prompt children to do so. I will forever be grateful to my wife for the way she cultivated respect for me in our home. For example, when the children were small I would phone home late in the afternoon to say that I was finished my round of calling and would soon be there. She would end the call and then turn to the children with excitement in her voice and say, “Daddy’s coming home!” That kind of honor and enthusiasm is contagious with small children and it made my task easier.

Third, both parents can contribute to a father’s good standing by showing respect for one another in the flow of their time together. That’s not always simple when stressful moments come along but it is a surefire way of blessing the whole family and putting father in a position of good influence.

This coming Sunday, June 20, good things will happen for fathers in churches across the land. Cards will be given, perhaps gifts too, tributes will be spoken, and special sermons will be delivered. There will be sadness also over the absence of some fathers through death or desertion. But the best thing that could happen would be for us all to go on a search for what God, our Father by redemption, wants to teach us further about fathering.

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A Never-To-Be Forgotten Weekend

We are safely home from a trip to Greenville College, my undergraduate alma mater. The college, with a total enrolment of 1,400, is located in Greenville, Illinois, a compact, friendly city of 7,000 just off Interstate 70 and fifty miles east of St. Louis, Missouri.

This is a remarkable institution of Christian higher education that has a reputation for winning the loyalty of its students for a lifetime after their graduation.

For Kathleen and me, returning to GC brings a flood of memories. We first arrived there from Toronto, Ontario, at the end of August 1951. The two of us and our nearly three-year-old daughter, Carolyn, took a Greyhound bus from Toronto to Detroit, bought a used car, and started the 500-mile trek, south-westerly.

The fourth member of our family, was a hidden passenger – our soon-to-be-born son, Donald, who arrived five weeks after we reached our destination. Everything else that accompanied us was stuffed into a suitcase and a bulging briefcase.

We had packed a few other earthly possessions into a second-hand steamer trunk and shipped it by rail. To our dismay it went astray. It was not located by the railroad company and delivered to us until late in that fall. For three months we made do with the contents of our suitcase.

How did all this come about? The college, on my solo visit just weeks before this, in mid-August, had captured my imagination. The whirlwind visit was at the courtesy of a friend who was returning his girlfriend from Toronto to Greenville. When we got there, the campus was mostly vacant and the weather hot and sticky. But from the start I experienced an engaging friendliness.

I visited the chairman of the English department, Dr. Mary Alice Tenney, who had been commended to me for her academic strength. A young employee of the college, Watson Tidball, showed me around and made the place and its personnel enticing. I had also earlier been offered a couple of tuition scholarships. Forty-eight hours later I returned to Canada a convert.

From our present “mature” vantage point, the whole venture looks to Kathleen and me like a flirtation with insanity. But there were reasons for doing what we did that were compelling to our 25-year-old minds. I had two years of college to complete and time was running out. In a real sense, ours was a move of desperation. It seemed to me that it was either now or never.

Although the first of the two years was financially precarious right down to the basic necessities of life, we look back on the adventure as a risk taken by starry-eyed youth who were trying to prepare for a lifetime of ministry. Was it a case of “God cares for fools?”

This past weekend was different. It developed as follows: Kathleen and I left our Brampton, Ontario, home on an early Tuesday morning and drove 525 miles to Downer’s Grove, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. Our son and daughter-in-law, Bob and Jan, and family live there, where they run the Bastian Voice Institute.

After less than a day’s stay there, we started out for Greenville, 260 miles to the south. The occasion was the graduation, May 23, 2010, of their daughter, Charis, and as grandparents we were going to be in her cheering section. That was to be exciting enough. But there were other invigorating moments on the horizon. I had been invited to speak to the college’s Board of Trustees, on which Robert sits, on “The Veiled Heritage of Methodism.” The reason for this was to review something of the historical roots of Methodism for the Board of Trustees of a college in the Methodist tradition. It was a privilege I embraced with joy.

In addition to these assignments, there were dinners with friends and visits with former classmates and longstanding associates. Earlier I had been a pastor to the college and town community for 13 years, and that meant pleasant re-connections, too.

The only missing element for our great weekend was the absence of Zack, Bob and Jan’s oldest. He is a medical student in Cork, Ireland. We had settled in our minds that any contact with him would have to be by Skype or telephone or e-mail.

Then, on Saturday night, when we were together, all five of us, in a hotel room, we answered a knock on the door. When Bob opened it there stood Zack, all smiles. For a moment, he seemed like an apparition. We were stunned. It turns out he had planned two months earlier to be present for Charis’s graduation even though it meant expending a chunk of his diligently earned and carefully saved resources. What a bonus this added to the weekend!

Weekends like this don’t come one’s way very often. Try to imagine the praise we offered to the Father for the joy this one brought us all.

Now we are safely back in our home in Brampton, Ontario. Things are quieter here. We have re-established our routines. But we will relive the occasion again and again, and each time we do we will be careful to remember the “God from whom all blessings flow.”

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Raising Kids for Christ

I have now had the pleasure of observing from their earliest years the traits first of children, then grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. I’ve noticed that if you observe carefully you can see their dispositional tendencies from the start.

Before they can talk or even walk they show on their faces and by their responses their reactions to people and life in general. And those traits tend to carry over to some degree when they arrive on the shores of adulthood.

One child has a sunny disposition from the start; another is unusually shy around all but close relatives. One child is full of self-confidence; another takes considerable encouragement to embrace new challenges. One tends to be defiant against all orders; another is easier to convince to go along. They all seem to share to one degree or another the ability to manipulate, to deceive, even that wretched impulse to punish parents who are supposed to regulate their lives. Likewise, they all at times have flashes of loving generosity toward parents.

If I could run my life back two generations to the time when our children were small I know I would study each one separately much more carefully than I did. I see even now how different they were in temperament.

I’m not a trained psychologist but I have gleaned from my child-raising experiences one truth that I find myself repeating over and over again. It’s that every child comes into the world with a “package,” one that their parents have to work with. They do not come as a blank sheet to be written on.

In the Bible, Esau was an outdoors type; Jacob was more for the indoor life. Esau was a man of appetite in the moment; Jacob was a cunning trader who could hold for the long view. But they were twins, both from the same mother and father. Each came into the world with his own package.

As our children were growing up, my wife, Kathleen, and I tended to pool our insights regarding how we would handle difficult situations. We had slightly different perspectives on what to do, and that was good. In fact, God made us to bring a male and female perspective to a parenting situation. But because of our shared values we agreed fully on the outcomes we were working and praying for.

We wanted our children to know Christ as we have known him. And character-wise we wanted them to be honest, respectful, obedient, and accountable to us even as they matured and went farther afield.

It pleased us to see them become resourceful and enterprising as they grew up. Perhaps some of this came from parental example and encouragement, but I think a fair portion of it came from the genes. They hustled and got their own odd jobs, saved their money, and bought some of their own clothes, or a bicycle, or fish tanks, or other things they were left to themselves to provide.

They were not without their squabbles. For siblings, fighting for territorial rights and jockeying for favor go with the territory. Sometimes it was tiring to us as it is for all involved parents. Those issues seemed to recede with the coming of adulthood and the children became staunch supporters of one another. And when they bring their spouses home, the mutual support among them all is a joy to see.

I feel for young parents who are bringing children up in today’s environment. There are so many external anti-family lures to contend with -– sitcoms in living color, often with subtle anti-Christian biases, cell phones, the whole perilous world of the Internet, texting (and sexting), early access to automobiles, a movie industry that can’t always be monitored, and even some educational influences in school that contradict family values.

Yet, I believe when properly administered, good family influences are stronger than all the counter influences. What are some of the things parents can do to increase the likelihood of winning the children to Christ and to adopt family values? Here are nine:

(1) Read the Bible and pray with them daily. Make it a family time.

(2) Take them to a church regularly where the preaching is biblical, clear, and anointed and leads to the growth of community.

(3) Make sure you attend a church where Christian Education for all ages is taken seriously and encourages discussion.

(4) Keep alert to the friends they choose. Invite them into your home.

(5) Don’t be shy about keeping track of what they are seeing and doing on the Internet; you are their guardians.

(6) Have fun times with them on their level.

(7) Take them for a treat occasionally one-on-one. In this case, it will not be the size of the treat that counts, it will be the exclusive attention of a parent.

(8) Be sure they get to Christian camps where their activities are properly supervised and they are invited to give their lives to Christ or to follow him.

(9) Model consistency before them and when you come short acknowledge it. Children respect honesty.

In my opinion, parents today tend not to reckon with a child’s free will as they should. They should make much of it when parenting, rather than considering themselves totally responsible for outcomes. By the time children are 15 they have made scads of choices that are rapidly shaping who they are becoming and what value system they will live by. Lying, cheating, stealing, sassing, rebelling –- these are all options open to them, however seriously their parents coach them in uprightness and decency and respect.

Children should therefore be held responsible for their choices. This needs to be brought home to them from their early years. I remember little sayings repeated to me in my childhood that infected me with a sense of personal responsibility from early years onward: “If you make your bed, you have to lie on it.” Or, “Your chickens will come home to roost.” Or, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Whenever I was unresponsive to parental advice regarding some decision, one such saying would be dropped into my memory and left with me to accept or reject. They were effective lines.

The battle for the souls of our children is a taxing one, but one well worth waging on every front -– the spiritual, the moral, the social. At the same time, every child must be helped to understand clearly that they are fully responsible for the decisions they make that seal their eternal destiny. The key decision: “What will you do with Jesus?”

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An Inconvenient Birth

In the early 1920s, my parents and my three much older siblings lived on a vegetable farm three miles south of Estevan, Saskatchewan. The town is tucked into the southeastern corner of the province just ten miles from the American border and fifty miles from neighboring Manitoba.

This farm, nestled in a valley, had a stream flowing through it and was framed by low-lying hills to the north and south. It was picturesque for that area, but for my immigrant parents it was also the scene of dawn-to-dusk hard work.

A certain Christmas on that farm stands out in family lore. As darkness fell on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve. in 1925, my mother alerted my father to get ready for a trip to the hospital in town. Labor had begun.

This meant that the family’s Model T Ford had to be pressed into service. My father went to the dark shed where it was kept and began cranking, but Tin Lizzie wouldn’t cooperate. He resorted to the common practice of putting a pan of hot ashes under the engine to warm the oil. This also failed.

His report to me many years later was that finally in exasperation he gave the crank one mighty twirl , saying, “Oh, hang it all,” and the engine sputtered to life. He nursed the coughing, complaining beast by delicately adjusting spark and gas until it settled into a somewhat steady four-cylinder put-put-put-put.

He and my mother started off on the three-mile trip across a wide, shallow valley, Tin Lizzy hesitating repeatedly. “This thing is going to quit on me,” my father said half way to town, to which my mother replied in desperation, “It can’t quit!”

Wind-driven snow filled the ditches along the gravel road. No street lights added cheer to the frigid darkness. No other traffic appeared. They were two lone travellers on a mission while fighting the winter elements on the western Canadian prairies.

When they came to the hill into town, my father knew the drill. He turned Lizzie around and backed her up the hill. This was common practice because the gas from the tank under the driver’s seat was fed by gravity to the motor.

By the grace of God, the flivver made this maneuver successfully. It was then only a short distance to the hospital on Fifth Street where my mother disappeared quickly into the care of a nurse and my father took up his watch in a small waiting room.

He was dressed for the winter cold in a bulky buffalo coat, a fairly common garment at that time. This coat apparently changed his appearance because the head nurse, Mrs. Hogman, well known to the family, didn’t recognize him and thought him a vagrant seeking shelter from the cold. She told him firmly that he couldn’t loaf there; he would have to leave. When she realized her mistake, she quickly cancelled her order — with apologies.

That section of the small hospital was quiet until 4:45 Christmas morning when the hush was broken by the lusty cry of a newborn, and I announced to that sleepy town of 2300 souls that I had arrived.

I became the first of two children of a “second family” since the youngest of my three older siblings was already 10, and my parents were 42. Did they want to keep me? Today that question might have been asked by a professional during the early stages of the pregnancy. It would have pitted my mother’s “right to choose” against my right to live.

But 1925 was a different time. Poverty and hugely greater workloads and inconveniences of that time notwithstanding, even unexpected infants were quickly enfolded into the love of family and community.

My name had been chosen in advance. It was to be Donald. But Mrs. Roach, visiting my mother in hospital, offered, “This is your little Noel – the Christmas baby.” That name was added. And so it was that out of the love and fortitude of my parents, the strenuous efforts of Tin Lizzie, the thoughtful suggestion of a neighbor, and above all, the grace of God, I was then and am now Donald Noel Bastian. And that’s how I got here 85 years ago.

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About Same Sex Marriage in California

On January 11 the Supreme Court of California heard the opening arguments in favor of overturning Proposition 8. This proposition, you will recall, amended the State constitution by means of a statewide vote of its citizens.

It’s more than a California matter because the marriage laws of 45 other States are at issue. It’s even more than an American issue because the assault on marriage is going on in Canada and the United Kingdom and other places in the western world.

It appears that those who are pushing for the collapse of the historic and virtually universal belief that marriage is a covenanted union of one man and one woman do not respect or believe in the democratic process.

A state-wide vote was taken at great expense. Impassioned speeches were made. There were demonstrations. And then a referendum. The citizenry said they want the historic position to be enshrined in the state constitution. The procedures were followed carefully. But the arguments must be made again.

In the opening arguments on January 11 a lawyer representing California said, “the traditional definition of marriage does not reflect animus against gays and lesbians – in California or anywhere else. Nor is it any way arbitrary or irrational.”

The argument continued, “Rather, it simply reflects the fact that the institution of marriage is, and always has been uniquely concerned with promoting and regulating naturally procreative relationships between men and women to provide for the nurture and upbringing of the next generation.”

It further states, “This understanding of the central purposes of marriage has been repeatedly and persuasively articulated by leading lawyers, linguists, philosophers, and social scientists throughout history up to and including the present day.”

The attack mounted against traditional marriage is multi-pronged: divorce has become surprisingly commonplace; living together unmarried almost mainstream; and a seemingly relentless campaign is on to broaden the definition of marriage to include an unnatural same-sex arrangement (possibly to be followed later by polygamy, polyandry and even state approved incestuous unions).

Those of us who hold to a Judeo-Christian understanding of life and particularly of marriage will need to give greater attention to what’s going on in this society. Do we understand why the traditional view of marriage is critically important? Can we articulate clearly the position we hold? And do we take opportunity whether in church or newspaper or local meetings to support the idea forthrightly but with civility?

I would be glad to hear from you, my reader, a one sentence or no more than a one paragraph reason why traditional marriage is to be protected for the good of the family and the good of society. That little assignment would test us all on the depth and clarity of our understanding of the problem. Good solutions begin with understanding.

A Fresh Wrinkle on Child-Rearing

Now here’s a fresh wrinkle on child-rearing, well worth posting in the literature.

Our friend and former parishioner, Melli, has spent much of her adult life in Burundi, Africa, along with her husband Ken. Together they’ve seen the enormous need of children left orphaned in great numbers there, and out of the compassion of their hearts have taken ten such children and are in the process of adopting the last six of them.

At the present, Melli is living in Lakeland, Florida with this little brood. They are in the United States principally for long term speech therapy for Samuel.

Melli writes that earlier that morning two of the children were squabbling over a little toy car and she was sure the whole neighborhood could hear the goings-on, So she commanded, STOP EVERYTHING AND QUOTE KING DAVID: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14)

She doesn’t report the results but I can guess that they were electric. And from the perspective of a great-grandfather, I can commend the solution to the literature and to the use of harried parents anywhere when their little ones squabble. Except that the children must be helped to memorize the prayer in advance of the strife.

One of Life’s Neglected Words

My wife recently had a cataract removed from her left eye. As planned, a week after the surgery, she went back to the surgeon’s office. He examined the eye and told her that everything was as it should be. She then said to him, “It’s wonderful what you doctors can do these days. I want to thank you very much for this service.” There was a moment of awkward silence, she says, as if he didn’t quite know what to say, and then with a smile he replied, “Well, that’s what we are here to do.” He held the smile but there were no more words. My wife reported that this seemed awkward for both of them, as if he wasn’t used to handling generous words of appreciation.

When she told me about this exchange I remembered that a few weeks earlier I had had a complicated problem with my computer. It was a matter of getting the modem and router to talk to one another and relay their message to the computer. Three different companies were involved. I spent the equivalent of one whole day working with technicians by telephone. One of the technicians worked faithfully for a long period of time before admitting defeat and referring me on to another service. I acknowledged his patient effort and thanked him, which brought a reply I wasn’t expecting. He said, “I can answer a thousand calls and not hear a word like that.”

Is it possible that in our high-tech culture the wonders of modern technology that bless us in all sorts of ways, at the same time make us less thankful for these blessings?

The Bible has a great deal more to say to us about thanking God than it does about thanking our fellows. Unless, that is, the idea is subsumed in the Second Commandment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, or in Jesus’ instruction to treat others as we want to be treated. Who does not appreciate a simple word of thanks?

And who can forget St. Luke’s story of ten lepers who cried out to Jesus from a distance for healing. He sent them to the priests, ostensibly to be cleared for entrance back into society. In this case, Luke tells us, “… as they went, they were cleansed.” Luke is also quick to report Jesus’ perplexity that of the ten, only one returned and “…threw himself at Jesus feet and thanked him.” And he was a foreigner to God’s chosen people (Luke 17:11-20).

Little words of thankfulness dropped here and there add color and warmth to life. When they are withheld or neglected life can be grey or even painful. Shakespeare’s King Lear laments about the ingratitude of his daughters in these words: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / to have a thankless child.”

Which reminds me that it’s good to express thanks to a surgeon or computer technician but the best place to release long overdue words of appreciation first of all is in the home where primary family connections are either oiled by such words or left to creak painfully through the days.

Reflections on Fatherhood

On Father’s Day, June 21, I preached at Wesley Chapel in Toronto. In the sermon I included a tribute to my father as follows:

It is now 42 years since my father died, but I still think of him every day. Sometimes when I’m shaving, I see a likeness to him in the mirror. Or in the flow of the day I’m reminded of some ways in which I’m like him by temperament.

What a potent force fatherhood is if a father’s influence can remain active in a son’s memory and make-up for nearly half a century after his death!

My father was a small man, 5’4” tall and no more than 125 pounds even into his old age. But he was every bit a man, physically strong, agile, and one who faced life as a warrior.

He was not refined or cultured and for good reasons. At 13 years of age back in Lancashire, England, his father took him into the coal mines to mine coal. Imagine, at that age having to get up early, walk a great distance above ground to the mine entrance, and then walk a further distance under ground to the active section of the mine, there to put in a full day’s work. In the winter months he saw daylight only on Sundays.

He didn’t fare much better in formal schooling. At five years of age he was sent to school, but after six weeks he contracted scarlet fever and was taken out. He was never sent back. The family does not know how he was taught to read and write but I remember that he could write an adequate letter with no more misspellings than an average high school student’s, and he was an avid reader of the editorial section of the daily paper — in spite of his educational deprivations.

In the first decade of the Twentieth Century he brought his young bride, my mother, to the sparsely settled prairies of southeastern Saskatchewan. He started work there as a coal miner in a place called Roche Percy, Saskatchewan, because coal mining was all he knew.

He soon had a government-awarded homestead three miles south of Estevan and began market gardening. Then, while continuing that, he also sold Watkins Products in the area and, as a third job, continued to take coal from a mine in the side of the hill on his property. He eventually built a small bakery in Estevan which later, under the management of my older brother, Wilfrid, became a Red and White grocery store on the main street, owned by my father. Later still he established a second-hand furniture store—what was then called a furniture exchange.

He obviously was ambitious and entrepreneurial and I think he passed a portion of those traits on to me. He also worked very hard right to the end of his life and I think I gained from his example. Most importantly, although he was not an active believer until late in his life, he went to church regularly with the family. This reflected a value he held and it was because of that value I was kept under the influence of the gospel while I was growing up. To this day I am a beneficiary of his decisions.

My father was obviously limited in certain ways because of the poverty and dearth of social niceties in his upbringing. But he also had admirable natural qualities that were God-given, and from those I have gained immeasurably. I know that what he had he gave me without reservation and for that I salute his memory.