Temple Baptist Life

I am grateful for Godly Men. A man today needs a responsive heart to hear God and a life that is available to obey God. A man must have the integrity to honor God. When we set our heart on God we are saying that following God is number one priority in our lives. Nothing else can take first place. Godly fathers will make God and His Word the first priority in their lives.

I am thankful for my father. I knew him as a Christian and a non-Christian. Let me say that I liked the Christian version the best. Last week I was working in the garage and picked up a toll to use that had belonged to my Dad. I looked at that tool thought of seeing that same tool in my father’s hand so many times. I stopped and just thanked God for my Dad. This event has happened to me many times over the years. Even though my Dad went to be with Jesus 30 years ago, I miss him on some occasions and look forward to the day when I will see him again. I hope you will remember your father (especially your Heavenly Father) this Father’s Day. Last month I placed in my article several things about mothers. Here are a few about fathers: The idea for an official Father’s Day celebration came to a married daughter, seated in a church in Spokane, Washington, attentive to a Sunday sermon on Mother’s Day in 1910-two years after the first Mother’s Day observance in West Virginia.

The daughter was Mrs. Sonora Smart Dodd. During the sermon, which extolled maternal sacrifices made for children, Mrs. Dodd realized that in her own family it had been her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, who had sacrificed-raising herself and five sons alone, following the early death of his wife in childbirth. For Mrs. Dodd, the hardships her father had endured on their eastern Washington farm called to mind the unsung feats of fathers everywhere.

Her proposed local Father’s Day celebration received strong support from the town’s ministers and members of the Spokane YMCA. The date suggested for the festivities, June 5, Mrs. Dodd’s father’s birthdays were three weeks away-had to be moved back to the nineteenth when ministers claimed they need extra time to prepare sermons on such a new subject as Father.

Newspapers across the country, already endorsing the need for a national Mother’s Day, carried stories about the unique Spokane observance. Interest in Father’s Day increased. Among the first notables to support Mrs. Dodd’s idea nationally was the orator and political leader William Jennings Bryan, who also backed Mother’s Day. Believing that fathers must not be slighted, he wrote to Mrs. Dodd, “Too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the relation between parent and child.” Father’s Day, however, was not so quickly accepted as Mother’s Day. Members of the all-male Congress felt that a move to proclaim the day official might be interpreted as a self-congratulatory pat on the back. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson and his family personally observed the day. And in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge recommended that states, if they wished, should hold their own Father’s Day observances. He wrote to the nation’s governors “the widespread observance of this occasion is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and also to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.” Many people attempted to secure official recognition for Father’s Day. One of the most notable efforts was made in 1957, by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who wrote forcefully to Congress that “Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.” Eventually, in 1972 sixty-two years after it was proposed Father’s Day was permanently established by President Richard Nixon. Historians seeking an ancient precedent for an official Father’s Day observance have come up with only one: The Romans, every February, honored fathers-but only those deceased. In America today, Father’s Day is the fifth-largest card-sending occasion, with about 85 million greeting cards exchanged. Some years back Bill Cosby wrote a book simply entitled Fatherhood. I would like to share with you two observations that Cosby makes about fathers. He writes: Now that my father is a grandfather, he just can’t wait to give money to my kids. But when I was his kid and I asked him for fifty cents, he would tell me the story of his life. How he got up at 4 A.M. when he was seven years old and walked twenty-three miles to milk ninety cows. And the farmer for whom he worked had no bucket, so he had to squirt the milk into his little hand and then walk eight miles to the nearest can. All for 5 cents a month. The result was that I never got my 5O cents. But now he tells my children every time he comes into the house, “Well, let’s see how much money old Granddad has got for his wonderful kids.” And the minute they take money out of his hands, I call them over to me and I snatch it away from them. Because that is MY money! The other story Cosby tells is the difference between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. He insists that Mother’s Day is a much bigger deal because Mothers are more organized. Mothers say to their children, “Now here is a list of what I want. Go get the money from your father and you surprise me on Mother’s Day. You do that for me.” For Father’s Day I give each of my five kids $20, so that they can go out and by me a present–a total of $100. They go to the store and buy two packages of underwear, each of which costs $5 and contains three shorts. They tear them open and each kid wraps up one pair, the sixth pair of underwear going to the Salvation Army. Therefore, on Father’s Day I am walking around with new underwear and my kids are walking around with $90 worth of my change in their pockets.

Mothers get the red carpet treatment on their day, with fabulous brunches and beautiful bouquets. For the fathers, however, retailers have cleverly priced almost everything under $9.99! Case in point: the Talking Fly Swatter. It’s a lime-green fly swatter with a little speaker that says stuff like “Hasta la vista, baby!” “Flight canceled!” and “Die sucker!” every time you try to use it.

Father’s Day calls the Illinois Bell Telephone Company reported that the volume of long-distance calls made on Father’s Day is growing faster than the number on Mother’s Day. The company apologized for the delay in compiling the statistics, but explained that extra billing of calls to fathers slowed things down. Most of them were “collect” calls.

What we have feared most wasn’t all that bad. Illustration: One of my all time favorite TV shows, for having good moral lessons as plot lines, was the “Andy Griffith Show.” There was an episode where young Opie was having his “Milk nickel” bullied away from him and could not afford any milk for lunch. “You wouldn’t want me to get weak bones?” Well, Andy found out about the trouble and looked to find a way to help Opie without making Opie ashamed or dependent of his fathers help all of the time. In itself this is a good lesson to parents, children must learn, and earn, some things on their own in order for them to fully appreciate it later in life, but that is not our point in this illustration. Andy began to tell Opie about the time that Odie Snitch stole Andy’s fishing hole away from him when he was Opie’s age. Young Andy had to eventually face Odie Snitch to rid himself of his awful feeling of being “Lilly livered” and found that a punch in the nose didn’t really hurt when taken for a good cause and that bullies often can’t back up their words with deeds. Opie took the words to heart and faced down his extortionist the next day. Opie came away with a “Bute” of a shiner, but he didn’t even feel the black eye because the sweet feeling of the loosing his trouble and regaining what was rightfully his. The point, you may ask? No trouble is as bad as it once seemed when completed than it did when we first dreaded and feared it.

In one of Dr. James Dobson’s 2008 newsletters, he writes: “Some years ago, executives of a greeting-card company decided to do something special for Mother’s Day. They set up a table in a federal prison, inviting inmates to send a free card to their Mom. The lines were so long they had to make another trip to get more cards. “Due to the success of that event, they decided to do the same thing on Father’s Day, but this time, not one prisoner felt the need to send a card to his Dad. In fact, when asked about it, many had no idea who their fathers were. I find that a sobering illustration of the importance of a dad and his blessing to his children.” Any father who thinks he’s all-important should remind himself that this country honors fathers only one day a year while pickles get a whole week.