Saints and Sinners: Tidbits for Father’s Day
With Father’s Day just around the corner, I’d like to share with you some stories I’ve written down and saved over the years about my own father and God the Father. One I’m particularly fond of comes from author April Oursler Armstrong, whose dad was none other than renowned life-of-Christ narrator Fulton Oursler. Oursler wrote the highly acclaimed 1949 book “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”
Armstrong, who co-authored the sequel, “The Greatest Faith Ever Known” (Doubleday, 1953), with her father, once described him as having “unbecoming anger on his face and egg on his tie.”
But what she remembers most vividly about him is that he was her first introduction to God.
“From babyhood,” she says, “my father taught me to appreciate the secrets of God. All good fathers, whatever their failings, do the same. Nobody told me that God was like my father. I just assumed it because their names were the same. Both of them were Father.”
Armstrong says she learned that in each family all over the world, the father bears a secret responsibility. “He is for the child the first contact with the idea of God because his name and God’s name are the same.”
TIDBITS FOR FATHER’S DAY …
When he had finished repairing something around the house or yard, my father would stand back and survey his handiwork, which often left something to be desired.
“Well,” he would say, “it’s better than it was.”
It’s a saying that has stuck with me through the years. You won’t find it in “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations,” but it has done more to encourage me at various times than all of the wise musings by renowned philosophers that have been preserved in that distinguished volume.
If we want things to be perfect for us all the time, we are going to be unhappy. Happiness is improving a situation in our lives even though the result is not ideal and leaves something to be desired. It is being able to say, “Well, it’s better than it was.” If we make just enough progress to keep us encouraged, we have reason to be satisfied.
TIDBITS FOR FATHER’S DAY …
My father also had this saying, which I have fashioned into rules for living:
“Just do it.”
As children, we used to be ready with all sorts of excuses when we were asked to do something. My father would hear us out — up to a point. Then he would break in and say, “Just do it.” And we did it.
A lot of the needful work of the world goes undone because somebody is always saying, “Why should I have to?” If there is something that needs to be done, we ought to “just do it.”
TIDBITS FOR FATHER’S DAY …
Then there was the way he would handle my attempts at finding a quick fix:
“What does the book of instructions say?”
That was my father’s first question when, as a boy, I went to him for help with some mechanical problem without having read the directions first. Many of us waste a lot of time by plunging ahead on our own without first consulting life’s book of instructions. A lot of our difficulties, including many of our problems with our health, are the result of not following the “Manufacturer’s Book of Instructions,” the Bible.
So, dear readers, I hope all of you, this Father’s Day, can reflect upon the day’s true meaning, find at least one life lesson your father taught you.
HAVE YOU SENT IN YOUR FAVORITE Bible verse (or verses) yet? I want to find out my readers’ most beloved Scripture passages. Readers from 30 states and Canada have responded so far. Send your selections to Favorite Bible Verses, P.O. Box 06580, Columbus, Ohio 43206.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)