What My Dad Did Right
by John H. Morgan
The air split from the sound of the rattlesnake. My heart pounded, and my legs shook.
“Here,” Dad said, tossing me a shotgun shell.
I was 10 years old, and like Barney Fife, had to carry my gun unloaded. I loaded, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. The shot severed the snake’s head, and the rattling slowly faded to silence.
Today that rattle sits in a cigar box with other treasures from my past. It reminds me of a great day in the field with my dad. I was a preacher’s kid with many religious experiences, but the things that spiritually affected me most were the nonreligious experiences with my dad.
My dad could teach spiritual principles from the most ordinary circumstances.
He brought me into his world
When Dad walked out the door, I was invited. When he played golf with his preacher friends, I rode in the golf cart. Yes, he had to tell me to be quiet, to stand back, and a dozen other rules. But I learned them.
I rode in the pickup with him and his buddy Red Moore when they went quail hunting. As Red lit up a Camel, I told him, in a serious voice, “Jesus doesn’t like it when you smoke.” Red laughed with that smoker’s hack. Dad just grinned.
I spent countless hours in the garage with my dad while he melted lead and made fishing sinkers, or refinished his boat, or fixed a car, or built furniture. People ask me how I acquired skills at fixing and building things. It catches me by surprise at first; it seems I was born with those abilities. But I got them from my dad.
The beauty of Dad’s method of bringing me into his world was that he did not have to alter his schedule, just his focus. There was never “family time” on his calendar. If he was doing something where I could be with him, I was.
He caught me doing something right
I was not an outstanding athlete and, thank God, my dad did not try to pump his ego on my athletic endeavors. But when I did play in a sports event, he was usually there.
On my junior high football team, I sometimes played linebacker. In one game I noticed the halfback leaning. I knew he was getting the ball and going left, but I had to gamble on the count. I figured it would be on two, since it usually was. At the right time, I dove through the line between center and guard and crashed into the halfback just as he received the ball. Tackled!
It was not one of those all-time greatest athletic achievements, but it was sweet for me. On the way to the ground I could hear my dad yelling, “All right, Johnny!”
One of a child’s greatest needs is to hear those “all right’s!”
He took advantage of the window years
The “window years” of a child’s development run from 5 years old to 15, or perhaps from 6 to 12.
My dad began deep-sea fishing in Mexico when I was 6. He started taking me along when I was 8. It was an adventure to haul trucks, boats, tents, and enough food and water to last ten days on a Mexican beach. Dad would take me out of school for up to two weeks to go with him. Some parents might raise an eyebrow at that, but the education was tenfold what school could produce. I came home bearing trophies that turned my friends green with envy: shark teeth, stingray stingers, and scorpions.
Late one day the Mexican sun burst into flame as it began its descent into the sea. We were preparing to pull the boats out of the bay and secure them on their trailers for the thousand-mile trip home.
“Let’s troll the point one more time,” Dad said. Off we went, just Dad and I. I was behind the wheel; Dad put his line out pulling his favorite homemade lure. I hugged the rocks jutting from the point as tight as I dared. Dad’s reel began to sing. Snagged on the rocks? I slowed the boat and pointed the nose to the open sea.
When we came to a stop, the reel kept singing. “I’ve got one!” He fought it as the sunset lit his face with anticipation.
A calico grouper came up beside the boat, brilliant with color. I went for the net, but it made a desperate lunge, threw the hook from its jaw, and disappeared into the depths. We sat back stunned, bobbing on the waves. We lost the fish, but not the experience.
The other day my dad commented, “I regret not being more consistent in family devotions when you were growing up.”
I reminded him that our family altar was often a boat, a field, or a golf cart.
John H. Morgan is pastor of Exciting Tabernacle Baptist Church in Farmington, New Mexico.
The Price of Living with a Great Pastor
by Lena Butler
The afternoon of Dad’s funeral, we assembled at the funeral home. Soon, a procession of friends and strangers would come to honor our father’s memory.
I stared through a blur of tears at the wooden box six steps away, not wanting to look, yet unable to look away for long. Inside, on tufted ivory satin, lay all that was left of my father. Fifty years of faithful service to his Maker had not guaranteed an easy departure from earth.
The love of his flock
Our hearts were warmed that day by the kindness and affection showered on us, simply because we were our father’s offspring. As one old saint put it, “You was really blessed to be his kids!”
Daylight dissolved into darkness. Still the line of mourners stretched out the door, visible proof that people genuinely respected Dad. More—they loved him! With tears and smiles they painted a radiant picture of their friend:
“Whenever we called on Pastor, he came!”
“When our boy shot hisself, I never woulda’ made it without ‘the Rev.’ His faith carried me through. I’ll never forget him!”
“Can’t tell you what it meant to me that your daddy stayed that awful night when my wife died of cancer. That man was the truest friend I’ll ever have.”
“Your father saved my life! I could talk with him about anything.”
“Pastor was my mentor, before I knew the meaning of the word. After I got laid off from the mill, he kept goin’ ’til finally I found a new job—a better job.”
“I loved it when Pastor quoted Scripture. Seemed like he always had just the right verse on the tip of his tongue.”
Those people affirmed the value of Dad’s ministry—of his life. Yet as the day wore on, I winced in pain as this stream of witnesses piled up evidence that confirmed the verdict I’d reached years before. Truly, my father gave more, revealed more to his flock than to his family.
Unanswered questions
At last the crowd was gone, and we four siblings were silent. Finally my brother, Josh, voiced the question that had drummed in my brain: “Who was that man they spoke of?”
Another moment passed before my older sister, Karen, answered quietly. “I never knew him.”
“Neither did I!” responded Val, my younger sister. “Whenever I tried to talk to Dad about personal problems, or about my feelings, he just looked uncomfortable and clammed up.”
“And all those people who told how Dad encouraged them!” said Josh. “I’d have given my right arm to hear him say he approved of me!”
I realized we shared a pain we had never discussed.
“They described the man I wanted to know as my father!” I said, tears flowing unchecked. “Some of them even quoted Dad’s favorite Bible verses! I can’t remember him talking of his personal faith to me—not even through all those months when he was dying. Have I been deaf all my life?”
“If you were, we all were,” said Josh. “It’s as if Dad put on his pastoral role like a garment.”
“Can’t help wondering, was his ministry a joy to him? I never knew,” said Karen. “Could it be that Dad was only really alive when he functioned as a pastor?”
No question about it, our father was a much-loved shepherd with an effective ministry. Love was a silent given in our family, and our home would have been labeled happy. Yet each of us in that parsonage chose against professional ministry.
An outside observer would have wondered why. Didn’t we see and hear Dad preach the gospel faithfully—and live it just as faithfully?
“Maybe Dad made himself available at all hours out of his own need to be needed,” Karen mused.
To Dad every request from a member constituted a command performance. Family plans were canceled without question. Protests were pointless. Even the youngest child could recite Dad’s response: “Don’t you understand? God called me, to serve these people. My work is to do the Lord’s work. How can I refuse? They need me.”
And he would be gone.
Lena Butler is a psuedonym for a writer living in the northwest.
Tribute to My Predecessor
by Ralph Nite, Jr.
Kansas City slept under a downy coverlet of snow. I lay cocooned against the cold, a layer of quilts tucked tight around me. A hand was shaking my shoulder, rousing me to consciousness. My father’s voice softly called in the dark: “Wake up, Son, I need your help.” Tipsy with sleep, I stumbled from bed, and shivering, groped for my clothes. My younger brother snored softly in the next bed.
My father was waiting in the kitchen. Dad was the pastor of a blue-collar Baptist church. Its pews were filled with laborers from the sooty plants and steel mills in the east river bottoms of Kansas City—burly men who served God with rough hands and black-rimmed nails.
Dad’s military background was usually evident; we joked that his idea of casual dress was to take off the jacket of his suit. Now, though, his hair was tousled, and he wore a huge wool overcoat over pajamas that were tucked into the top of a pair of black rubber snow boots.
An elderly member of the congregation had called. He was in his seventies, nearly used up, all bones and blotchy skin. He had been married for half a century. His wife was now ill and bedfast, and he cared for her in a hospital bed set up in the front room of their little shotgun house. Putting her in a nursing home was unthinkable.
The snow tires grabbed for traction as our station wagon pulled from our driveway into the road. The car could easily become bogged down in a drift, and I knew who would have to leave the warm car and push. I breathed a sigh of relief when Dad pulled into the old couple’s driveway. The snow crunched underfoot as we made our way toward the porch light.
He opened the door and led us to his wife’s side. The room was dimly illuminated by a single 40-watt bulb in a little lamp near her bed. The sour odors of age, sickness, and Pine-Sol caused me to catch my breath. She was a large woman in an ancient, pink cotton nightgown, her yellow-white hair limply pasted to her head. She had been having bad dreams, and in a fitful moment had fallen out of bed. She was uninjured, but her husband did not have the strength to get her back in bed.
Groaning under her weight, we wrestled her back into bed. There was a simple thank you. I have never forgotten the look of gratitude in that old man’s face as he showed us to the door.
Call to servanthood
Nearly two millennia earlier, the table was set for the Seder, the Passover meal, when suddenly Jesus did the unthinkable. He removed his outer garment, wrapped a towel around himself, poured water into a bowl, and knelt to wash his disciples’ feet.
None of Jesus’ disciples would volunteer for such a task. Peter did not intend to wash anybody’s feet, and he recoiled as Jesus knelt to wash his. The disciples stared in silence as Jesus stated, “I have set an example that you should do as I have done for you” (John 13:15).
The call to the pastorate is the call to servanthood. This is a hard lesson, and we are no more inclined to listen than the first disciples were.
In one of life’s ironies, I am now a pastor in the same inner-city church where my father served on that winter night three decades ago. Like the first disciples, my inclination is to jockey with my ministerial peers for position. Servanthood is not an attitude pastors come by naturally, nor is it held in high esteem.
Yet I remember that old man, his wife lying helpless on the floor in the middle of the night. He didn’t need an appointment; he needed a servant. He didn’t need a pastor in two weeks; he needed one then.
My father retired this spring. During the reception, people told me that my father’s ministry had touched their lives. It was interesting that nobody mentioned his preaching, though he was a capable expositor. Yet many people mentioned loving acts of service.
The church had a portrait of my father painted in honor of his retirement, and the morning it was hung in the entryway to the church, a little boy asked his mother, “Is that God?”
We chuckled over the naivete’ of a little child. It is not a portrait of God, but a lot of people have seen Jesus in an inner-city pastor who devoted his life to acts of service.
Ralph Nite, Jr., is pastor of Centropolis Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri.
1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us.
