Letter to Paul

Dear Paul,

I am enclosing a check for you to use in your expenses, pre-graduation and post-graduation. It is an honor to graduate from a prestigious university with a degree in engineering. So many of today's young people become just another college graduate...just a piece of paper. You see, you prepared yourself in high school to meet the challenge of a higher calling. Anyone can read a book on sociology, communication, government, and understand and know about all such a college major would give you, but it takes to brain to study engineering and the other sciences. Almost anyone can become a psychologist, but it takes a brain to become an engineer. I am very proud of you and as I told your father, if you fail in life, it will not be mine or God's fault, because I talk with God about you every day.

Since you were raised on the foreign mission field, you hardly know me. Last summer when you were over, sitting in this large room where I work every day, your father was sitting on one side of the fire place in a wing chair, and I was sitting in a matching chair on the other side. You and your mother were sitting across the room, of course your father and I were having one of those animated Morris conversations. All of sudden you said, “you two are just alike.” This has been the story since he was very small, his mannerisms, brain, etc. You and your brother Andy have a real hero in your father. It is so tragic that so many sons never appreciate their ancestry. I have had young men working for me who had never seen their father, did not know who he was. I don't know which is worse, the prodigal son or the prodigal father.

Even at best, at age 80, I do not have that much longer, I don't seek death, but my later adventure with our Heavenly Father will be a great relief. I have about done everything else with my life which I intended to do, which God had directed me to do. Someone said, “with all your travels in the world, your military experience, your business experience, having faced most of your life as a blind person, why not leave something in writing.” And of course, I am doing most of this writing, the blog, for my two grandsons and others can just “overhear”, or look over your shoulders, if they wish. The tragedy of the Christian life, those who claim the name of Christ, they have never studied and learned the challenge and privilege they have, in knowing both the horizontals and verticals of the Cross. You probably know more than most young men about claiming the name of Christ. I want you to be forever proud of having the name “Morris”.

None of my relatives ever spoke much about my ancestry. We are taught in the Bible, the New Testament to be concerned about others. The Bible is a racial book, a history book, a history of the promises and prophecies of the Jewish family. You note in the Old Testament that they always gave genealogy in speaking of anyone. Your genealogy is genuine, my father's family, Morris and Lucas, were two of North Carolina's first families. One of my cousins, Dr. Clement Lucas, a physician in New York State, traced the Lucas line into Europe and beyond (In Wilson County, a town, Lucama, named for the Lucas family, he was raised on a farm on one side of the town, I, on a farm on the other side of the town, both of us graduated from UNC-CH). The Morris family was well known in New Jersey and along the east coast. My maternal family, Pittman and Underwood, well known in this state. As you will learn in your study of history, many of the early families in the south were just hard-working, land-owning people, they did not own anyone, slave or otherwise. The black people who lived on the farms, even after emancipation, stayed on the farms. Everyone's lives, black or white, involved safety, security, survival, for a long time they went to the same church, but then separate churches, always claiming the same church names.

The beautiful problem you have now is getting started, always look at every phase of your life as an adventure, following a plan already designed by your Creator in the counsel chambers of eternity. You see, He knows the end as well as the beginning of the parade, every nation, every life. You will always be able to get a good job, because you are in a profession which is in demand. Surely, what I have written must have hit you right between the eyes. Creator God who designed every snowflake that has ever fallen, the voice, the iridial flex of every eye, the fingerprints of every hand, knew what He was doing when He designed you, a very special person. (Psalm 139) You can depend on His Word, because He honors His Word more than anything else. (Psalm 138:2)

Trust in God.

Love, Your Grandfather.