Fathers Day 2017

It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father.

-Pope John XXIII

            We have known for some time that most vehicle crashes on the highway are caused by (drivers on) prescription drugs or alcohol. You should remember this each time you're speeding down a busy highway, approaching a fast car driven from the opposite direction...you are just a few feet from death, because anything could happen; failure of a vehicle, or even a doped up driver.

            Michelangelo spent forty years of his life on his back, painting that marvelous ceiling of the Sistine chapel, Vatican, Rome. When looking at that ceiling, as I did many times, one cannot imagine the talent/time involved (in its creation). In the early years before electric power, for 400 years, it could only be viewed by officials taking candles and torches into the Edifice. So, you can imagine how blackened, over the period of 400 years, it became. In more recent years, it has been cleaned. When you look at the other sculptures of Michelangelo, such as his sculpture of Moses, it is hard to imagine all that talent in the brain of just one man. It has been said that after the completion of Moses, featured at the . The statue, so real that even the artist himself hit it with a hammer and said "speak to me."

            With all the greatest of some men, we think of great world leaders, who were fathers of children; none take a back seat to the average hard working, God-fearing, tax paying father who, not only gave us life through his affections and mixture of DNA with his wife, than are own father. To raise a child, with the temptations, risks, expenses involved in today's world; that 40 years can be well inequity, on a balancing scale, with that of Michelangelo.

            At the beginning of WWII, draft boards were set up in each county to pick from the male youth of that county, those who would be selected for military service. My own grandfather sat on this draft board. In our community was a wonderful family by the name of "Acock." My grandfather told how the father/head of that family came before the board and begged that his only son, draft age, would be spared from selection of military service. He said, "I was in WWI, I know about war, please let me go in place of my son; if anything were to happen to our only son, it would kill both me and his mother."

            From the beginning of time, certainly discovering the history of the Old Testament, we now know the importance of a father in a family. Certainly, women had their place in the history of the world. But, as we so plainly see in the certain history involving men of the Old Testament....maleness, ancestry.

            Woman began to take their place in our Western culture around WWII. Perhaps it started with a cover on LIFE magazine, featuring women wearing slacks. Women started working in factories, as was the case with my mother and grandmothers. My father and my grandmother's other sons had gone to war. Women drove tractors, and even mules on the farm. They kept things going until their husbands and sons returned. Then came television and the fact that most television writers and producers were gay. You can slice it down to the beginning of time when men started designing women's clothing, starting working with women's hair...started degrading real men in theatre and movie productions. The attempt has been made to make buffoons of fathers.

            This writer has been blind for over 50 years. I understand that some men now wear earrings, that seeing a man walking down the street dressed like a woman is not a rare sight. We all have been exposed to the recent epidemic of genderless marriage, unisex showers and bathrooms. You will not find this type of abomination is Muslim countries. Even Liberal, Western civilization nations, realize that a woman's place is anywhere that a woman can serve. The nurses on the battlefield work for military hospitals; more female doctors and lawyers now than male. 65% of all college students are now female, when I was in college there were very few female students, only one in my graduating class. At the funeral of a great pastor, one of the speakers referred to what I had said about the one being eulogized. I had said, "I have seen his Christianity in my home."

             I am what I am today, because of MY father, the hardest working man I have ever known. I never knew him to go hunting or fishing, any type of entertaining because there was always work to do. After working late, he, and he alone, would always milk the cows. On Saturday's, when most men were watching ball games, he would stay on his feet all weekend long and cut hair. But, my father knew the joy of all his children graduating from college, knew the feeling of having one of the nicest homes in the community, of seeing my mother well dressed. It was he who went to the church early on Sunday mornings and built fires in all of the wood stoves. In Summer, he'd go out early and open all the windows. It was he, more so than the pastor or any other member, who made sure the church was closed up after service. It was he, who with his great voice, that lead the singing, taught a class, or even preach if necessary. Talk is cheap, but it is the walk of the father that we celebrate on fathers' day. I was never that type father. My son and grandsons well know that I stand strictly on the shoulders of my ancestors...nothing I have done compares to what they did/accomplished.