By David Grousnick
Well, here we are, fresh off of the celebration of Father’s Day. I pray it was a good celebration your family!
A mother was out walking with her 4-year-old daughter. The child picked up something off the ground and started to put it into her mouth. The mother took it away and said “Don’t do that!”
“Why not?” asked the child.
“Because it’s on the ground,” said her mother. “You don’t know where it’s been. It’s dirty, and it’s probably loaded with germs that could make you sick.”
The child looked at her mother with total admiration and said, “Mommy, how do you know all this stuff? You’re so smart.”
The mother said, “All Moms know this stuff. It’s on the Mom’s Test. You have to know it or they don’t let you be a Mom.”
There was silence for a minute or so as the child thought this through. “Oh, I get it,” she said at last. “And if you don’t pass the test you have to be the Daddy?”
A first-grader asked his mother why his Dad brought home a briefcase full of material each night. She explained that he had so much work to do that he couldn’t get it all done at the office. The youngster pondered this soberly and then asked, “Well, why don’t they put him in a slower group.”
Bill Bouknight encourages those who are parents to remember this: If you can’t say no to some claims, your life may well drip away like a leaky faucet and you won’t make much of a splash anywhere.
And making a splash as a parent, as a Mom or as a Dad, really is important.
In his book, “Disappointment with God,” writer Philip Yancey relates a touching story from his own life. One time on a visit to his mother – who had been widowed years earlier, in the month of Philip’s first birthday – they spent the afternoon together looking through a box of old photos.
A certain picture of him as an eight-month-old baby caught his eye. Tattered and bent, it looked too banged up to be worth keeping, so he asked her why, with so many other better pictures of him at the same age, she had kept this one.
Yancey writes, “My mother explained to me that she had kept the photo as a memento because during my father’s illness it had been fastened to his iron lung.”
During the last four months of his life, Yancey’s father lay on his back, completely paralyzed by polio at the age of twenty-four, encased from the neck down in a huge, cylindrical breathing unit. With his two young sons banned from the hospital due to the severity of his illness, he had asked his wife for pictures of her and their two boys.
Because he was unable to move even his head, the photos had to be jammed between metal knobs so that they hung within view above him–the only thing he could see. The last four months of his life were spent looking at the faces he loved.
Philip Yancey writes, “I have often thought of that crumpled photo, for it is one of the few links connecting me to the stranger who was my father. Someone I have no memory of, no sensory knowledge of, spent all day, every day thinking of me, devoting himself to me, loving me….
“The emotions I felt when my mother showed me the crumpled photo were the very same emotions I felt that February night in a college dorm room when I first believed in a God of love. Someone is there, I realized. Someone is there who loves me.
It was a startling feeling of wild hope, a feeling so new and overwhelming that it seemed fully worth risking my life on.”
Have a great weekend!
(EDITOR’S NOTE: David Grousnick is the pastor of First Christian Church.)