Thoughts On A Given Day

My father is retired twice over. He is retired from the United States Air Force, and he is a retired pastor. He is not, however, a retired preacher. He says that you don’t retire from preaching, and I believe he is right. God calls us to witness for him in whatever position he places us in, and in my father’s case, that has been, for many years now, as a preacher.

I have been asked sometimes what it was like to grow up as a pastor’s son. My only true response is that I don’t know. My childhood was lived on and near Air Force bases in Misawa, Japan, Washington DC, and San Antonio, Texas. My father studied for the ministry during my High School years in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and he was called to his first church in Bedford, Virginia as I was approaching graduation from High School. I left home for the military shortly thereafter.

I joined the Army at a relatively young age, not necessarily younger than average, but, nevertheless, young. I was eighteen years old and midway through my senior year of High School when I joined on what was referred to as The Delayed Entry Program. What that meant to me was, from the time I signed my name on the contract and swore the oath of allegiance, I had six months before I had to report for Basic Training. That six months allowed me to have what I considered a lot of freedom – freedom to not care whether I struck a lick at anything faintly resembling school work, because I did not see college on my horizon, and freedom to not worry about my future, because I had a job waiting for me, complete with its guarantee of three hots and a cot, as those in the military are prone to say. That freedom, of course, immediately disappeared the day I reported for duty. My life was no longer my own.

As my father began his new career as a pastor, I began my career, or at least what I thought was going to be a career, as a soldier. I was enlisted for three years, and, when I volunteered, I honestly thought it was a career decision. It did not take me long, however, before I realized that I was not happy in the Army as it existed in 1973. Viet Nam was in its death throes, but the influence it had on attitudes in and around the military was certainly not dead. Drugs and alcohol were rampant among the soldiers of the non-volunteer Army I was stationed with during that time, and I encountered very few people who lived around any of my duty stations who wanted anything to do with a soldier. Those three years seemed like an eternity to me. I believed that life was going to pass me by before I ever escaped from the torment into which I had put myself. I felt adrift with a broken sail on an ocean of depression and loneliness. I did, however, have a rudder with which to steer. I had relationships to guide me – relationships with my friends, relationships with my family, and a relationship with my savior. My friends were extremely important to me during those years, but my true rudder was my relationship with my family and my savior.

Throughout those years I had two phrases that lived in my mind and by which I tried to define myself. One was “I am my father’s son,” and the other was “quiet strength, gesture without motion.” I could not tell you exactly when those two statements began to mean so much to me as I sought to define who I was as a young man, but as time passed during those first three years in the military I often repeated them to myself as a reminder of whose I was and who I wanted to be.

The phrase “I am my father’s son” represented my desire to be someone that my father would be proud of. Without question I considered him the man I most respected and the man of whom I was the most proud. He set the example I wanted to live by, both as a person and as a Christian. I had been there when he had first rededicated his life to God and had accepted God’s call to the ministry, and I had witnessed the change in him as he went from the career Airman to the career preacher, pulling his entire family along with him. He always was the leader of our family, and we followed where he led. I still remember the first sermon I ever heard him preach. He asked the question of those of us in the congregation, “Do you have religion, and is it the catching kind?” He was the one who asked me if I would like to accept Christ as my savior when the rest of my family, who were already Christians, were going to join a church in Texas. I answered, “yes”, and that has made all the difference.

“Quiet strength, gesture without motion” was, I believe, a misquote of a line of poetry that stuck in my head. I found it popping into my thoughts from time to time, and I tried to let it define what I wanted to be – someone who was strong, helped others, but did not seek out the limelight or the leadership role. It was a statement that embodied what my mother was. My father had a great ministry in a small, rural church in Virginia for many years, but he was never alone there. My mother was always there with him. It was, in reality, her ministry as well. Quietly, never taking the leadership role, she strengthened him with her support and her insight, and together they ministered to those that the Lord put in their path.

During those three years of loneliness and depression that were my first three years away from home, I had a relationship with my savior, but in all honesty it was largely defined by what I had seen in my parents. What they had was real, and I wanted what they had. It kept me steering in the right direction most of the time, and slowly I made progress. I am older now, and more informed about spiritual matters, but they are still a rudder for me, always there to set an example of what I hope to be. I could not begin to tell you how many people’s lives they have touched over the years since they first devoted themselves to God’s ministry, but I can tell you of one they have definitely touched, and that is mine.

Ephesians 6:1-3

New International Version (NIV)

6 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ² “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— ³ “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”

2 Timothy 3:14-15

Revised Standard Version (RSV)

¹⁴ But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it ¹⁵ and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.