by Norman Bales

Ten years ago this week, I found myself pushing a cart through the
grocery store, when I passed the aisle where the Father’s Day cards were
displayed. I thought about my childhood years when I didn’t pay much
attention to Father’s Day. My father claimed that he didn’t believe
much in special occasions. After the passage of ten years, I still
remember that particular trip to the grocery store because I suddenly
that that for the first time in my life, I don’t have a living father
that I could send a card to. A month earlier, we had taken the sad
journey to his hometown to make funeral arrangements. As I stood there
in the aisle beside the Father’s day cards and realized I couldn’t
select a car for him, I felt pretty empty on the inside.

Now that ten years have passed since he died, I find myself
reflecting on the legacy my father left me. I grew up in the
Southwestern United States, where "Daddy" is the most common
name that children use to address their fathers. He was not
"Dad," "Papa," or "Pop." If I referred
to him as "father," it would only be in the third person. I
never used that word as a term of address. He was and always will be
"Daddy."

Daddy was the oldest of 11 children. He was born in Indian
Territory, a year before it became the state of Oklahoma. His home was
a Christian home. The Bible was read regularly and with respect. From
his early childhood until the day he died, he believed, as I do, that
the Bible is the Supreme Court when it comes to settling spiritual
questions.

Daddy didn’t give me any parting words of advice. However, I
observed the way he lived his life and I knew how he thought. Had he
been able to speak to me in that last hour of his life he might well
have echoed David’s parting words to Solomon in I Kings 2:1-3, "I
am about to go the way of all the earth. So be strong, show yourself a
man, and keep his decrees and laws and requirements." The legacy
that he left behind was an example, which said that these are the most
important priorities in life. Here are some of the priorities I
observed.

Diligence In Work

If ever there was a man who believed in the Christian work ethic, it
was Daddy. He was firmly devoted to such passages as the one that says,
"if a man will not work, he shall not eat," and "if a man
provides not for his own, he has denied the faith and is worse than an
infidel." Although it didn’t come from scripture, he believed
that "idleness is the workshop of the devil." He coined a lot
of one liners that he repeated at various times. One I recall he used
when he had to wait for me to finish a job so he could start one was
"Norman, a dollar’s waitin’ on a dime."

Everything I remember about my father is not admirable. There were
times when he said and did things he shouldn’t have. Among the things
I regret is the fact he was so devoted to work, that he never took the
time to play. When I participated in high school sports, he didn’t come
to the games. In fact, he and I usually fought over whether I would
participate in sports. As he saw it, the sports program was a device to
get out of work, so he never got very excited about it.

When I was 19 years old, I came to realize how important it is to
have the legacy of the work ethic passed on to you. I was trying to
earn my way through college. He helped me get a summer job. I didn’t
like the work., I didn’t like the people I worked with and I was just
mainly putting in my time and doing what I had to do to make sure I drew
a pay check every week.

One day a visitor came to the construction site where I was
employed. For some reason, he came around to see me. He said, "My
name is Frank Antilley." I knew who Frank Antilley was, but I had
never met him. When my Dad first began to work for the public back in
the 1920’s, he worked for Frank Antilley who had a very large farming
operation. I said, "My name is Norman Bales." He said,
"Well you must be either Burl or Murl’s boy." I said,
"Yes, I’m Burl’s son." He said, "Well, you must be a
hard worker. Your name couldn’t be Bales if you weren’t a hard worker.
From that time on, I knew I had a reputation to uphold and my attitude
toward work changed completely.

That’s a part of the legacy my father left with me and I hope that
I’ll be able to pass some of that same respect for the work ethic along
to my own children. As fathers we all need to convey to our children by
example, by our teaching and by our discipline the advice of the ancient
wise man Solomon who wrote in Proverbs 13:4, "The sluggard craves
and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully
satisfied."

Enthusiasm For God’s Word

He was a diligent student of the Bible throughout most of his life.
Only when his eyesight began to fail him in the last two or three years
of his life, did he cease his diligent study. Some of my earliest
recollections are those of Bible stories. My mother didn’t tell me
Bible stories. My Daddy did. He could make them very interesting.
Sometimes he embellished things with his own commentary, which I’ve
learned to take with a grain of salt as an adult. As a child, I
believed every word. As his hair began to thin, he loved to tell the
story of the 42 youths who were mauled by bears because they ridiculed
Elisha’s bald head. To this day I’m not very comfortable with jokes
about baldness.

Daddy believed himself to be the world’s foremost authority on the
book of Revelation. He disavowed the views of all the scholars,
theologians, exegetes and commentators. He thought all the commentaries
that had every been written on Revelation were a waste of paper and ink.
Whether he was right in his view on Revelation, is subject to
discussion, but I do know that he knew the text very well.

Several years ago I taught Revelation in a Sunday morning Bible
class. I ignored his advice and consulted the best scholars on the
subject. I thought I did a credible job, so I sent him a copy of my
outlines. He called me up on the telephone and said, "Norman you’re
a fine preacher of the gospel, but when it comes to the book of
Revelation, you’re nothing but a baby." It was pretty clear that
he and I weren’t on the same page. I will say this much for him. I’ve
seen him studying the Word of God until the wee hours of the morning,
when he had to be up at 6 o’clock the next morning to go to the
construction site and he would do that for weeks on end.

He placed great value on the Word of God. In my mind, his legacy is
not that of the world’s greatest Revelation scholar, but one of loving
the Scriptures. He deemed the Word of God to be worthy of our time, our
energy and our diligence in trying to understand it. Because of him,
probably more than any other influence, I’m a student of Scripture..

A Set Of Values

Daddy was never rich in this world’s goods and he didn’t want very
much. Sometimes we had conflicts, because the things that I wanted as a
young teenage boy, trying to live with peer pressure, were not always in
line with what he thought I ought to have. And of course, I had very
little understanding of just how poor we were. We were very poor, but I
didn’t know that, because we never thought of ourselves that way.

I remember a time during my adolescence when he bought me a pair of
shoes. He had a friend named Bill Work, who ran a dry goods store. He
would go to the store and complain to Bill that all his prices were too
high. He would say something like "That boy’s feet are still
growing. If I buy shoes today, he’ll grow out of them in six months and
I’m not paying these high prices." Bill would go into the back
of the store and find an old pair of shoes that had been gathering dust
for about twenty years and bring them out. He’d say, "I can make
you a deal on these shoes." Of course, he knew nobody else would
wear them, but I had no choice and had to wear the shoes.

Sometime later I was earning some of my own money (I didn’t earn
money during my adolescent years, because I was needed on the farm).
Slavery had been outlawed, but that didn’t apply to sons. With enough
money to buy shoes, I found a real shoe store. I certainly didn’t go to
Bill Work’s dry goods store. I knew the owner of the store and told
him I needed some new shoes. He looked at the shoes I was wearing and
said, "Norman, those are the kind of shoes an old man wears. A
young man like you doesn’t have any business wearing shoes like
that." I left behind my old 1930’s shoes and never wore a pair
like that again.

Although that conflict in values, set up some tension between us, it
also set the stage for determining the values I would live by. I’ve
never really wanted to make a lot of money. Like most people I like to
see the bills paid and I’m materialistic enough to want a fairly
comfortable standard of living, even a standard of living that’s more
comfortable than the one my father lived by.

Even so Daddy’s frugality taught me the value of our Lord’s
perspective on wealth. "…a man’s life does not consist in the
abundance of his possessions"(Luke 12:15). About a year before
Daddy died, he chose to share some of his reflections on life with me.
He said, "It’s been a good life. I’ve had the health to work."
At 78 years of age, he built a house almost single handedly. Pointing
to his modest dwelling, he said, "We built this house and it’s paid
for. I got you through college and we’ve managed to take care of our own
needs." Then he said, "But it when it comes right down to it,
at the end of man’s life, the only thing that counts is his faith."

Conclusion

In I Thessalonians 2:11-12, Paul says, "For you know that we
dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children?"
What kind of fatherhood model did Paul have in mind when he said he
dealt with the Thessalonians the way a father deals with his children?
Look at the next verse, "encouraging, comforting, and urging you to
live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and glory."
Perhaps your father wasn’t a model father. I don’t want to leave the
impression that my father always chose to conduct himself according to
the model Paul describes. He would have been the first to tell you that
he sometimes fell short of being the model father. But there are two
things to ponder as we approach Father’s Day.

1. If your father did anything that’s right, noble and helpful, you
need to appreciate it, respect it and be encouraged by it.

2. If you are a father, you need to realize that you are building a
legacy every day you live. Think about it this way. Suppose your son
decides to send out an electronic newsletter to describe your legacy as
a father, ten years after your death. What will he have to say? You are
establishing your legacy right now in the way you live and in the way
you relate to your children.