Thursday, September 26, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Dad’s favorite psalm
What profit has a man from all his labor, at which he toils under the sun?
Dad sat in a padded rocking chair in our family room, wearing his favorite red flannel shirt. His Christmas shirt. A bright lamp glowed above a small round table, part of the lampstand, and he read books. Often the Bible.
What’s your favorite psalm, Dad? I already knew that. I’d asked him before.
He read it to me. Psalm 90. Which ends with a farmer pleading to his God. In the middle of all the crazy weather and impossible-to-plan-for financial collapses, the psalmist asks God, how about a little help here?
May your favor rest upon us, O Lord. Establish the work of our hands for us – yes, establish the work of our hands. I love that psalm.
And I love something else from that Bible, something Dad read and lived, a part of 1 Thessalonians 4 where Paul tells his listeners how to gain the respect of others:
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life. Mind your own business, and work with your hands, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.
Margaret and I sang a song together yesterday, as we do every day. We choose a hymn, usually, from a favorite website or Margaret’s old red Christian Church hymnal with the such small print. This time we sang Dad’s favorite hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Margaret had been praying for people with no home or food, living under a bridge in Austin. Dad would have appreciated that prayer.
Dad didn’t often hesitate when someone needed help. I’m sure he did his share of thinking, sometimes protective, sometimes more generous, but generally when push came to shove he gave from what he had rather than keep it all for himself. I don’t imagine he did much “taking” in his life. Our tractor often dug stranded cars and their passengers out of a snow-filled ditch.
Dad had an accounting degree from the University of Illinois; but in the farming business, when he and another farmer clashed over some deal he often chose to give way, whether it was a small thing or land purchased contract for deed. Being right mattered less than doing right.
My friend Thomas told me yesterday that he gave a car away soon after he had bought it. He had planned to sell it to his friend for a much lower price than blue book, but then he just gave it to her. “It’s just money,” he said. “We have money in our bank account. We’ll be fine.”
A moment later he said, “She needed that car. No one had been kind to her for a very long time.”
Fill us at daybreak with your kindness, that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days. Prosper the work of our hands for us, prosper the work of our hands!
There’s another part of today’s lectionary that hits me between the eyes, that verse in Luke where Herod looks for John the Baptist after his head’s been cut off.
He kept trying to see him.
I do that sometimes, keep trying to see Dad, long after he was buried in 2002. Asking him to pray for me and listen to my troubles, thanking him for his love, and for how much I learned just being around while he woke up to milk our cows every morning of every year.
I ask Dad to forgive me for choosing a path away from the farm rather than into it, although that forgiveness has long been given. In the last years of his life we took trips – to Billy Graham’s Retreat Center, to bluegrass festivals in the Smoky Mountains and Brown County, Indiana. We drove north to Rev. Larry Christensen’s charismatic Lutheran conference in Minneapolis and later to Old World Wisconsin and my friend Don’s home on Lake Lulu, where Dad had his last swim.
Such sweet times we had with each other. We talked a little, but never a lot. One night at a Cracker Barrel somewhere in Tennessee he looked at me across the table, and asked if I would forgive him.
For what?
Dave, for not making it more possible for you to farm. (I remember that his dad had helped him a lot at the beginning.)
I saw his point. He could be a hard man when he farmed, even if he gentled up in the evening. My strong will and his determination hit head on sometimes.
I forgive you, Dad. I love you and appreciate how you’ve forgiven me for so much.
Oh, yes. I forgive you. And now, decades after we last saw each other, I will keep trying to see you.
Thanks so much for being the man God made you to be.
I am the way and truth and life, says the Lord.
(Ecclesiastes 1, Psalm 90, John 14, Luke 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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