Among my classmates, there were more than a few being raised by single moms who were doing their best to do the jobs of two people. More than a few girls I knew in high school were devastated by the abrupt abandonment of their daddies.
Several I knew had dads who were habitually unkind or unreliable, leaving them scared and angry.
Some had fathers who were present, but checked-out emotionally.
Other stories filtered down about fathers who were crude and inappropriate, exposing their daughters to humiliation, leaving them stripped down and hurt and at the mercy of a hungry culture.
In the same way that fresh air and good health are most noticeable by their absence, I had the privilege of being largely oblivious to the blessing of having a wonderful father when I was young. Now that I am a parent, I am applying retroactive thankfulness to my own parents.
Parenting is a hard job. Relentless. Joyous. Heartbreaking. Wonderful. Exhausting. Delightful. Overwhelming. Satisfying.
And if it is done well, then due to the lack of trauma and drama in their lives (and the presence of peace, happiness, and security) most often your children won't even notice how well you did until much later.
Such was the case with me, but gratitude is better late than never!
The following is my tribute to my daddy, who has been and continues to be so adept at his many roles as to make them look easy.
Dear Dad,
You have been many things in your life: Before I knew you, you were a son and a brother, a student, a paper boy, a truck driver. I have known you as a father, as a husband to my mother, as a business man, a landlord, a property manager, an owner/operator, a college professor, a church deacon, an avid reader, a peacemaker, a joke teller, a dispenser of wisdom, a man of ideas and insight.
And I have known you as a farmer. In fact, after "father", "farmer" is what I picture you as being.
When I think of you in your element, I see you striding across one of your fields, a waiting combine rumbling in the background, or coming toward the house at dusk in your blue jeans and work boots, white t-shirt smeared with tractor grease, hands black, face streaked with a day's worth of field dust.
You are a study in contrasts. Your expression holds both weariness and excitement, worry and contentment, patience and eager expectation. Your posture conveys a relaxed readiness.
You stand like a giant in my estimation. My respect for you held me in check during my childhood--and yet you were my beloved and approachable daddy, whose affection and esteem I have never once doubted.
It strikes me now that you have always seemed comfortable to live in the tension between opposites, and you move between them even now as if they all seem like home: tender and stern, concerned over us and confident in us, busy and restful, a safe-haven and a risk taker, a seeker of truth and a repository of wisdom.
A business man and a family man.
A man of academia and a man of the soil.
I have sometimes wondered if the instincts which have made you such a great farmer are also the same ones that have made you a great father.
I wonder if you have noticed the strong parallels between tending the land in your care, and stewarding the hearts in your home. The two vocations support each other beautifully and you have lived them out faithfully by putting one foot in front of the other and putting your heart before God day after day after day for as long as I've known you.
Here are just a few of the things you were mindful of, both on the farm and in our family:
1) Soil.
Every spring, I remember how closely you monitored our fields. Before a single seed was sown, the temperature was checked and rechecked, the soil was tested for PH and nutrient content. It was examined for signs of disease.
At just the right time, the land was burned to cleanse it from any possibility of being infected by diseases or pests left over from the previous year. It was cultivated and purged of roots and rocks.
So with me. You took care to nurture the soil of my heart--to carefully turn over the hard parts, to remove stones of doubt and disbelief, to wait to speak until the moment when my spirit was warm enough and soft enough to open and receive the good words you wanted to plant.
As with farming, sometimes the seed and the soil did not work together perfectly, but the time you took to know me and to carefully consider the timing and type of words you spoke to me went a long way toward making me receptive to the habits and beliefs you wanted to grow in me.
2) Seeds.
You were choosy with the seed you planted. How well had it been stored? How pure was it? How quickly was it able to germinate? Was it a good match for the field in question?
If any of the answers to those questions was "no" then the seed was not sown.
Likewise, you were careful with the messages you brought into our home. Before images and words fell into our eyes and ears, they were run carefully through your head and your heart--examined for purity, for truth, for their ability to grow good fruit in our family.
You did not blindly accept the conveniently pre-packaged bundles of propaganda the culture was offering up because you weren't about to entrust our souls to the clever slogans and shiny pictures on the wrapper.
You and mom broke open every idea and looked for weeds among the grain, so that the worldview planted in us would have the best possible chance to produce a harvest of righteousness.
It took much time. I'm sure you were criticized as being too picky, too particular, and maybe even a bit snobbish about your little garden of souls. I'm sure your choices cost you more than we knew, but ultimately I think Dan and I felt that we could accept the truths you offered us, because we saw you carefully test and trust those same seeds in your own lives.
3) Season.
In farming, there are windows for sowing and spraying, for burning and tilling, for watching and waiting, and for reaping a harvest. It doesn't look the same every year.
It is weather dependent. It requires vigilant observation, readiness to act when the moment is right, and a willingness to stand back and wait.
A farmer doesn't take vacations in the summer because missing a window by even one day can mean a costly setback, or even the total loss of a crop.
Sometimes when I was growing up, I must admit I wished you would take a vacation in your parenting. Sometimes I wanted to grow wild--or not grow at all. But you were not willing to be a lazy parent any more than you were willing to be a lazy farmer.
You showed during our formative years, and even now, how faithful you are to speak a word in season.
Were there times when you spoke when you should have waited, or waited when you ought to have spoken? Sure! Just as, despite the best laid plans, there are sometimes miscalculations on the farm. But never did I doubt you were doing your best to be a faithful steward of either us or your land.
And now that I am a parent, I can truly appreciate what delicate and subtle signals children send out for their mother and father to read and act on! It is truly some of the hardest deciphering I have ever done and it only raises you in my estimation!
4) Waiting.
I have heard you and Dan talking about how many farmers work themselves out of profit and yield because they are not willing to simply stop at certain points and just wait for their plants and livestock to grow.
Fussing over and tinkering with crops and cattle and equipment that don't really need anything but time to get bigger or more mature, can actually stunt or destroy them.
But many farmers don't want to relinquish control to the rain and the sun and wait for the slow, patient unfolding of stem and leaf and bud.
And it always ends up costing them something.
So I have seen in my own parenting when I fuss over and drown my children with words and lessons and lectures, instead of letting the good seeds in their hearts take the time they need to mature.
Maybe sometimes you sprayed too much, or over-fertilized or over-spent on the farm.
Maybe sometimes you did the same with us, but I also see now how much restraint you showed (and continue to show!)--not to the point of neglect, certainly, but for the intention of letting the truth take its time to unfold and take root in my heart.
Thank you for waiting for me all these years.
5) Guarding.
It is not enough to get the right seed in at the right time.
I remember driving out through our fields with you sometimes. You would put the truck in creeper gear and let me steer. From time to time, you would jump out and walk, sweeping a giant net back and forth among the young plants as I bumped along beside you, and after a minute you would pause and dump a squirming, buzzing harvest of insects into the palm of your hand, studying the mass for certain harmful bugs--the arch enemies of your crop--and for others which were beneficial for pollination or for eating pests.
These routine sweeps would tell you when you might need to spray, or how well the bees were doing their good work, and you did the same sweeps of our hearts on our travels around the farm or as we worked alongside you during the summers.
In the winters, you made sure to take us kids along with you on errands and as "special guests" for the day at the university where you taught. Our conversations were plentiful and pleasant and I am sure you gathered from us a mix of wisdom and foolishness.
Field checks and heart checks were a normal and natural part of my growing up, and I see how intentionally they were done, and how gently and consistently the pests and weeds were identified and treated, allowing for both your crops and our hearts to grow strong and true.
6) Serving.
Most days in summer, you were gone well before I woke up, and you were coming home as we were getting ready for bed. I remember the tired in your eyes, the dirt on your t-shirt, the grease on your jeans.
I remember your hands. They were rough and brown, wide at the knuckles, nails blackened and sometimes split.
Not uncommonly, you would have a gash in your skin or your clothes where a tool had slipped during a repair. Dirt gathered in the lines on your face and in the crooks of your elbows.
You outworked every one of us, every day of your life, tending to the hundreds of farm and field tasks that called for your diligent attention. In the winters, you taught classes and mentored students, and then brought back piles of papers and tests to grade after dinner. You owned and operated businesses on the side, bought and sold property, maintained our home, served in our church, and nurtured your wife and children.
Likewise, your parenting was relentless. It still is. Not for one moment have I thought you would do less than sacrifice your comfort and rest to meet our needs before you considered your own.
Your example in this has been immensely important in my own parenting journey. I hope my children remember me being up before them, asleep after them, earning and enjoying wrinkles and callouses and gray hairs and tired eyes for the joy of seeing them flourish and thrive.
7) Sacrificing.
Farmers give up a lot. Their sleep and their time is controlled by the demands of their livestock and crops. They lay out a ton of effort on the front end of their endeavors and only see returns months later. Maybe.
They risk a tremendous amount of money and spend a tremendous amount of energy on things that often fail. Machinery breaks. A lot. And almost always at inopportune moments. Pests and blight strike without warning. Droughts hit and wipe out young plants. Heavy rains fall and prevent the harvest from taking place. Rising oil and gas prices raise the costs of production, eating up profits. Freak snowstorms or heat waves obliterate an entire year's work. Diseases strike livestock, leaving them unmarketable. Government regulations strangle farms without warning. Markets collapse unexpectedly.
Sometimes I wonder why anyone still farms at all, but I'm so glad they do!
They are a special sort of people, who for the hope of seeing a piece of dry earth yield a bountiful harvest, will sign up for the risk of heartache when it doesn't.
For the joy of blessing their fellow man with healthful and plentiful foods, they bend their backs and pour out their own sweat and blood.
For the privilege of tending God's creation, they forgo many safer and more reliable means of earning a living for their families.
You did that, Dad. Some years it was wonderful and there was money left to improve our buildings and buy new equipment and still leave us with plenty.
But some years it was awful. I remember how you looked when whole fields of seed pods shattered before you could get the combine into them. Or when beautiful little blossoms got bitten off before they could set seed at all. Or when the the fickle market took the beautiful, brown mountains of seed that you had cut and cleaned and dried and made them almost worthless.
Why did you keep on farming? Was it for the same reason you have kept on loving and guiding and nurturing and supporting me, even in the years when I was miserly and selfish, or neglectful, or foolish, or ungrateful?
I think it was.
It is interesting that the great "Love Passage" in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, doesn't spend any time at all describing whether the object of that love is worth loving.
It doesn't say, "love is patient when there is some indication that the person will eventually come around to your way of thinking."
It doesn't say, "love is kind to people who aren't jerks."
It doesn't talk about love being protective of "people who are not engaged in routine foolishness", or trusting of "folks with a good moral track record and an A+ rating at the Better Business Bureau", or forgiving of "those who aren't prone to impulsivity and recklessness", or hopeful toward "those who know enough to come in out of the rain."
And boy, am I glad!
I have seen that both a good parent and a good farmer are willing to endure a tremendous amount of risk and an equally tremendous amount of pain,
because for both, love wins. Period.
Farmers know going in that they very well might lose it all, but they love the land, they love being hands-on stewards of living things, and they love the opportunity to work intimately and co-creatively with the earth and its Maker.
Likewise, a good parent is willing to embrace great risk in order to enter the sacred adventure of creating (or adopting) and nurturing another human being.
Only something as all-consuming as love (in its truest sense) would make this level of sacrifice worthwhile. Love, by definition, is sacrifice (John 15:13), and Dad, I have seen you do that for your farm and for your family for as long as I can remember.
8) Sovereignty
I know there are farmers who do not have a relationship with God. We know some. But I have observed something in many of them that I think your faith has saved you from.
It is a kind of desperation. A need to control all the variables, to manipulate outcomes at all costs, and an inability to live peacefully in the land of "come what may".
I remember some farmers who grew bitter and hard whenever their land did.
I remember some trying to grab and grasp their neighbors prosperity in order to make up a shortfall in their own.
I remember some who cut corners and dealt harshly with their animals, or ran their equipment into the dust.
I remember some who made rash decisions out of panic and some who always suspected that they were being cheated.
But you taught us that God gave us dominion over the earth and that our job was to be stewards and caretakers.
The land exists for our good and His glory. We don't own it. God does. We can't control it. God does. And so when we have done our best with it and given our all to it, and it turns around and rebels against us or closes itself off like a stone, we can leave it right there in God's sovereign care and we can rest.
We are not to panic. We are not to deal harshly with one another. We are not to grasp after vain hope or make false promises or hedge our bets.
God is our hope and shield and He will hold us fast.
So you seemed with me. Protective but not possessive. Concerned but not consumed. Loving me very much but not worshipping me.
The balance is not easy to maintain, as I am learning every day, but I am grateful for your continuing example of how to relinquish the illusion of control of both my life circumstances and my children, and instead take rest in God.
9) Harvest
Harvest was one of the most exciting times of the year. Everyone's spirits were high and we all wanted to be at the field to watch the giant combines devour endless rows of yellow grass and spit out glistening waterfalls of shiny, brown seed into waiting wagons.
It was the culmination of a long season of hard work, waiting, and wondering and no farmer I ever knew would have missed having a part in bringing in the fruit of his labor.
When it went well and the price was high and the seeds were fat, it was a joyful, almost giddy experience. When it was thin, there was still satisfaction in ending a hard thing well.
Dad, I have always appreciated the fact that you and mom have wanted to "enjoy the harvest" with my family and Dan's. I am sure there are decisions we made that made you cringe (there probably still are), and I know there are things you would have done differently, but you have wanted to be here in the midst of our lives through thick and thin.
You are hopefully taking joy in the work of your hands and seeing good fruit from your labors. We are so glad you did not shake the dust off, wave goodbye, and retire to the golf course in parts unknown.
I am glad that you are still working your farm up north AND still planting wisdom and love in the hearts of your children and grandchildren.
I am glad that you are still getting your hands dirty and coming in with tired eyes and working early and late.
I am glad you still want to nurture and care for the lives and the land God has given you, and I hope you will continue to do so for many, many years.
Most of all, I am glad that YOU are my farmer-father. I could not have been blessed with a better one and I love you very much.
Happy Father's Day!💕
