Father's Day

It is Father's Day, one of the grandest days of all and one of the most important, I would place it only behind Easter and Christmas.  The entire earth is established by how well we do our job as fathers.  It’s not our vocation, it’s not our hobby and it’s not natural for us.  We are fathers because of birth, we are good fathers because we want to be, we are great fathers because we are sacrificially determined to be.  No great father has considered his task and not fully known he wasn’t up to the job.  It takes a ton of help, secondly from our wifes but firstly from God in Christ by the Holy Spirit.  I was fortunate enough to have a great father who had only an alcoholic as his example.  My dad knew his father as a man but not a father.  My father's life was forever lived juxtaposed against a childhood of unimaginable sorrow and pain.  By grace, at 18, my father was born again into a new family with a new Father, God Almighty.  To my knowledge no one in his family was a believer at the time but afterwards everyone before him and all those of age after him are.  I watched him and my mom live a life of faithfulness through hardship, poverty, rejection and want, but I never did, because of them. I knew a living Christ, a happy family filled with examples of living well through all things because he chose to live by faith.  The greatest example of Christ I ever knew was him, in all my years of scoundrel wretchedness I never one time felt that he was anything but proud of me and grateful that I was his son.  I remember when I was a small child wearing my dad’s flipflops and thinking they were my skies; they were so big.  But even today as I think back on his life, now gone some 18 years, I still know my feet are so little when slipped into his shoes.  My Father's Day is always so overwhelmingly fulfilling even if my feet don’t fully fill his shoes.   

The greatest man I ever knew, my dad, Wayne Lee Benson