Meet my Dad

Meet my Dad

Tuesday 11-29-16 Posadas, northern Argentina   

Today we read 1 Thess  4 – 5 and 2 Thess 1 - 3

S.  1 Thess 4:11-12 This should be your ambition: to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we commanded you before. As a result, people who are not Christians will respect the way you live, and you will not need to depend on others to meet your financial needs. NLT

O.  It seems that human nature has not changed a lot since the time of Paul. He felt it necessary to exhort these new Christians to go out there, get a job and earn a living.

A.  My father was a devout Christian who was raising 5 children and supporting his aged mother-in-law during the “great depression”.  I was never informed that we were poor.  Our clothes were never purchased new.  In fact, nothing was purchased new… even our bread was old and sometimes moldy.  But we never lacked anything.  During the worst years, while I was an infant and until I was about 8 years old my father drove the company’s yellow 1925 Ford A with a painted sign “New System Laundry”.  I just thought he attended an established route to pick up dirty laundry and return it clean… like he did at our house.  Many decades later at his death, the “New System Laundry” published an article in the newspaper explaining that his job was not just running a route.  He had to go house to house and seek customers.  They wrote that he worked so hard and added so many new customers that he actually saved the company from closure when money and customers were scarce.  Later he worked two, different back to back, 8 hour jobs to keep us alive.  Still later, when I was an early teen, I worked with him as a house painter and as a builder.  He went at each job with a passion to do it right, do it fast and leave behind a happy customer.  You ask why I preach 6 to 10 times a week… and love it?  I learned my work ethic under my godly dad. 

P.  Dear Lord: How blessed I have been to grow up in a home governed by Christian principles.  May I encourage many fathers to get out there and make it happen instead of whining over the fact that no one will come knocking to offer him a sit-down, white-collar job. 

Ralph