“Hey! Get a load of this!” Jim yelped. “Here’s the check Dad wrote to old Doc Jackson for my birth.”
As we dug through the mountains of paper in our late father’s office, we unearthed a treasure trove of family history. For some unexplainable reason the man had kept every bank statement since 1936.
Soon after our father was buried, my brothers and I had
gathered in
What a job! Dad had this “thing” about paper. He couldn’t throw it away. So we had to. And deciding what to toss was no easy task.
Stashed along with 70 years worth of sermons and Bible teaching notes were congregational records pre-dating WW II. His journal listed every person he visited, wrote to, counseled, ate with, married, or buried on any day of all those years. And he kept every letter he ever received, even those that called him dirty names.
Discovering checks like the one for Jim’s entry into the world set my little brothers to digging with new fervor. Hoots of delight filled the small office as they came upon checks for their first college tuition, their wedding receptions, and their orthodontist bills.
Finding the down payment check for the house Jim and Curtis grew up in caused them pause. I was more interested in the large check Dad wrote to the builder of a house our family moved out of in 1946. Almost 40 years later Dad heard that the Christian contractor had fallen upon bad times. Our mother was probably the only person who knew that Dad wrote the guy a check for big bucks and notated it, “Cost overrun on house.”
Tucked in between checks for all the mundane costs of life were the ones he wrote every week without fail to pay a generous tithe out of his meager parson’s salary.
For three days as we sorted, stacked, and sacked our father’s papers, we celebrated the incredible ministry they chronicled. And each of us, especially my younger brothers who weren’t around when a lot of that paper was generated, discovered dimensions of our father we had missed while he was alive.
For the first time in our lives my brothers and I didn’t buy Father’s Day cards that year, but we honored our dad as never before.