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June 2015 Articles

• Just Rambling June 2015

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Just Rambling June 2015

Just Rambling: When we think about the month of June one of the things we think about is Father’s Day which is the third Sunday in June. This day celebrates the contribution that fathers and father figures make in their children’s life. Its origin may partially lie in a memorial service held for a large group of men, many of them fathers, who were killed in a mining accident in Monongah, West Virginia in 1907. Another contributor to the establishment of Father's Day was a woman called Sonora Smart Dodd. Her father raised six children by himself after the death of her Mother. She was also inspired by the work of Anna Jarvis, who had pushed for Mother’s Day celebrations. Sonora felt her father deserved recognition for what he had done. Father’s Day was first held in June of 1910 and was officially recognized as a holiday in 1972 by President Nixon. As I grow older it seems that I think about my father, Coy Bennett, more each day. He passed away on June 9, 1998 from colon cancer. Before he passed away I can remember him talking more about his father, my grandfather, Tom Bennett. It seems that my father may have been having some of the same feeling that I am having today—feeling of regret—regretting not spending more time with my father, but I imagine these are normal feelings for everyone after their father has passed on. As I think about my father I think about how he molded my life—no birthday parties after my first one—birthday parties are for girls until his grandsons came along then it was fine. He bought me a puppy when I was three, a half bluetick hound and half cur who I named “Blue”. He paid $5.00 for him and brought him inside giving him to me as I sat playing in front of the fireplace. I kept this puppy until I was 18 and a freshman in college. As I returned home from college one day I found him dead on the highway, he is now buried on our homeplace where he and I grew up together. Speaking of college, there was never a question about me going to college. From the time I was old enough to understand my father told me I was going to college. He never liked school and didn’t finish high school (later he got his GED) but I was going to college, no if, ands, or buts, I was going and I was graduating, which I did. Another fact about my father was that he believed in working and he believed that I should work as well. He and my Uncle Ralph ( Daddy’s brother, they worked together all their life) farmed cotton and corn together until I was fourteen then they raised cattle and operated a custom hay baling service. This meant I always had some type of work to do, picking cotton, carrying sacks, (it was all handpicked) emptying cotton sacks, loading gin trucks, pulling corn, feeding hogs/cattle, hauling hay– plenty of work. At the end of the day my father and uncle would pay all the farm workers before carrying them home but I never got paid. As I got a little older I asked my father one day when was I going to get paid? His response was, “You get paid when you put your feet under the table”. He did start paying me some when I became a teenager but with a stipulation that the money be saved to help buy my school clothes. I did get paid when we hauled hay for our outside customers and that money was mine to use as I wanted to. My father always expected me to be in church and he expected me to behave. When I was a kid I got tapped on the back of the head in church several times for misbehaving. It didn’t take long until I knew I better behave or that tapping on the back of the head would lead to more than tapping on the rear which it did on a few occasions outside of church. My father wasn’t a very emotional person but I always knew how much he loved me without him expressing it. He worked hard to keep me on the right path in life and if I began to venture off he could always detect it and encourage me back on the right path in a not to subtle way. I think this was because he had gone down some of the same paths and his father had put him back on the straight and narrow. What I am saying here is that good fathers are so important in the lives of their children. No father is perfect except our Father in Heaven but we as fathers must all be committed to love, guide and care for our children. Too many men in our country today father a child but that is where it stops. They have no intention of supporting, loving or caring for that child and this is shameful and sinful. 1 Timothy 5:8 states, “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” This Father’s Day don’t forget your father—whether it is in memories of a father passed on or whether it is communicating with your living father. Fathers be thankful for your children for they are a blessing from God. Love, guide, and care for them according to God’s scriptures and pray for the children that do not have fathers to guide their lives. Van Bennett

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