The father of five children had won a toy at a raffle.
He called his children together to ask which one should have the present.
"Who is the most obedient?" he asked.
"Who never talks back to mother?"
"Who does everything she says?"
Five small voices answered in unison.
"Okay, dad, you get the toy."
President Gordon B Hinckley gave his appreciation for all of the obedient and righteous LDS Fathers at Conference in 1999 and a part of it was printed for Fathers Day. Let me share part of it with you.
"There are hundreds of thousands, now reaching toward the millions, of boys and men of the priesthood who love the Lord and who walk in obedience to his commandments. These husbands and fathers govern their homes in kindness and with a spirit of love and appreciation. They answer every call to serve in whatever capacity as such calls come from the Church. They are good citizens of the governments under which they live wherever they may be across the world. They are good neighbors in their communities. As employees, they are loyal. They work with diligence and with honesty and integrity. They are men who live chaste and honorable lives, men who love the Lord and are loved by him."
"I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the goodness of your lives. I thank you for your examples before your families and before the world. You bring honor to this Church. You bring happiness and peace and security into the lives of your wives and children. You indulge your generous instincts in giving to the poor, in befriending the lonely, in standing up for the very best in our society. You are the sweet fruits of this beautiful gospel of the Son of God."
The Book of Mormon contains numerous stories of righteous fathers who set positive examples for their children. Today I would like to share three stories about three fathers from my family who set positive examples for their children.
First Story...
My ancestors joined the Church in England and Sweden in the mid and late 1800s so my Mom and Dad both ended up in Ogden, Utah and working at the same department store after high school graduation. When they were 20 they were married and by the height of the depression in 1934 they had five children and my father had lost his job as Asst Manager at J C Penney's and was working for $20 a week at a butcher shop and they had rented a home for $20 a month.
Then a great opportunity come to him. He could manage a department store if he would travel to eastern Montana to do it. They were elated but it would mean leaving all their family and the comfort of the Church in Utah. As my Mom said, it seemed like the end of nowhere when they stepped off the train. But they had faith it was the right thing to do and followed their faith.
There were no Mormons there and they were advised to not let anyone know that they were Mormons. But they never hid the fact and began to make friends and take part in the community. He and my Mom saw that we all attended the Congregational Church And Bible School and my Dad sang in the choir. When the missionaries came a few years later we would have cottage meetings in our home which eventually led to a Branch and finally a full-time Ward some years after I was married and living in California.
Though a quiet man, my Dad was always a leader, a teacher and yet such a gentle man, so full of love for everyone. As a child I remember him taking us on picnics, fishing, to Silvergate, to Yellowstone, to visit relatives in Utah, and lug us back and forth from college when we were older. He was never a selfish man though he loved hunting, fishing, golfing and could have just gone off with the guys. Most everything he did was involved with some or all of the family.
He was a very hard worker and was looked up to in the community as an honest, wise, and fair person. He always lived exactly who he was as far as I know.
My friends all loved him, too. He would take us girls to as many out-of-town football and basketball games as time and money would allow. He was always in the audience strongly cheering "our" high school heroes. He was generous with his time and what little he had.
He taught us to work --One of the first things he taught me as I began to seek jobs in junior high was to "always be worth more than what you were paid".
They say one of the best things a father can do for his children is to love their Mom and that he did. He loved my Mom and it showed--we had our big meal at noon, everyone coming home from school and Dad coming home from work and one of my fondest memories is his dancing Mom around the kitchen and then giving her a big noisy kiss before he went back to work each day.
In high school we found some of his love letters to Mom and we read them out loud and he just grinned. He was quite the romantic.
He occasionally raised his voice, but not often, and he never raised a hand in discipline though he raised six children, six children who pretty much stayed in line all the time. All have been to the Temple, all have stayed active in the Church and raised their children in the traditions of their father.
He was a good listener but didn't try to preach at you, just let you know he was there for you.
Dad had about three children in college at a time for a long time. We were always expected to have part-time jobs but that didn’t pay for a lot.
Being the leader in our little Branch of the Church for so many years could not have been easy. He had to prepare so many talks and guide so many people while he ran a store, was a leader in the Elks, on the school board, head of the Chamber of Commerce. He was a leader who served well but never for his own glory, always modestly, doing whatever was needed.
A kinder, gentler more caring father could not be had. A better example for his family and community I am sure does not exist.
He was a good, good man. And I remember he most always had a smile on his face. Happy Father's Day, Dad, you were the best!
Second story…
When my husband passed away I asked my son James to speak at his funeral. He was looking through Richard’s things trying to get some ideas on what to talk about. Now Richard did not have a lot of stuff like I do, he was not a collector. But there was the old Book Box that was filled with all of the floral cards from his father’s funeral. Richard always said he knew the exact minute his Dad died. He was at the Chapel practicing for the Sunday Primary program. You remember those days when Primary was on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon.
He suddenly became very still and quiet and even though there was lots of noise going on around him he just sat there and quietly thought about his Dad. It wasn’t long before one of the teachers came and told him he was to go home. He didn’t live far from the Chapel. When he arrived he was told his father had died. Richard was 11 years old.
As James was looking through the box at all the cards he saw there was some index cards also. He got them all out and arranged them in the numbered order and lo and behold it was a talk that Richard, his father, had given in Church on Easter some years ago, about 9 years before he passed away as far as we could figure.
In this talk Richard was expressing his feelings on finding this box with all the names of relatives and friends that he knew who were honoring his father. He had very tender feelings as he thought about actually having a reunion with his father and all these other relatives and friends at the time of the resurrection.
Now Richard’s father must have been very loved. I counted 47 floral cards—all with several names on them or a group name. You would have thought he was a very important person. Actually he was a very important person, the custodian of the Las Vegas High School, evidently a very beloved custodian. Richard had great esteem for his father and I had catalogued along with other letters a poem he had written to his mother when he was attending BYU.
I won’t read the whole thing—you are probably familiar with it---his mother was probably very worried about him away from home. He wanted her to know he would not do anything she or his father would be ashamed of.
“I follow a famous father,
His honor is mine to wear,
He gave me a name that was free from shame
And a name he was proud to bear.
He lived in the morning sunlight,
He marched in the ranks of right
He was always true to the best he knew
And the shield he wore was bright.
I follow a famous father
And him I must keep in mind.
Though his form is gone
I must carry on the name that he left behind.
It was mine on the day he gave it,
It shone as a monarch’s crown.
And as fair to see as it came to me
It must be when I put it down.”
Just as Richard had great esteem for his Father and the things he had been taught by him and about him now James was reading about the testimony that his father had of the Gospel.
It was like Richard was sharing his belief in Jesus Christ and the atonement, and his understanding of the gift of the resurrection and eternal life with his son James. He talked about the free agency that Heavenly Father has given us and the choices we all must make and the need to continually seek our Father’s guidance and keep going in the right direction until that final day of resurrection when we will all be together again.
My son James had just the material he needed for the talk about his Father and it touched all of us at the funeral as he shared this experience and others with us.
Boyd K Packer said, "It should have great meaning that of all the titles of respect and honor and admiration that could be given him, God himself, he who is the highest of all, chose to be addressed simply as Father.
Third story happened just last year.
When I moved here in 1999 I bought this little house with this huge lot and though it was fine to leave it mostly as dirt there was this area below the deck that always turned to mud that Bandido and I tracked in the house, so I drew a plan for a kidney shaped patio out of brick or flagstone or something. My neighbor told me I could put it in sand. I pondered how I could do this alone and then John, Marjorie’s son began to bring up river rock to her house and I liked that idea.
The Thiessens said they would show me how. They drove me to the river and showed me what kind to gather and helped me gather rock in their red truck. Wow, those rocks are heavy and it was going to take a lot more than I thought. Marjorie helped me gather river rock. My Grandchildren helped me gather river rock. I was accumulating quite a few but I had no sand base to put them in so I began to use them for a path instead of the patio. In the meantime my grandson dug out and flattened the mud hole in anticipation of the patio. The Thiessens lent me their stone making forms as a possible way to get to a patio sooner. I bought some cement but that seemed like too much work for me, too, so I gave the stone forms back and just kept gathering rocks.
By last August 9 ½ years after I moved here I had a fairly flat kidney shaped dirt base and a 150 river rock path that led from the front to the back and about 5 river rocks for my patio. My daughters family was coming for a boating trip which they had begun to do every other year since I had moved here. She asked me if I had any projects that needed doing while they were there. I said, "Well, there is the river rock patio".
Gary, Linda’s husband counseled with me about the patio after they arrived. We concluded we needed sand and we also needed a truck to carry the sand. His son-in- law Mike had a truck with him for the weekend but he had to leave Sunday evening to go back to Reno for work the next week.
Gary borrowed the truck without saying anything to anyone and drove into Chester. He scoped it out—now this was late afternoon—He found a place to buy sand and went there but it was closed but while he was parked there a man comes up and asks him what he wants. He explains about the mother-in-law and the river rock patio and only a week to get it done and the need for sand and the truck only for the weekend. The man was the owner and he filled the truck with sand.
Gary calls the family and tells them to meet him at my house and with the few shovels and rakes I had they emptied the truck, put the black plastic down and then the sand and Gary flattens it all out and makes a kidney shaped patio out of sand. And then each day after they had been boating and skiing Gary takes the children to the river and they gather river rock and put it into his fancy Van that he keeps so clean and they bring them to my house and leaves them at the edge of the patio. Sometimes they made more than one trip and every day while they were boating I would put them in place and the next day they would bring another load. It was going to take a lot of rocks!!!
Now here was a Father who had always expected his children to work – on Saturdays the cars were washed, the lawn mowed, the house cleaned. If they were going somewhere on Saturday, the work was expected to be done on Friday afternoon. I have seen also, if the work is not completed before they went to bed, they must finish it first.
This was a family who had a lot of trips and fun together but who also worked together Their father expected they would do this and there was no fuss, no complaints. It was done and by the end of the week there was only one little area that wasn’t complete and another grandson finished that. I once tried to count the rocks, there is probably around 500—that is a lot or rocks to gather in a week.
I even heard them say it was one of the best vacations they ever had.
As a great father King Benjamin told us from the Book of Mormon ‘When you are in the service of your fellow man, you are only in the service of your Lord.”
You know we are living in a day when many fathers are working to build material legacies of homes, boats, and bank accounts for their children. We, however, have been taught from the Book of Mormon fathers, the importance of leaving eternal legacies for our children. What more could we hope for than to leave our children the spiritual tools of self-control, of love and service to their fellow man and the faith to become witnesses and disciples of Jesus Christ? Think of Lehi teaching his sons Nephi and Jacob, Jacob teaching his son Enos, King Benjamin teaching his three sons, Mosiah teaching his four sons, Alma teaching his sons, Helaman teaching his sons Lehi and Nephi and Mormon teaching his son Moroni and my husband’s father teaching him and Richard teaching his son James and Gary teaching his children. All are fathers leaving eternal legacies to their sons and daughters through their words and through the lives they live.
I will finish with President Hinckley’s final words to all the fathers on Fathers Day 1999. “God bless you. I pray for you, that there may be peace and love in your homes, that you may be prospered in your honest endeavors, and that when the times comes you may stand before the Lord and receive his welcome ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
It was a few years after Marjorie moved here that we were talking about her conversion while treadmilling at the local gym. What a small world--Richard's cousin Joanna Wells was one of the lady missionaries instrumental in her baptism into the Church!
