My father-in-law celebrated his 87th birthday last weekend. He’s an incredible person, really—he’s still very healthy and demonstrates that by driving over 200 miles a day, six days a week, delivering car parts!
This is his third lifetime career. After returning home from WW II, his father handed him the reins to the family farm. He farmed the home place for over 30 years. Eventually, he and Naomi built their “retirement home” on the same farm and then quietly, without fanfare, he gave the farm over to his daughter and her new husband in the 1970’s. (Turns out he instinctively knew more about the importance of generational transfer than many of his contemporaries—although I’m sure the obvious competence of his new son-in-law fueled his confidence in that decision.)
Having stepped back from operating the farm and completely unable to sit still, he purchased a dilapidated ditching machine and restored it to like-new condition. Spitting in the eye of retirement, he adapted a sophisticated computer-operated laser system to the machine and proceeded to install hundreds of miles of drainage tile under many farm fields in Fairfield and Perry counties.
At the age most of us are trying to decide which golf course we want to retire to, he rallied every resource he had to support Naomi in her fight with ovarian cancer. They won dozens of small battles, but after 10 war-weary years, cancer won its hollow victory. This time Wayne found himself blinking back at an 81 year old man in his shaving mirror—a man who needed a new assignment. He kept busy around the farm mowing everyone’s yard (including some of the neighbors’), until he accepted a delivery job with an automotive parts store. At the age of 85, he began loading his Buick luxury sedan with car parts making inter-store deliveries to Nelsonville, Cambridge and Zanesville. He confided to me that he would do it even if they didn’t pay him, saying, “I like having something to do every day.”
Like I said, he’s an incredible person, really.
I remember vividly the afternoon in 1973 when my in-laws came to visit us in our tiny starter house and nonchalantly offered to give us a lot to build on and the finances necessary to assure a good start. I was taken aback. It was hard to process that kind of generosity, that level of commitment to our wellbeing. As I grew older and wiser, I realized their generosity made my faith in a generous God so much easier to process. I’d seen what generosity looked like in real life, and as a result it made it much easier to see God’s generous hand operating in my life day in and day out.
One of the most troubling aspects of God to many is that He seems invisible. They say, “Why doesn’t He make Himself more visible, more available?” I understand their ambivalence, it is hard to believe in someone or something you can’t see or touch.
The Bible says in the New Testament book of James, chapter 1 verse 17—
“Every good and perfect gift is from God. It comes down from the Father.”
I’ve discovered something interesting about myself: the more often I acknowledge His gifts, the better I become at recognizing them. You might discover you have the same tendency. Perhaps you haven’t enjoyed the level of generosity I have been privilege to, but you have received good gifts from the Father in Heaven. In fact, I believe everything in our lives that we consider “good” is a gift from our generous Heavenly Father. I hope you’ll lift your gaze just high enough to see the generosity God provides each one of us each day.
Read Ron’s column, Simple Faith, each Saturday on the Faith Page (page 3) of the Lancaster Eagle Gazette, or visit www.lancastereaglegazette.com.