I know Father’s Day isn’t for two weeks, but my own father is always in my heart and mind, and our Father in Heaven should be. After all the greatest known prayer is the “Lord’s Prayer”, or the “Our Father.” We would do well to pray the “Our Father” as often as we can.

God has made His presence and His love known in many ways, especially as father, as parent. Scripture is replete with specific references to God as our father. As a matter of fact, Jesus specifically directs us in Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Even though God is all love, what is it about His perfect fatherly love that Jesus passionately wants us to emulate? So much of fatherly parental love is found in acceptance. Other characteristics involve the recognition of fault and giving a way out; redemption. Therefore, perfect fatherly parenting comes through Jesus, end of story.

All of us have biological fathers, and we can easily conclude that they were not perfect, especially when we thought they were over-disciplining us for some wrong we thought was right! (at the time). As they say, ‘hindsight is 20/20’. Regardless, they are ours.

I must give a shout-out to my own dad, who died in 1973 when I was 15 years old. His gravestone was inscribed with the epitaph, “A man for others”. Why? He was born to a poor rural family in 1915, was taken out of school at an elementary age, never to go back. He was supposed to work on the farm. He served briefly in WWII, was a truck driver and, he and my mother, raised 10 kids. Because he smoked, he died of emphysema at 58 years of age. Good, but not apparently special. A deeper look at his life, however, reveals he had a happy and constant view that propelled him to work, for his family and for others. Even though sometimes tired and later he had a hard time breathing, his vision never veered; he chose to love God, his family and others. Again, end of story. Many years after my dad died, I found out that other truck drivers would seek to find out where his travels would take him so they could meet up with him and seek his counsel. His epitaph makes absolute sense.

Watching my own sons live their lives as fathers, husbands, and as good Christian men evokes from me and their mother, initially prayer, for them, their marriage, and their children. We pray in immense gratitude for God loving them into existence and giving them to us. We pray for their busy lives that they may be, as they pray, ‘instruments of God’s peace’. We pray that we may all be in Heaven together someday………….I catch their grandfather’s spirit in the beauty of their lives, as they, too, are men for others.

Let us not be found to have relegated our fathers to a bare significance and memory. Rather, let us revere, respect and indeed love them dearly and forever, as we do our Father in Heaven.