Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you.

• Deuteronomy 5:16

Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’ they are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
“‘These people honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
    their teachings are merely human rules.’”

• Matthew 16:3-9

My son recently left after spending ten full days here.  The memorial service for my wife was right in the middle.  My son fixed authentic Indonesian food from scratch for the memorial dinner after the graveside ceremony.  He was constantly busy, cleaning the house when not cooking.

On his return trip, that started soon after his birthday, he stopped in Kentucky near the halfway point to his home near Memphis, Tennessee.  He called, excited that they had an A&W restaurant there.  He and his teenaged son had Papa burgers.

Suddenly, I remembered a summer in the late 60s when, after more than ten years of my short life, my Dad had spent the money for me to accompany him alone, just to two of us on one of his service projects, this one in St. George, Utah.

I had just arrived home a couple of days earlier from Philmont Scout Ranch, hiking over 50 miles through the mountains of northeast New Mexico, and here I was flying on a redeye flight from Memphis, TN to Houston, Texas, to Los Angeles, California and finally to Las Vegas, Nevada.  My Dad then drove us from there to St. George, Utah.

Now, I need a little back story.  We lost the turkey farm when I was in first grade.  Now, nearly finished with high school, my father and I had never been close.  He worked service projects and installation projects on equipment used in processing poultry all over the western hemisphere, as far south as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and as far north as Edmonton, Alberta. He would come home.  My mother said that I deserved a beating – not to death, but as close as possible.  Without ever knowing why, he pulled off his belt and he started hitting me with it.  Funny, his bad shoulder prevented him from helping me learn how to hit a baseball, but he could swing a belt with ease.  He had torn up his shoulder in World War II.  He finally had surgery in his 60s or early 70s, but it did not work, too much scar tissue.

So, teaching me sports, he could not do.  Teaching me other things, he was never at home long enough.  But that summer, I had split rails the same way Abraham Lincoln did (probably).  I had these huge logs of an old chestnut tree cut into lengths suitable for fence posts.  I followed the grain and cracks in the wood and made hundreds of fence posts using a metal wedge and a sledgehammer to crack the wood just right so that the log (about five feet in diameter, but hollow in the center) would split and then split again, until nothing left but fence posts.  I also crushed the concrete on the patio so that my mother could plant more flowers.  Again, striking the concrete with a three-pound sledgehammer until it was small enough for me to throw it down the hill.  I only had upper body strength for about 3-4 months over all of my life, all that summer and early fall.

So, I never bonded with my Dad.  We did not play sports together.  We did not go fishing together.  My memories were of the beatings, spankings that went too far and I was never told what I did wrong because he never knew himself, and one fast road trip each summer.

But this was that trip, but by airplane and my mother did not go with us.  Each day that week, he came home at lunch and almost every lunch that we had in St. George, Utah was at the A&W Restaurant.  Root Beer in a frosted mug and a Papa burger.  After a suitable waiting period each afternoon, I swam in the motel’s pool.  There were girls in the pool, but I was too shy…  Okay, girls scared me.  I could not talk to them until I met my future wife.  I had small talk with other girls on dates, but my wife taught me how to talk and how to listen.  So, I never “got lucky” (at least to chat and swap lies) with some other traveler in St. George, Utah.  I swam and watched from afar. Game shows in the morning.  A&W for lunch.  Swimming in the afternoon.  Upper body strength around bikini-clad girls … wasted.

But my Dad and I talked at night.  The weekend in the middle of the two-week project at a chicken plucking plant (please, it is a chicken processing plant, but our family had our own name for it, and please do not try to say our name for it three times really fast, you might embarrass yourself)…  Anyway the weekend featured Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.

In our talks and in our sightseeing, my Dad and I bonded, just a year or two before I left to go to college.

But for the present: All of a sudden, I wanted to be at a restaurant not far from Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, with my son, eating a Papa burger.

Dad, if you have a minute to look down from Heaven, I just want you to know.

I love you.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.