The following is another in the series of Lessons from My Father. This one is a little more rambling than The Wheelbarrow, in part because it contains more than one topic. However, all of the elements in this one pointed me to putting relationships in a more important place in life than my rights or goods. In reality, it is the Second Greatest Commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself.
Dad would rather suffer an injustice than put the screws to someone; I’m confrontational. I recall one summer when I was very young that a potato farmer rented some of our hayfields to plant his crops and then failed to pay the balance of the bill to my parents, or so I was told. From what I understood, Dad preferred not to take the man to court over it, citing Scripture’s command not to sue a fellow believer in a secular setting, so our family was out the money due us. I struggled to maintain a charitable attitude when I learned about getting short-changed like that. On the other hand, Dad was being charitable, sowing mercy, and reaping a harvest of mercy and righteousness that I didn’t comprehend at such a young age.
Over the years, Dad did his best to assemble the family for family worship after supper. We usually sang and then read a passage from the Bible and prayed. I squirmed. A lot. I don’t know why, exactly, but when I see my sons squirming now, I remember my experience from childhood. I have not done well with this practice at all as a dad, although the boys and I did have several stretches over their younger years when I would read the Bible and pray with them at bedtime.
As a teacher in public school, my father had responsibilities that kept him away from the house some evenings. We lived equidistant from his work, which was west of us, and where we went to school, which was east of us, 30-40 minutes either way, depending on traffic and road conditions. Also, he was an elder in our church, which was east of us, in another part of the same city where we went to school, and he attended meetings there at least once a week, I think. It seemed he was away from home at least two or three evenings a week or had meetings at the house.
We attended Sunday school and church every Sunday morning, and then evening service, too. We also attended prayer meetings or hosted them at our house. It differed over the years. Some of my earliest years, Dad served as pulpit supply at the East Dixmont Community Church. We had just one vehicle, so he’d drive us to Bangor for Sunday school, drop us off, and then drive to East Dixmont for church there. When church was over there, he’d return to Bangor to pick us up and go home for lunch. He did a lot of driving in those days.
It was once such Sunday in the fall of the mid-1970s when we lost the barn. The night before, my brother and I had helped Dad line a room in the barn with bales of mulch hay to make a cozy place for the chickens to spend the winter. We held off on moving the hens that night, though. The next morning, after we left for church, a fire was started. A neighbor noticed it and called the fire department. Then he called our church. Mum got the call just as Sunday school was finishing up. She found a ride for us with someone who had a car large enough for all of us.
As we hurried home, someone else contacted Dad somehow. To this day, I don’t know how he was reached in East Dixmont. They didn’t even have running water or indoor plumbing in their church.
Today, nearly 42 years after the fact, I can still picture the cars and trucks lining both sides of the road of the final quarter mile to our house, blocked from continuing due to the ferocity of the fire. When our driver tried to proceed, a fireman stopped him. Our friend rolled down his window and Mum shouted to the fireman, “That’s my barn!” He let us through.
I sat by the three trees at the corner of the driveway and watched the barn burn. Dad arrived home just as the roof collapsed. The entire season’s hay was gone, hay that would have been sold to pay our Christian school tuition. Of far greater concern to Dad was that a neighbor had parked some farming equipment in the barn for safekeeping for the winter, and that had burned up, too. At some point, a dead tree behind the barn caught fire, broke off, and rolled down the hill into an uncut field, causing it to light up. A firetruck had to be driven down there to put out that blaze. The State Fire Marshal was never able to pinpoint a cause, though he suspected arson.
Dad was more concerned about his relationship with the neighboring farmer than with the material loss we suffered. By God’s grace, the other man was also a believer, and was a forgiving man. It helped that the barn was insured, but it took me a long time to comprehend that relationships are more important than materials, a lesson well demonstrated by my father’s reaction to our barn fire.
Mack Ames Books and Maine Moose Patrol 