"One of the things my father taught all his sons was how to use a cross-cut saw. His daddy and his daddy's daddy had taught their sons, and my father was not going to let this rite of passage for rural southern manhood end with him....One brisk fall morning, we began sawing on a log that we did not know had a rotten core. When we had sawed partially through the log, it split and fell off the sawing frame. The timber hit the ground so hard that a large piece was sheared off from the rotten log. In my childhood imagination, the unusual shape of the sheared piece looked like a horse head. It so captured my imagination and I took it home from the day of sawing.
For my father's birthday, I attached a length of two-by-four to the log, attached a rope tail and stuck on some sticks to act as legs. Then I halfway hammered in a dozen or so nails to the two-by-four body of the 'horse'. I wrapped the whole thing in paper and put a bow on it.
When I gave it to my dad, he took off the wrapping, he smiled and said, 'Thank you, it's wonderful....what is it?'
'It's a tie rack', Dad, I said. 'You can put your ties on those nails going down the side of the horse's body. My father smiled again and thanked me. For years he used it as a tie rack.
Now when I first gave my father that rotten log horse tie rack, I really thought it was good. In my childish mind this creation was a work of art ready for the Metropolitan Museum. But as I matured, I realized that my work was not nearly as good as I had once thought. In fact, I understood ultimately that my father had received and used my gift not because of its goodness, but out of his goodness. In a similar way, our heavenly father receives our gifts, not so much because they deserve his love, but because he is love"
michael,
ReplyDeletei love this story, and the thoughts afterward. thanks for posting it. keep on brother.