Father's Day 2020

Today marks a “first” for me. It’s the first time I’ve lived through as many Father’s Days without my dad alive on earth as I did with him here. I’m the last of his children to reach that marker in the steady passage of time. When he died in 2000, I was just entering adulthood. A lot has changed. We are all used to life without his physical presence, but he still is part of our lives, and always will be.

My husband encouraged me today to take some time to reflect once again about my dad. So many good words have been written/spoken about him by so many, that sometimes for a moment it seems easier to stay busy than to stop and think and feel his loss poignantly again. What could I write today that hasn’t been written before? And, yet, I cannot not stop and think. “The memory of the just is blessed.” (Prov. 10:7) And so I remember…    

He treated people with courtesy and respect.

If we were already seated at church and someone, especially an older person, stopped to say hi, he would stand back up to talk to him/her. I never remember him making fun of anyone. Even as a teenager, he valued in his friends the character quality of respectfulness. He apologized to his children when he made mistakes. He said that he didn’t think it was wise to compare yourself with others, even if the comparison put you in a favorable light. He was kind.

He used his head.

Anyone that knew my dad knew this to be true! He was a math and languages genius, and a very gifted musician. Without exaggeration, he knew the Bible better than anyone else I have ever known (uh-oh, just realized I made a comparison!). He was literally a walking calculator and concordance. But what stands out to me is that he repeatedly said that he didn’t want his children to base their beliefs about  God just on what he or the preacher said; he wanted our relationship with God to be founded on what we knew to be true because we had seen it in the Bible ourselves.

There are a lot of other things I could write about Johnny V. Boley  – memorable, serious, humorous – but it suddenly hit me that the two paragraphs I just wrote illustrate how he fulfilled the two great commands to love God and love others (Matthew 22:37-40). In doing so, he fulfilled Micah 6:8. May we who are left ever do the same.