This past Holiday season I received a Christmas card from my Aunt Pat and Uncle Tony as usual. They like to 
keep the family up to date on their comings and goings during the past year. But along with the update, a picture was enclosed. The same picture seen to the right. It is a picture of my dad and me sometime during my first year.
Receiving the photo caused my mind to be flooded with all sorts of nostalgia about my dad. My dad passed away due to complications with diabetes when I was fifteen. I never really got to know him as an adult, and there are times I’ve really missed having a dad around. But receiving the photo allowed me to reflect on the time God allowed us to have together.
My dad was blind for most of my life but he never let the handicap prevent him from trying to do the things he loved. We used to build model airplanes together. We’d install real gas fueled engines on them and then fly them. He was an amazing golfer before he lost his sight and was actually pretty good without it. I would line up his club head behind his ball and give him the details of the hole, like dogleg right about 200 yds, and he would smack it. Most times the ball would go where he intended it. I learned much about the game of golf from our outings.
My dad always tried to make light of his handicap around others. I will never forget a time when I was about 10, my neighborhood friends and I were playing baseball in our back yards and we began to get into a heated argument about something. Probably balls and strikes. My dad came out the back door with a very serious look on his face. We thought we were really going to get it, and then he yells “If you kids don’t knock off the belly aching, I am going to come out there and insist on calling the balls and strikes.” You could tell everyone was thinking on what he said, and then all at once it dawned on us just what he said. We all busted out in laughter.
I miss my dad but I have the utmost confidence that I will see him again when it is my time to enter the gates of Heaven.
Soli Deo Gloria!
Upon This Rawk 