Looking forward

To hear my dad tell it, his long career in agribusiness had its genesis in “shoveling chicken [waste] for John Tyson,” proprietor of a humble feed market and chicken hatchery in Northwest Arkansas you’d know now as Tyson Foods. Experiences like those led him to favor the front of the animal, so feed became his business and Checkerboard Square, Ralston Purina International, was where he did most of it.

When he had to retire, colleagues feted him as a great mentor, and tributes poured in from all over the world. Even though his partners spoke different languages, they all said essentially the same thing: Work wouldn’t be the same ­without their leader, teacher, and friend.

I understand why his training methods worked in the rough and tumble of the publicly traded world, and as his son I could attest to them. For example, Dad didn’t believe in training wheels.

About as far back as I can reliably remember, he instructed me on bicycle basics: Pedal to go forward, backpedal to stop, and you don’t so much steer as lean in the direction you want to go. He got me started and jogged behind. As I picked up speed, he let go. Which was the plan, and it was a good plan … until I looked back. I panicked and screamed in his general direction, something like: “Hold on to the bike!” But even as the bike carried me down the street, I swiveled my head as far as I could and kept my eyes locked on my dad.

“Turn around!” he urged. “Eyes forward!”

I pedaled straight into a utility pole.

Good lesson. Dad’s job is to get you started, not ride the thing for you. It wasn’t exactly a Bible lesson, but it could’ve been: “Let your eyes look directly forward,” verse 25 of Proverbs 4 says, “and your gaze be straight before you.” In Proverbs, the father’s invitation to wisdom urges repeatedly, be attentive.

The Apostle Paul commanded attentiveness. This one thing I do, he wrote to the church in Philippi: “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

I couldn’t help but think of this when Dad died a year ago, Aug. 11. Eyes forward, even when they’re blurry with tears.

A few days later, WORLD’s board chairman John Weiss texted me a prayer adapted from a liturgy published in Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2, Death, Grief, and Hope from the Rabbit Room. For the uninitiated, this little publishing house takes its inspiration from the private lounge called the Rabbit Room, in the back of an Oxford pub where C.S. Lewis met with his writers’ group, the Inklings. Artist and singer-­songwriter Andrew Peterson started the contemporary Rabbit Room in Nashville to promote the Christian arts community.

The prayer John selected speaks of a man’s father as a “strong, buffering wall between [the son] and the risks and uncertainties of life, … [one] who did not hesitate to sacrifice resources for his good, or deny desires in order to advance his flourishing.”

Privilege, you might say, which I received in abundance. I remember when Dad first learned that the culture was down on privilege and that it needed to be “checked.” He didn’t take it well. I’ll not quote him in full, but it did include a ­reference to agricultural byproducts. His point was that of course he worked to privilege my sister, my brother, and me. “What father among you, if his son asks for a fish,” the Gospel writer Luke records Jesus asking, “will instead of a fish give him a serpent?”

But probably more important than the resources he provided were the desires he denied to advance our flourishing. Thank God Dad did not indulge my many foolish desires. The secular social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would approve: “In previous generations, parents understood that their job was to work themselves out of a job. Their job was to prepare the kids to leave the home and function independently.”

True, as far as it goes. But there’s substantially more. That Every Moment Holy liturgy also petitions God to meet “in this empty space” the one who mourns a father’s death and the loss of “that ever-present sense of stability and safety.” The prayer is: “May he know the joy of placing all worry of weight and living on You.”

A year after my father died, I’m back on that bicycle, eyes forward—eyes on Christ!