CONGRATULATIONS AND HAPPY FATHER'S DAY...ME!!!

I want to congratulate myself on being me! Ah, you might have expected such. I am the father of Wendy Chapel, Dusty Rush and Tim Rush. What a threesome! (When they were in grade school I always teased them that they had yet another brother, Dennis, but I traded him off for a free tank of gasoline.)

Those kids were the cutest things I ever saw. At family reunions I always felt sorry for the relatives as we left because Mary and I took the best/cutest/funnest three kids home with us. When in preaching school in Dallas we lived on the second floor of an apartment complex. Money was fiercely tight. Being new in the church and knowing very little Bible while living in a huge and strange city, I was flying through life by the seat of my pants.

I would take those three little kids down to the apartment playground and swing them ‘til their hearts were content. My grandmother had sown homemade clothes for them and they looked homemade. We could have been mistaken for Amish. But the kids were so doggone cute and I loved carrying them around.

Wendy was clearly Daddy’s girl. I was always proud of how she could be both outgoing and quiet. She started out compassionately and has never stopped. One day I came home to find a strange elderly couple sitting in my living room as she found them with their broken down car along the road. Today she is the perfect daughter. She and Chris have three of the cutest kids (one now residing in heaven) of their own.

Dusty started out most talented to stand on his head for great lengths of time. Everyone drew to the orange-headed, dark-eyed boy. When he first started talking (and talking and talking) he couldn’t say “shoes”. He brought much laughter to the relatives when he pointed out someone didn’t have their shuce on. Today, a dad of four, Dusty with Crystal get to work as remarkable leaders in the Kingdom of God working with a church in Conway….and (I’m proud to say) his entire congregation wears shuce.

Tim was just a dandy. When little he would ride the canister vacuum cleaner as Mary swept. He laughed a lot. Tim was wild with adventure and had a heart matching in the range of compassion. Tim was both smart and tender. He could hardly get through college for simply having to go to various foreign mission fields during a few weeks' break. I was most proud of him when he went to Sunset’s School of Preaching, served as an AIM assistant and got a double major at Texas Tech all at the same time. Today he and Kim have three kids and serve God devotedly in Guadalajara, Mexico.

So this weekend I say….Happy Father’s Day Me!!!!