10-09 A Chldhood Personal Lesson

➡ Paul, the narrator, shares his personal journey growing up in a small town near Dallas, born to parents who lived through the Depression. His father had to quit school to work on the family farm, while his mother managed to finish high school and attend some college. Paul’s childhood was marked by severe asthma, which led to him spending a significant amount of time in the hospital. Despite the hardships, he learned valuable skills from his grandparents, such as cooking, electrical work, and sewing, and started working at a young age to contribute to the family expenses.
➡ From a young age, the author worked hard and made independent decisions, including traveling and pursuing education. Despite facing personal challenges and a divorce, the author learned to overcome anger and other issues. The author emphasizes the importance of parents teaching their children about God and leading them on the right path, as stated in the Bible. The author encourages everyone to keep faith, stay strong, and shine their light in the world.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pug at God Is Government called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer, in Matthew 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry, focused not only on uplifting Scripture, but Scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today’s focused discussion will be on a childhood personal lesson. I have thought long and hard as to whether I would be willing, no not willing, but unafraid to write or discuss my childhood.

As I sit here and write this devotion, it has been one of the hardest for me to create. The emotions that I am dealing with bring back events that I thought I had long forgotten. As with many of you listening to this will soon come to understand about your own life. I was born in a small country town, about 45 miles northeast of Dallas in 1955. My father was born in 1921 and my mother in 1922. As you can imagine, both of my parents lived through the depression which shaped their minds for the rest of their lives.

My father had to quit school in the eighth grade to stay at home and work in support of their family. My father’s family were farmers and the hired help became scarce when the money to pay them dried up. So my father and his oldest siblings were required to quit school and work on the farm. My mother lost her biological father in World War One and her mother remarried and they could afford more things which allowed my mother to finish high school and attend a couple of years of college before World War Two broke out.

My father understood the hard way about life with my mother, having it not so hard. But nonetheless, both had to work when they could to provide income for the family, as well as support what they wanted to do as individuals at a very young age. I am not saying that this was bad for their upbringing, but due to the circumstances by which they had to work, took the toll on them because of the weight of making sure they carried their weight or the family would suffer. I never met my father’s father because he died one month before I was born, but the stories I was told by my father and his siblings shaped my perception of him.

My perception of him was that he was a tough taskmaster. He required all the children to get up at 4am and start work, regardless of whether they were attending school or not. So for the years that the clan got to attend school, their day started at 4am and went until they could not do anything more. They attended school and came home and did more chores until it was dark. They had supper altogether each night, and the children were responsible for cleaning up after dinner, and then they did studying and personal cleaning after that and to bed.

So on a good day, the children got about five to six hours of sleep each night. When they had to quit school to support the family, they were treated no different than any other hired help. However, they didn’t get paid for the family work, so they found that they needed to take on a second job in order to afford to do things they wanted to do. My father’s mother was part Native American. She took care of the home, cooked, worked on the farm and helped raise the children. She lived up until I was five years old, so my memories of her were one of teaching me how to cook and about nature.

She made the best pies, homemade biscuits and ice cream. My mother’s stepfather was a licensed electrician. He was a short fellow of stature, but one that liked to fish. My mother was the oldest, the stepdaughter with two half-sisters from my grandmother’s second marriage. He was regimented in his day. He started promptly at 8am and he stopped at 11.30am for lunch and always ate at the same cafe each day and took a nap. He returned to his afternoon of work at 1pm sharp and worked until he was done for the day. On most days when the weather permitted, and on some when it was not too bad, he left work and went fishing.

My mother’s mother was a seamstress. She made all kinds of things and grew her talents into a small cottage business, sewing for the local community. She set up her shop in the front end of the building she and my mother’s father bought. The back end of the building was storage and an electrical shop, where my grandfather stored supplies and tools for his electrical trade, and the repair shop he had to tinker with small appliances. My grandmother cooked well enough, but that was not where she liked spending her time. At night, after sewing all day, she liked to crochet.

She would make booties for grandchildren, table runners, afghans, and more. My mother’s parents lived through my teenage years and early adulthood, so I bet you can guess what I learned. You got it. I was the gopher for my grandfather and learned everything electrical to the point I can plan and wire an entire house, but I don’t have the licensing to hook it up to the city main. And you got it. My grandmother actually taught me how to sew. I can lay a pattern out on cloth and know just how you cut it.

I can sew back my buttons. They have come off my shirts and more. Now that came in handy as I travelled the world in my younger adult career. My parents met in my hometown and got married, and in the first year had my older sister. Three years later, they had a stillborn, and then I came three years later with my younger sister, 17 months thereafter. So in a very short order, my parents had three children under the age of seven years old. The house we lived in was very small and was a duplex in its original form.

My dad, with the help of some of his friends, remodelled the duplex to a single dwelling. When they finished the remodel, we had a three-bedroom home. I was born with asthma, which put me in and out of the hospital more times than I want to count now. But in essence, I spent 18 months of the first two years of life in an oxygen tent in the hospital. Medical procedures at that time had no real focused drugs to aid in the issues caused by asthma, so the doctors took me off of all dairy products and any citrus, so my liquid intake consisted of water, apple juice and beer.

My father thought that I should have nourishment, and in his mind, that was beer. Both of my parents smoked and did so not only in the house but in the cars they owned. When I complained that I could not breathe, they cracked a window and kept going. As I grew older, I found that in the car, I could only breathe by lying on the floor of the car with my nose underneath the seat of the car. When I reached the age of around five years, the doctor told my parents that they needed to build my lung capacity and that they needed to place me outside and have me play to build my lungs.

But what happened was I would get an asthma attack and go to the step at the back door and ask to come in, and instead of allowing me entry, they ignored me, as the doctor told them to do. This made things worse, because as a child when you can’t breathe, you panic and begin to get very emotional. So instead of building my lung capacity up, I began to build an internal anger that lasted for a very long time. I finally grew out of the asthma around the third grade, eight years old.

As soon as my dad saw that I was much better, he sat me down and told me his story of helping the family, and that he wanted me to understand that I needed to find work, so I too could aid in the family expenses by taking care of as much of my personal expenses as possible. So at the age of eight years old, I started working. I will not go into the jobs which I had, but will say that I begin to see a life only as I would make it, and not taught by my parents.

I need to back up a bit and identify that my mother was very controlling and my dad was an alcoholic with a bad temper. So when we got old enough to understand this, we had to figure out at the end of the day when the parents came home what the state of affairs were going to be, based upon how much my mother wanted to be in control, complaining all the time, or how much my dad had drunk. At age 13, I was pretty much paying my own way at home. By age 15, I was working three jobs, which kept me out of the house with school and allowed me to build my own focus about how life should be.

I made a decision that I would travel the world. Beginning at age 15 and through 17, I worked all school year after school and the summers I traveled the United States. When my mother began to tell me I couldn’t do this, I literally told her that I made my money and I would damn well spend it as I choose to do, and if she didn’t want to take me to the airport, I would find someone that would. This traveling experience allowed me to experience as a teenager what many don’t experience until much older in their 20s.

Whether or not that was good or bad, it didn’t matter. I was learning and living life like I wanted. At the age of 18, when I graduated from high school, I was driving an 18-wheel fuel tanker truck. I was dating a preacher’s daughter at the time, and one of the deacons at the church asked me if I would be interested in a mentorship program at a local government contracting firm, and I jumped at the opportunity because it paid for my education. I was the first and only to graduate from college at that time.

Upon graduating from college with a degree in accounting, I made the decision to move companies and my corporate life began. The first year out of college I got married, and in the second year of marriage we had a beautiful girl, and within a few months thereafter I was told by my wife’s mother that we were getting a divorce. By this time I had all the family drama I could stand of her parents, and I said fine and walked out. It was my decision, based upon how I saw my parents live and raise us, that I would leave her with everything, including support, and I would literally start over.

My entire life I never wanted to be like my parents, but at around 30 years old I found that I was just like my dad, and it crushed me. It took the next 15 years to figure out just how to remove the issues from my life, anger, so that I could continue on the journey of not being like my parents. That finally occurred, but not without great difficulty placed on my marriage and my children. How does this relate to an individual life and the lives of the generation of children that come from your life? According to the Bible, God’s primary commandment to parents is to honour your father and mother, which is the fifth commandment found in Exodus 20 verse 12.

This essentially means to respect and value your parents, listen to their guidance, and treat them with love and consideration. This was much in question to me as I dealt with my life’s crisis. The biblical role of a parent is to be a good steward of the children God has placed into their care. Parents are responsible for caring for their children’s spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being. The most important biblical duty of a parent is to teach their children about Jesus in action and word. Let me ask a question. How can a parent teach their children when they did not have a childhood? To understand, children are not adults until they have been trained to be adults.

Can you even imagine a mind of a child being taught by a parent that was never a child? God charges parents with the responsibility and authority to nurture their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. For education to be truly biblical, godly teachers must instruct children with God-honouring and life-equipping principles and materials so they become productive members of the kingdom of God. It is the responsibility of the father to raise their children. Colossians 3 21 says, fathers do not embitter your children or they will become discouraged. Although the Lord does not punish people directly for the sins that their fathers commit, the Lord punishes those who follow in the sins of their fathers.

Their father’s sins often reverberate and the consequences can be felt for generations to come. Exodus 20 verse 5, God warns that he will punish the children of those who hate him for the sins of their parents, even to the third and fourth generation. Exodus 34 verse 7, God will visit the iniquity of fathers on children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation. Numbers 14 verse 18, the Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. So when God tells you to teach your children there is a reason.

Don’t cause issues with your children and your children’s children with the decisions and your own issues. As parents, we have a command from God to make the right decisions and teach our children the ways of the Lord so they never stray from his path. According to the Bible, the verse that best reflects this idea is Proverbs 22 verse 6, which states, train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it. This means that by actively teaching your children about God’s ways from a young age, they are more likely to continue following God’s path throughout their lives.

Thank you for joining us in this exploration of a childhood personal lesson. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].