Not Words, Tears

As many of you know, I grew up in a great home with parents who loved me and God too much to let me get away with foolishness. Many of you had that kind of home too, and you, like me, have often thanked God for it. My father was a disciplinarian. He knew how to apply the strap of wisdom to the seat of knowledge if you know what I mean. But it wasn’t his application of coporal punishment that reached me at the crucial moment of my life.

It was my sophmore year in high school. I had always kind of grown up enamored with cigarrettes. They had been glamorized back then and didn’t have the stigma attached to them that they do today. The truth is, I didn’t like smoking as much as I just liked rebelling. I started going to the smoking area at our high school, thinking that I could get away with it and that no one would ever find out what I was doing. Now you’ve got to be pretty stupid to be in the only public High School in town and think that your dad, who pastors one of the churches in town, isn’t going to find out about it if you decide to take up such an obvious habit. So he approached me. He asked me if I had been smoking. I said “yes.” He asked me if I was planning to keep on doing that. I said “yes.”

At that point, he could have tried what I expected to try. I expected him to begin preaching his sermon about the body being the temple of the Holy Spirit and bombarding me with the truth that I had heard over and over again at church. He didn’t. In fact, he didn’t say anything that day. He let me stew in my own sin for a while. That afternoon he picked me up from school and took me to his office. He told me he loved me too much to let me get away with doing this and in the middle of the conversation, he began to cry. I didn’t remember seeing him cry before.

You know he could have cited the statistics about smoking and lung cancer, and I would have laughed them off. I was 16; I was going to live forever. He could have talked to me about how this was hurting my testimony and I would have hardened my heart. He could have said so many things and I might have been unmoved. What reached me were not his words; What reached me was his tears.