The Impact of a Righteous Father
Elder Daniel Lawler
Farewell Sacrament Meeting Talk
August 23, 2008
Can a righteous father have an impact on his children? The answer is obvious, yes. My family is a perfect example of how one righteous father can truly impact his children. The impact that my own righteous father has had in my life is so apparent that not only has it affected me on the inside but also a lot of what I do on the outside.
What makes a righteous father?
There are multiple factors that can contribute to making a man righteous. I have chosen to talk about what I think makes a righteous father through the example of my own dad:
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of my father is all the fun we have together. My dad is full of life. We rarely spend time together without either playing a sport, watching a sport, or just playing games. Anyone who is a patient of my dads knows Dr. Bill is full of excitement. The movie theater is a good illustration of the enthusiasm my dad has for life; there is always one person who laughs, claps, yells, and is a lot louder than the rest of the crowd; that man is my father. A memory that my older sister Becca loves to recall is when my dad went to see the movie Hook. Near the end of the movie as Robin Williams is remembering that he is really Peter Pan, he has to learn to crow. Guess who else had to show everyone in the movie theater that he also knows how to crow? That’s right, he stood up and crowed. This movie influenced him so much because of the idea of staying young at heart that he had my mom make him a Peter Pan outfit and he had Peter Pan day at his office, crowing all day long. (The movie the cousins went to was Rocketeer and he just stood and clapped.) Any time the family is together there is one common interest we all share, we all love to have a good time together and have fun! In order to have a successful family home evening, there had to be a great super fun activity. There is just no other way our parents could get six kids’ attention without dong something fun. Needless to say there is never a dull moment when you’re around my dad. A righteous father is full of joy.
My father loves to spend time with his family, as a child some of the fondest memories I have are when my father would come home from work. He would rush into the house full of joy often times screaming and shouting to the family “I’m home”; it would then turn into a game as he would come running into the house no matter where I was inside our house or outside our house—I always knew when dad got home. I would drop what ever was doing to immediately run to find my dad and start playing games. Looking back I am amazed just how much energy that must have taken out of my dad, having just worked an 8 hour day having seen patients all day and being busy, he would come home with such energy it was as if he hadn’t worked all day. In any sport I played I always knew who my number one fan was, my dad! I can’t think of a game I have ever played in where I couldn’t look to the sidelines and find my dad cheering me on with a loud voice and big smile. My dad has not only always been there for me at sports, but also wherever I am. No matter what friend’s house I was at, no matter what time I called, I always knew my dad would be there for me. From an early age my father made it a point of telling all of us kids that no matter where we were or what time we called, he will always come get us, no matter what! The stories are endless of late nights when any of us kids would call for a ride, and my father was always there to pick us up. A righteous father is a family man!
I have turned many times to my dad as most kids have for many things. Like most kids the first thing we think to turn to our dads for is money. But my dad has always provided me with more than just money. My dad has always either shown me or taught me by example how to make the right decisions, sometimes it’s not always easy to show me how to make the right decisions and sometimes he has used guilt trips to help me see the right and wrong choices. My father hasn’t done this by telling me what’s wrong, what’s right, and being forceful, he usually with sincerity and a soft voice just asks me. As a young kid I remember taking lots of car trips with my dad because with one of his church callings he had to travel a lot. On car rides we would talk a lot and listen to books on tape. One time I remember talking to my father and sharing my 9 year old point of view with him on girls and women. Very ignorantly I exclaimed that I didn’t know what all the commotion was about with women being able to do all the same stuff us guys could do. I said how all women need to do is just clean the house take care of the kids and make dinner. Leave all the rest of the stuff to us guys… clearly I had no idea what I was talking about and was obviously wrong. It wasn’t the answer that stuck with me that he gave me but it was how he handled his response and it has stuck to me this day. He very calmly with a quite voice said to me “Dano, if you just said what you said to me to a group of women, you would find yourself in a lot of trouble!” Instead of telling me how stupid I just sounded or how dumb of a comment that was, he just softly told me that wasn’t a good idea to share with women what I had just told him. That response led me to figure out for myself that my naïve point of view was wrong. With all the excitement my father shares and as loud as he is I cannot recall a time where my father has ever yelled at me, I cannot recall a time where my father has gotten into a serious argument with me. I have never been afraid of my dad. I do not think fathers should be people you fear, someone you are scared to talk to, or someone you are afraid to tell the truth to because he was always honest with us. LDS.Org says, “A parent who admits his own wrongs and honestly strives to overcome them is trying to become perfect. His honest behavior invites his children to be honest. Parents who honor the covenants and promises they make with God and men teach integrity to their children. Often times in today’s world you see kids that will screw up, do something stupid, and usually the first thing that comes to mind is, my dad is going to kill me! In my life my father has never been criticizing, I have never had to fear whatever actions I did. There was nothing in my mind that was so bad that I couldn’t tell my dad, and it is for those reasons that I respected him, and I chose to do the right things not out of fear but out of love, and because I would never want to disappoint him. A righteous father is soft spoken and approachable.
Having grown up in the church I never had to find out if the gospel was true on my own till I was much older. Through all my childhood like many other kids my testimony of the gospel coasted on that of my parents. My father has always found ways to bless my family’s life through the gospel. My father hasn’t been known to be a preacher but more of an example. I would also put something about being an example and serving a mission somewhere. Dad was the first missionary to leave from Waterville and always set a good example even when it wasn’t easy. He lives the way he taught us to live, which makes it easier to listen to him and believe him. Something about how he told stories about his mission and it made you excited to serve a mission as well. He was always strong in the gospel in a place where there were few members. He was a counselor in the branch presidency at 17!
It is thorough example the others learn. I have gained testimony through the faith that my father has put in the Lord. Any time a member of our family has had to make an important decision my father always required before we made our final decision that we do a pro con list, in which you list the good things that would come from about the decision and the bad things that would come from about the decision. After a verdict is reached he then asked that we take it to the Lord and ask him in prayer. My father would offer his help in praying if we wanted, or have us pray on our own. In any family activity my dad would make sure that the Lord was involved, on long car rides we would pray for safety, on campouts we would have some kind of gospel lesson. Some things were mandatory, but usually our father always gave us the choice of what to do. At the age of 17 we had the choice to attend church, if we didn’t want to go anymore he would let us stay at home, but usually first leaving us with a slight guilt trip. There were some of us who chose not to go, and some who did, but I can say that without the choice I would not have gone to church because I wanted to but because my father made me. My father always gave me agency. During the last year when I attended college at Southern Virginia University I lived in the dorms. For all of us guys living in the dorms, it was our first real experience living away from home, and no longer under the rules of our parents. When Sunday mornings would come around often times it was a hassle to go to church and most kids didn’t want to, mostly because when they were kids they had been forced to go all those years and now that their parents couldn’t make them go, they didn’t. But because of my father’s decision to let me choose before, I wanted to go to church and I did not miss out on the blessings and teachings each Sunday that so many of those kids did. A righteous father is a man of god!
These are just some of the many things that I believe makes a righteous father and I know that there are so many more things that make up a righteous father. In closing I would like to share one of the harder parts of being a righteous father, that even if you are a righteous father and you are doing all the things that you are supposed to it does not always mean that you will see immediate results and impact the lives of your children. Often times it might seem as though you are not getting through to your kids. That despite what you do your kids rebel, I have even seen this in my own family. That my father and mother were doing everything they could and making the right decisions, but for some reason their kids wouldn’t accept their example or counsel. But no matter how bad things got, no matter how useless sometimes they felt, they never gave up. They endured through the bad never giving up hope and faith. It took some kids longer than others to realize their mistakes, but if you asked anyone in my family today, every member of my family could tell you they are in a better place, living a better life than what they used to. Being a righteous father is not always easy.
While writing this talk it has been so clear to me how hand in hand being a righteous father directly correlates with being like our Father in Heaven. The strongest attributes a righteous father can have are those that he learns from our Heavenly Father. A righteous father is like unto our Father in Heaven.
My testimony………
