A Life of Gratitude – Dad’s service – November 2, 2024
It’s very easy to have a legend as a father when the legend cares nothing for his reputation but everything about his own character. It’s very easy to have a teacher for a father when the teacher demands nothing from you that he does not demand from himself. It’s very easy to share a father’s love with a community that loves him when that father’s love draws from the bottomless well of God’s love. Simply put, it was easy to be my dad’s son. Dad spent years planting seeds within me that still find their times to sprout even decades after I left the house – things I did not understand at the time that needed their proper season. I am sure some of those seeds are still waiting. All of us know Dad had a sense of humor – humor that ran to his core. Just as strong was a deep wisdom that was so unpretentious you could almost miss it. He was willing to take the long view, inviting you to see things from a different angle, yet patiently. Dad never, and I mean this – never yelled at us. I’ll digress a bit – not all of you can say that. I had the privilege of working with Dad as I subbed in his school in the mid-90s. One day I was in the classroom next to his with a shared door between us. A minute or two before the bell rang, I heard Dad raise the roof. I didn’t even know he was capable of it. I cracked the door open after the bell and said, “Man, Dad, what was that all about?” He shook his head and said, “I tell you what…” Now when he said, “I tell you what,” he rarely told you what. It simply indicated the height of his exasperation. End of digression. He never yelled at us…. Digression two – it didn’t mean he didn’t get mad. Oh, you could tell when you crossed the line. He’d get real quiet and the bottom would fall out of the barometric pressure in the room. A kid will notice that. And dad was not against spanking either – what in the world do you think that Texas flyswatter was for anyway? But I want to be clear – we didn’t obey dad out of any kind of fear. We obeyed out of love. Because we never doubted that. You can tell when someone has the long view in mind and Dad had the long view – he was interested in our character – and when we let him down on that score, it was palpable – but he never withheld his love. And so those seeds still sprout because they were planted in love.
People found it easy to love our dad. Generous with his time, always interested in how you were doing, remembering things about you years after he first met you. But what made him tick?
Dad never knew his dad. He wasn’t even a year old when his own dad died leaving his mom with nine children she could hardly afford to feed. Dad ran barefooted after his brothers and sisters through the East Texas town of Quinlan to the windows of those who left food out for them on the windowsills. That’s how they survived. When Dad was three, the mailman convinced his mother to put the youngest three kids in the local orphanage, Boles Home, still an extraordinary place that at the time was also a working farm where, among other things according to age, the children picked cotton, milked cows, and slopped pigs. They prayed for supper with their eyes open so no one got a jump start on the biscuits before the “Amen” sounded the call to commence digging in. That would become Dad’s life after the scared little three-year old who spent his first night in the orphanage dorm pacing the floors looking for his mother settled in.
What I am about to tell you everyone here knows is true. What made him tick? You never heard Dad complain or talk about the rotten hand he was delt. It never occurred to him that he had it tough. What you heard rather from his recounting of all his experiences in life was gratitude. He was saturated in gratitude and when you are saturated in it, what you get is the beautiful man we all knew and loved. What you get is Gerald Lee Harrill. He readily told you stories of “the home” as he called Boles Home, stories of breaking open and eating whole watermelons right in the field as they ripened in the hot Texas heat or of raiding the freezer and downing half-gallons of ice-cream in one sitting; of meeting giants in the faith like Tillet S. Teddlie who wrote one of the songs we just sang; of singing across the state of Texas with the Bel Canto Singers; of the shenanigans they all got into and how painful a scorpion sting is – boy howdy they hurt! I wouldn’t know but when I was younger I thought “I wish I had been stung by a scorpion,” – not that I wanted to get stung by a scorpion, but I wanted it to have happened sometime in my past. I’m really quite over it now. He spoke of the excitement when a whole truckload of hightops came in and they all scrambled in to find their size. Through working his way through Abilene Christian College flipping burgers at Templeton’s Pharmacy, meeting mom, getting married, getting a teaching job at Tabernacle, having kids, living life, he lived gratitude. A few years back, after he had grandkids, he said to me, “My dad never got to see his grandkids. The Lord has been very good to me.” The Lord has been very good to me – it was a phrase he used generously throughout his life.
There were, in fact, few things in life that bothered Dad more than ingratitude. If we kids demonstrated anything like what I guess folks now call entitlement or began to dip our feet in the waters of discontent, Dad nipped that in the bud quickly. He didn’t mince words but called things for what they were, saying things like, “Your attitude makes you ugly.” The truth hurts sometimes. He didn’t have time for grudges, you were never out of his good graces, but he told it like it was.
The other thing he would not tolerate, at least for my part, was disrespect toward my mother. It went to the heart of his sense of fairness and justice because he took servant leadership as a deadly serious charge and believed the stronger should always serve the weaker. It’s the kind of justice you find in the Bible, not in the world. He adored my mother. Mom told me a story just a few days ago of their early married life right here among members of this very church. They were sitting apart from one another across the room and Dad winked at mom. One of mom’s friends caught it and said to her, “That man can’t keep his eyes off of you.” Roger Hladky once told dad he was making all the other husbands look bad because wherever Mom wanted to go and whenever she wanted to go there, Dad dropped whatever he was doing and went with her. I guess the women in the church noticed. Only one time in my life do I recall disrespecting my mother. Actually, I don’t remember the details. I do remember the consequences. Having said something in some way, Dad came out to me in the yard and in that quiet voice that meant business said, “Respect your mother.” That’s all he had to say and he only had to say it once because I knew where it came from. Don’t lord anything over anyone who is weaker than you. You have a charge to keep. It reigns first in the family relationships and spreads to all others. He understood personally the terms “widow, orphan,” and “foreigner” – after all, he was a Texan living in New Jersey. He served us all, and by that I mean everyone he came into contact with, remembering no servant is greater than his Master.
There is a lot of talk these days about legacy and it all just rings hollow to me. It sounds short-sighted and self-serving, something very un-Gerald-like. Dad had one desire – that all the descendants after him would remain faithful to the Lord. He didn’t care about legacy. He did care about the punch in Micah 6:8 – “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” We have 66 books of the Bible that take it from there. Someday, we’re going to follow Dad and all those who have gone before. And what advice would Dad give? Simply this – make sure you are in Christ. And when the time comes, be a frayed… knot. I love you Dad. I’ll see you soon….