When I wrote “Choosing Life” I told you a little about how my father ended.  Let me tell you how he began.  I have a box of momentos that I saved from my childhood.  In it there are several pins that my father received from having perfect attendance at his Baptist Sunday School.  When I became a Christian (in my twenties), my dad told me that he had “accepted Christ” when he was a boy in Sunday School.   My dad also told me about meeting his Sunday School teacher many years later.  His teacher had told him to follow his conscience.  So my dad cheerfully told that teacher that he had spent years teaching his conscience to okay everything he wanted to do.  The Bible calls it ‘searing the conscience’ and the end of that exercise is becoming a ‘reprobate.’

My mother chose to marry my father because he didn’t drink.  Her other boyfriend drank beer.  My father joined the army during WWII and was sent to the Philippines as a cook.  When he came back, he had learned to drink and smoke.  The war was not responsible for his cheating on my mother.  He was doing that before the war.  My grandfather got him a job at a rivet company.  The men there teased him about blushing whenever they cursed.  So my father, when he was alone in the machine room, taught himself to curse, covered by the noise of the machinery.

My dad was blessed with talent and intelligence.  He started his own rivet company.  We, as his family, starved for a few years as the company was developed.  Soon he became successful, and he was a millionaire.  But my dad was also an alcoholic.  I was the one to tell him.  No one backed me up, and I was disowned.  Soon after, he left my mother.  Then he disowned my older son.  Divided we fall.  At the end, my dad could not say three words in a row without the worst profanity.  He died alone, having gambled away the millions he had worked for so hard.  If he had been sincere as a teen, none of this would have happened.  In between beginning and ending there are many choices.  We have to be vigilant and focused on the Lord so that we end well.   We are blessed if we start well, but it is how we end that counts.  Especially in eternity.

My dad’s ashes were spread over the grave of Billy Clanton in Boot Hill by his latest “girlfriend.”