Today, I will share with you some excerpts from a book that has not been released yet. I am still working on some of the questions about the final direction it should take. Is it a memoir, or is it a teaching book? That is the unsettled question, but I share this with you and look forward to any feedback you might give me. Here are portions from the chapter entitled, “Introducing Dad”
People always make comments about how unusual our father was when my brother and I tell stories about some of the things we did growing up with Dad. We can only agree; it was indeed unusual, so completely different from anyone else’s ‘Dad stories’ I have ever heard. We grew up as sons of Darrell Lemaire, who was definitely one-of-a-kind.
Our family subscribed to the Reader’s Digest magazine in my growing up years, and in that collection of stories, most of which I would read each month, there was always an article entitled, “My Most Unforgettable Character,” which was typically about some really interesting person. I remember Mom telling me once that if she ever wrote one of those stories it would be about Dad. At the time, I remember thinking, “What?! He’s just Dad. I don’t see anything unforgettable about him.” I was about thirteen then and had not yet caught on to his unforgettable characteristics.
He was just ‘Dad’ to me, and there were plenty of things about him that were irritating to me, the things that were part of a teenage son’s perception. He was a pain; he was bossy and sometimes scary angry; and he was always making me work with him on things that he was interested in, many of which held little or no interest for me.
As I write this, it has been five years since Dad died, so I have had some time to rethink all of those early experiences with him.
I am painfully aware that many boys in the US grow up without a dad, no father-figure in the home, but even that has a powerful influence on what a boy becomes. Missing a dad is, in its own way, as powerfully influential as having one, simply because there is some internal wiring in a son that looks to his parents. He looks to Dad for some things and to Mom for other things. Growing up, other kids have Dads, and a child can ask, “Where is mine? Why isn’t he here? What did I do wrong? Am I not worth it to him?” These questions and many more painful ideas float easily to the surface and there are no easy answers.
But, thankfully, that is not my story. The only Father that was mostly missing in my growing up years was God, the Eternal Father. That factor, the God piece, becomes important because the story of God’s influence on me is necessarily interwoven with what my biological Dad gave me. These two amazing characters, God and Dad, these two very different fathers were, in some ways in competition with one another for my allegiance. It was the struggle of my heart as I had to decide which one I would ultimately believe, on various issues, most importantly, from the beginning, the question of the very existence of God. These were such important questions to settle, because I could not believe both Dad’s perspective and God’s.
Jesus found His way into my heart fairly seriously for the first time as a sixth grader when I read the best-selling classic at that time, The Robe. Mom had given me the book. The way people loved Him in that story, and the things that He was famous for in His life, drew me in. I seriously wanted to know more about Him. Mom gave me a little Bible, and I tried reading the New Testament. It was the King James Version, and “Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob,” seemed to go on and on, and it just defeated me. My eleven-year-old brain couldn’t make it through all the ‘begats.’, so I set the Bible aside as not helpful.
It was not until age twenty-nine that I did come to believe in Jesus. It was at the very end of the Jesus movement that Time magazine called the “Jesus Revolution,” and the Spirit was moving in my age group. And now, after forty-six years of walking with Him, I can only reflect upon how the presence of God in our family when I was growing up might have changed things. I hear stories from my friends today, those who grew up with a father who loved Jesus, and I allow myself to dream a little about how wonderful that must have been.