"How To Change A Diaper"

     My wife and I had finished eating at a local restaurant and as I often do I asked if there was anything she needed to do in town or any place she wanted to go before we started home.  “Not really,” she said and then added, “Why don’t we go by the book store and look around.”  Well it doesn’t take much convincing to get me into a book store so I pulled into the parking lot.  We made our rounds commenting about various books.  My wife picked up a book titled “The History of Death” which was appropriately next to “The History of Disease”.  The assortment of books continued, books about things, books about people, books about food and the ever-popular books where the cover features a shirtless hero and a distressed damsel whose hair and dress indicates she is being swept away by the wind.  I suggested that maybe I should have posed for such a cover on my book. I can’t accurately describe the look I received following this statement, let’s just say I took it as, disapproval.  Who knows she could be right.  We continued to browse through the various titles until one caught my attention in part it was because of the length of the title, it took up most of the cover. The title was “Life Skills, How To Chop Wood, Avoid A Lightning Strike, and Everything Else Your Parents Should Have Taught You!”.  I picked it up and started thumbing through it.  True to its title it was full of information from how to check the oil and change a flat on your car, to basic cooking and how to change a diaper.  As I looked through it I made a mental list of the things that I had been taught to do by my parents.  I’m happy to say they were excellent teachers for I could find nothing that they had not covered some time or another in my life. My mother thought it was important that her boys, not just her daughter, knew how to cook, sew and do the other jobs found around the house.  I have many fond memories of cooking in the kitchen with her, my favorite thing to cook was cake from scratch with homemade chocolate icing.  Growing up on a farm, my father instructed me on the variety of task that it took to keep a farm productive.  I was instructed in welding, plumbing, carpentry, mechanic work, and the husbandry of both plants and animals.  There are hundreds of things that I take for granted each day that I learned from my parents.  But as I looked through the book there were some very important chapters that I felt were missing.  There was nothing there on how to get along with a neighbor, one’s responsibility to family, or how to live in such a way as to be pleasing unto God.  Speaking to Timothy, Paul mentioned Timothy’s mother and grandmother when he said, “When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also (2 Tim. 1:5).  I was blessed to have parents and grandparents that lived and instructed us in these three chapters.  I remember how they helped willingly those in need whether it was physical or spiritual.  I remember asking my father how much we would get payed for helping my grandfather bring in his hay crop or did he think we could start getting an allowance.  I do not remember his exact response but his example said, “You don’t always work for pay, it is the character of a man to do the right thing, because it’s the right thing.  My father and mother in word and deed have strived to put God first in their lives and in so doing instructed their children in that same path.  If you were to tell my parents they had to choose between their children being successful socially and monetarily or being righteous and pleasing to God there is no doubt in my mind what they would choose.  There is nothing that says we cannot strive for both, but one often stands in the way of the other.  As we instruct our children, grandchildren, and fellow man in word and deed, let us not forget the chapters in our book, of God, Family, and our Neighbor.  For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mark 8: 36)