DAD'S OLD STUFF

I don’t think we realized it really, until after Daddy died.  It’s kind of a funny story in itself.  Dad was always collecting stuff, accumulating stuff and buying stuff.   Stuff from Publishers Clearing House or any place else he could find it. The clearing house stuff, I guess, was his way of playing the lottery.  Maybe, just maybe, if he bought some of their “not seen in store” items, he may have a better chance of winning all that money.  So he bought their “stuff”. 

At the Bill and Keva Collum house we use to have “Christmas in August”.  It was a time when we bought items at the Dollar store, wrapped them in newspaper and gave them to each other in August on a designated "Christmas in August" day.  We put up a “Charlie Brown” Christmas tree, hung the lights and just got together with the family to have a good time.  Well, the year maybe two years after Dad died, instead of buying stuff, we just gave each other the stuff out of Dad’s boxes. 

You see we started going through his belongings and cleaning out some of the boxes he had accumulated and found box after box of what Dad thought was useful “stuff”.  To us it was junk but in Dad’s eyes it just might be useful to someone someday. And it was, it was useful for us to laugh at and have a good time with and it helped us remember Dad for a little while longer. Dad saw the good in things that most of us would just ignore and think was junk.

But back to what I  started to say, I can distinctly remember one year a gift that Dad gave me.  He was still in business at the old cab company in Alabaster.  I visited him one day and as I started to leave he stopped me and wanted to give me something.  He always did that.  He would reach in his desk, or in his old cab and find something he thought I might use. This day he pulled out an old calendar.  It was a kind of calendar / journal thing.  It had the month laid out on one side and on the other were pages to be used for notes. 

Well, even though the calendar was last year’s calendar, the little book was nicely bound and no one had written in it so Dad, knowing that I was one to write down lots of stuff, gave me the little book.  In the inside cover he wrote, “To Bill, to use not just save”. (In spite of what Dad said, I still have that little book saved away somewhere.)

I guess Dad knew that I was a packrat too.  Because that little book was his, I would just save it and not write in it. So he had made the distinction that I was to “use it” and not “just save it”. 

You know without me telling you this that I do the same stuff Daddy did.  When my children and now grandchildren come to visit, I may not always do it, but I always think of it.  I try to find something just lying around the house that I think you would “use”.  Heck, you will probably see it in the gifts I give.  The old ragged pallet furniture, the “hand-made” bowls and such are all examples of stuff that you are probably embarrassed by but will take and thank me and then it will end up collecting dust somewhere.

As I was thinking about these crazy traits that I have inherited from my Dad I suddenly realized that perhaps Dad and I had inherited this trait from our Heavenly Father.  You see, Father God looked down and saw some really ragged stuff.  In the eyes of others it was nothing more than junk.  But He loved that junk and saw the usefulness in that junk and so He sent His Son (what an enormous sum to pay for junk) to buy it and save it.  That which was ruined by neglect, and selfishness and misuse, He saw as salvageable and “useful”, He bought the junk and with the pen of the writers of the New Testament, across the pages of that junk He wrote “To use, not just save”. 

I am so thankful that the Almighty God of Heaven looked at Dad and me and saw that even though we were broken, ruined, and in the eyes of men, useless, chose to save us.  But even more this morning, I am thankful that He didn’t just “save” us but He put a little note on our hearts.  I think it might have been the same note that Dad put in that little book; “To use, not just to save”.

Lord, my prayer this morning is that you will use me.