Father’s Week #2: Clyde’s Gentle Nudge

Clyde

I was over 40 when I met Clyde; he was pushing 80. He tried hard to father me in later years when I was still pushing father figures away.

Over the years, Clyde taught me the secrets of growing roses, including how to mix the perfect soil for growing them and how to prune them and when the fragrance is strongest. When my sister died, he helped plant a rose garden in her honor at the bank where she had worked. He also taught me the most important secret of all: The more you give them away, the more abundantly they grow.

Clyde also gave me bushels of homegrown tomatoes every summer and a cutting rooted from a sweet shrub bush that had been in his family for more than a hundred years. He told me his World War II stories. He modeled consistency and love in action and the humility of contentment with being a work in progress.

And when I was still a hostile spiritual novice,  declaring in defeat one Sunday morning that I didn’t know a thing about God, Clyde is the one who looked across the room at me and said, ”Now you’re getting somewhere.”

That was a life-changing moment for me, a moment when God used a kind old man to nudge me gently in the direction of grace and truth.

Clyde has been gone a couple of years now. But, like all good fathers, his legacy lives on in generations of people who continue to walk his walk of patience and compassion and geniality and unconditional love. I hope sometimes I’m one of them.

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