Uselessness of delight
It doesn’t get anything done, but can cover a lot of shortcomings
Andrée Seu

My mother has always been surprised that I have good childhood memories of my father. He was almost never home, whereas she was home all the time. The exception was Sunday mornings, when after Mass he drove us to Lamoureaux Field for batting and fielding practice.

No one had to tell him to: We played baseball on Sunday because it was a blast—for him. And it was always capped off with a visit to Beaudette's Apothecary for coffee "cabinets" (Rhode Island for milkshake) and nabs (Nabisco peanut butter crackers) on the high swivel stools at the bar. I don't remember that kind of detail in most of the rest of my life.

It raises the question of what it is to be a parent in loco parentis for our own heavenly Father. We usually think of proper Bible study as working in the direction from the Bible to life (Normative to Situational), but in the investigation at hand, moving from life to Bible proves as instructive. I consider those Sunday mornings, I weigh my mother's mathematical premises and conclusion, I note a counterintuitive outcome, and I ask the Scriptures to make sense of it. That is, did my father, for all his mistakes (and James 3:2 says we all make them), stumble on biblical gold unawares? And if so, O Lord, show me now that I may at least finish well. the rest photo