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Fathers in Focus: 3 Reasons That You Must Take the Role Seriously

ArdyJun 21, 2021Current events,Fishing,Hunting0 Comment

As we move out of Father’s Day and into the coming summer, I want to write to you and stress the importance of that most sacred of roles that we all celebrated yesterday, that of being a dad.

If you are blessed enough to find yourself fulfilling this role in someone else’s life, you need to bear in mind that this honor is one which God has ordained to you and is so important to Him that it is actually a role that he claimed for himself first.

For you see, whatever Holy Book you read, (be it the Bible or the Torah), it doesn’t take a genius to see two things very clearly. They are that first: God planned a big family,  and second: that he wanted each person in it to be involved in it’s continuation. ( I can’t speak for any other writing due to lack of exposure to them). That being the case there are three main concepts about God’s relationship with mankind that I believe stick out and are vital to the place that we as men have in the lives of our sons and daughters.

  1. We are their protectors. Not all mammals are born utterly defenseless like humans are. Deer and horses for instance will be up and running in just a few hours from birth. Many in the animal kingdom are vulnerable for weeks and months; but very few if any are utterly defenseless for years at a time. I believe that is by design and that it serves to mold us as men for the better part of our lives.
  2. We are their providers. Though this aspect of fatherhood is very similar to the first, there is a distinct separation between the feeling of safeness and satiety. Both are different aspect of existence that we as fathers produce in our offspring and both are vital to growth and emotional maturity.
  3. We are their teachers. And with this we come full circle. Through protecting, providing, and teaching we create that great circle of life in conjunction with the God who created us to commune with Him. As fathers we represent our Father in Heaven who made us co-heirs  and advocates of His wonderful plans.
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Making a legacy: How military surplus carries on tradition

ArdyNov 01, 2018Adventures,Current events,Uncategorized0 Comment

It was with mixed emotions that I drove the boy to the Armed Forces Career Center for the final time.

He is, as I write this, in the process of becoming a United States Marine. I couldn’t be more proud of him and I was assaulted with a plethora of memories during that long final drive as I tried to offer him my advice on how to survive boot camp, forgetting for the time being that if he is at all like me, he wasn’t paying a bit more attention to what I was saying than the man in the moon. That’s because he is the type that wants to sort things out for himself, and he also knows that the boot camp I experienced in 1992 is not the same boot camp that he will experience on Parris Island in 2018.

However, we did have a great opportunity to relive some exciting moments that we shared together over the last 22 years.

His first deer for instance. This was a three day deer camp that culminated in his shooting the biggest doe I have ever seen straight through the heart with his brand new Mossburg 20 gauge shotgun that he had gotten for Christmas that year. I had just watched him allow a much smaller doe to creep past us, right underneath the deer stand we were sitting in. He had simply watched her go by, unable to move fast enough to click the safety off and fire the shot that would have made meat for the family for the winter. I was quietly chewing his ass, when he suddenly snapped off the safety, threw the shotgun to his shoulder, and blasted past my ear without a word of explanation. I was a little pissed, thinking that he had simply done that for dramatic effect in response to my chastisement, and then I saw the blood spatter in the snow. A spatter which ended in a steaming pile of nearly a hundred and fifty pounds of fresh venison. That was a great day for me, because being squeamish,  I offered him the chance to clean all the guns when we shoot in exchange for my dressing the game that we shoot. He soon discovered that we shot much more than we hit.

 

And so I look forward to the times that we can spend in his deer camp, telling his war stories to his sons as we sit in his grandfathers old military surplus army tent. This is what memories are made of.

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