UP – The Marked Up Bible:
As a child, Dad’s Bible always fascinated me – I can still picture it today, clear as a bell: softcover, thinline, a cover of gray leather with his name imprinted in silver foil on the bottom right-hand corner. It was not, by any means, in mint condition – which when it comes to Bibles, is actually a good thing. With just one look, you could tell my father was putting that book to good use. As fascinating as the outside was, it couldn’t hold a candle to the character to be found inside: verses highlighted in different colors; notes written in his oftentimes-illegible handwriting filled every margin; paperclips joined pages together in an organizational method beyond my ability to comprehend. If I knew one thing as a kid, it was this: my dad was the smartest man on the planet, and his Bible could prove it. No other person I knew, at church or not, had a Bible that could rival Dad’s. Of course, just filling your Bible with notes and different colored highlighters doesn’t make one righteous, but even as a youngster, I could tell from Dad’s Bible that his relationship with God was something he took serious. He wasn’t just reading this book, he was studying and digesting it as if his life depended on it – which, in all actuality, is the complete truth. As I grew older, he, along with my mother, encouraged me to start reading God’s word on my own, a habit that lives on to this day. Even now, my Dad remains my on-demand commentary. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve interrupted his supper with a phone call, asking for insight into a Bible passage – and he’s had an answer, every single time. With that little gray book, my father’s led the congregation of First Baptist Church for over twenty years, but more importantly, with that same book as his guide, he’s led his family.

IN – Roger Clemens Baseball:
The first love of my life was baseball. Twenty years ago, nearly every single Atlanta Braves baseball game could be found on cable TV, courtesy of TBS. I sat there, night after night, basking in the glow of America’s game. When I wasn’t watching baseball, I was knee-deep in pick-up games with other kids around the neighborhood. When weather put a stop to those plans, then I’d fire up my state-of-the-art Nintendo Entertainment System (old school!) and play Roger Clemens Baseball. It was a game made way before licensing agreements, so the only “real” player featured on the entire game was Mr. Clemens. Thinking back now, I’m not even sure they used the actual team names, instead identifying them only by their city. At any rate, I spent hours chasing the pennant on that video game.

My Dad taught me everything I needed to know about baseball, himself having grown up in Atlanta an avid Braves fan. As a child, those games and player took on mythic proportions. Forget Hercules, Perseus or Odysseus, the real heroes were Greg Maddux, David Justice, and legendary manager Bobby Cox. I’ll never forget watching (and rewatching) Sid Bream’s infamous slide into home plate which sent Atlanta back to the World Series in 1992, celebrating our only World Series championship in 1995, or my first game at old Fulton County stadium in Atlanta, which the Braves won on a 9th-inning homerun by then-catcher Greg Olsen. But of all the great baseball memories I have, the ones that mean the most to me were the times Dad played ball with us. He’d come dead tired after spending hours at the church planning sermons, running meetings, and visiting the sick – and yet, he’d still find the energy to hit fly balls to me and my brothers in the backyard. And I distinctly remember a time, before my brothers were any type of competition in video games, when Dad sat on the floor beside me, and I tried to teach him how to play Roger Clemens baseball. It was a sight. I laughed and laughed as he let balls trickle out of the infield, missed pop-ups, or accidentally threw the ball to the wrong base. Those times are precious – in choosing to lower himself, to sit on the floor and play video games when there were so many more important things he could have been doing, I understood that my Dad was choosing me. And that feeling was even better than hitting a walk-off home run.

OUT – A Tan Toboggan:
Three days ago, I was pulling weeds with some friends in our church’s prayer garden. Knowing it’d get a response from me, one of my coworkers suggested we just use a popular herbicide to kill the weeds. When I answered negatively (as they’d all assumed I would), one of them asked me why not. That particular herbicide, I explained, is mass-produced by a company involved with genetically-modifying crops, inflating demand for their own products, and pushing forward the trend of big, agribusiness at the expense of small scale farmers, even suing farmers who save their own seed from year to year. As my rant came to a close, they all nodded, like this was response was expected, and we got back to pulling weeds.

These types of conversations are nothing new to me. Since college, a great portion of my life has been dominated by social justice causes. I’ve fed the homeless, marched in protest against mountain top removal coal mining, joined rallies to end the use of child soldiers, attended conferences on stopping the global sex-trafficking trade, and monetarily supported a child in Africa for the last eight years. My faith in Christ compels me to care deeply about His creation – that includes not only the environment, but also the people who inhabit it. The numbers are staggering: over 1 billion people on our planet don’t have clean drinking water; 2.5 billion lack adequate sanitation and suffer from preventable diseases; there are more slaves today than existed at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the Horn of Africa wastes away from starvation while America experiences an obesity epidemic. As my friends learned on Thursday afternoon in the prayer garden, I can go on and on…

I know exactly when this passion for others started. It was the middle of winter, cold, inches of snow covering the ground. I was in middle school, and my normal routine was to walk home after classes ended – exerting my independence, I guess. The drastic shift in the weather, however, had changed my plans; Dad swung by to pick me up that afternoon. Like I said before, my father grew up in Georgia, so he has little love for cold weather – in fact, he can’t stand it. He bundles up like an arctic explorer just to make the short dash to the mailbox. That day, he was wrapped up as usual – huge coat, scarf, gloves, and a tan toboggan on his head. As we made the short ride home, my mind wandered, probably focused on all the homework I had waiting for me. I was jerked from my daydream when, out of nowhere, our car made an unexpected U-turn. I opened my mouth in protest just as my Dad was rolling down the window. “Hey man, come here,” he yelled, “It’s cold – put this on.” With those words, he took off his hat and tossed it to a man I hadn’t noticed, shivering as he walked down the side of the road.

On the way home I learned the rest of the story – Dad had worked with this man through the church. He was semi-homeless, couldn’t hold down a job, and had a hard time making ends meet. Other people around town called him a bum and saw him as a burden, but that afternoon, all Dad saw was a man, created in God’s image, who was suffering. So he did exactly what Christ commands His followers to do – he sacrificed his own comfort so that someone else might be comforted. Dad’s faith wasn’t just something he preached on Sundays and Wednesdays, but a force that drove him to love “the least of these.” Though Dad’s ears might have been cold on the way home, my heart was not, fanned into a flame that continues to burn for those in need. And to think, it all started with a tan toboggan.

In a world where it seems fatherhood is going by the wayside, the recipe is actually quite simple: “UP,” “IN,” and “OUT” are the only ingredients you need to be a life-altering, God-pleasing, three-dimensional dad. And if you need an example, swing by Danville, Kentucky, and look up Jack Timothy Mathis. If I know one thing, it’s this: he’d be happy to help.