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| Wayne and Dean Fuller |
I would like to share a
beautiful tribute that my husband wrote to honor his father, Emmett Wayne
Fuller. My husband grew up on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma and he learned the
following life lessons from his dad. This tribute was read by the pastor to
commemorate my father-in-law on September 6, 2008, after he lost his battle with
cancer.
When we were growing up in the mid 1970's, we usually prayed for rain on the weekends, especially during the winter, because if it wasn't raining Dad would get us up early to go work outside...even if a blue northern was blowing in. Our house had a fireplace which meant we had to cut wood on the weekends to last through the coming week.
I have two memories from our early
wood cutting days that had unexpected life lessons tied to them. The first was
when we went into the woods with the pickup truck to get a load of wood. Dad had
cut down a large tree and asked us to back the truck as close to the tree as
possible so we could start loading the wood. After we filled the pickup bed to
over-flowing with firewood, we got in the cab to head for the house. We traveled
about six inches and the truck came to a sudden stop. We had backed the truck
over the stump of the tree and with the bed loaded with wood, the back bumper
was catching on the stump.
LIFE LESSON ~
Plan ahead, see the big picture, think things through before starting
and cut stumps closer to the ground.
The second memory was when we went
to cut wood on one of the coldest days I can remember, we had on several layers
of clothes because it was so cold! It was well below freezing, the ground was
frozen so we could drive across the pasture in the pickup. We worked on clearing
brush and cutting fire wood until well past noon. It was getting warmer because
we were removing all the extra layers of clothes we had put on earlier. When we
finally cut an over-flowing load of firewood, it was time to head for the
house...or so we thought. The ground was no longer frozen and we ended up
getting stuck. We had to walk to the house and get the tractor to pull the
pickup all the way back to the house.
LIFE LESSON ~
Expect the unexpected and don't take the easy way out. We should have
taken the tractor out in the first place, but we wanted to drive the pickup
because it was warmer.
There are many more life lessons
like these that we learned from Dad that have helped us over the years. Most
were not verbal, but if you knew Dad he lead by example and/or
actions.
LIFE LESSONS ~
If you break it, you fix it. If you make a mistake, acknowledge it and
learn from it. Do it right the first time and be done with it. Don't ask anyone
to work harder than you do. The easy road is not always the best
road.
When we were growing up we thought
Dad was too rough on us at times by making us work so hard; but he was using it
to instill his work ethics and values in us. These values have benefited us in
our personal lives and careers many times over.
It wasn't
difficult to see the last life lesson Dad wanted to teach us...it was
his faith. During the most trying times he would continue to pray
asking for God's will to be done, even though it would have been easier to give
up hope. At the end of his life, we all knew he was ready for God to call him
home.
[This is a reprint of a post that appeared on JanetteFuller.Com on June 20, 2011.]
What
life lessons did you learn from your father? Please share your thoughts in the
Comments Section below.
