Sunday, July 09, 2006

Today after church, I was relaxing with a book when my oldest daughter, Rachel, came up to me and said, "Dad, would you pick out a book for me to read, please?" Athough she's only eight she's a voracious reader. Not wanting to give her just another Mary Kate and Ashely mystery book I turned to my bookcase of philosophy books and pulled out Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. She read it cover to cover in less than an hour.
Soon after she started reading she asked me why some of the sentences were yellow. I explained to her that the book had originally belonged to my father who was incapable of reading without a highlighter or a red pencil. "Those are the parts that your Papa Rog though were important when he read that book."
After she finished we discussed the book and I was tickled that she enjoyed it. I picked the book up and thumbed through the pages before I put it back onto the bookshelf. I too was a little curious what parts Papa Rog had enjoyed. I found this gem that I think describes my father to a tee.

"For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself." p.61

I hope that today I was able to pass on just a little bit of truth to Rachel just like my father passed it on to me.

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