SERVE DAILY VIEWPOINT
Dad Taught Me What Matters Most By Shellie Peterson
My dad taught me a lot of things. He taught me the importance of getting up early to start the day off right with scripture, prayer, and exercise. He taught me that you can come from a rough background with few words of affirmation and still choose to be a loving, kind person to others. My dad taught me how to dribble a basketball, how to whistle with a blade of grass, and how to make a killer tuna fish sandwich. But one of the most important lessons I learned from him occurred when he didn’t even intend to teach me one. It was during my teenage years. I had just come home from a long and
difficult day at work, and I sunk exhausted on the rocking chair in the living room to take a nap. My mind was heavy with the stresses, insecurities, and pressures that are not uncommon to most teenage girls. As I started to fall asleep, I thought I heard footsteps approaching me on the carpet. A moment later, my dad gently kissed my forehead, unaware that I was still awake. His action wasn’t intended to be seen by others or to even be noticed by me. But his simple and quiet act of love had a profound effect on me as a teenage girl and helped me realize that the smallest acts of kindness often mean the most. What he didn’t see as he walked
quietly away from the rocking chair were the tears pooling up behind my closed eyelids. It turned out that a tender forehead kiss from a loving father was exactly what my troubled heart needed at that moment. It was such a small thing, but it meant more to me than he could have ever known. Dads, you don’t have to live up to unrealistic expectations or try to be the “perfect dad.” The truth is, it doesn’t take a lot to become a hero in the eyes of your children. I never cared that my dad wasn’t wealthy and couldn’t buy us expensive things or take us on expensive vacations. I did care, though, that he took the time to have tickle fights with us and invite us to come with him to
take the dog for a walk. I cared that he would watch silly cartoons with us and laugh just as hard as we did. I cared that he would try to play card games with us, even though he absolutely hated card games. All it really takes to be a good dad is to spend time with your kids, love them, and teach them by example how to be good humans. Dads like that are getting harder to come by. So this Father’s Day, I want to thank all the kind, hard-working, wise dads who understand the honor and responsibility that comes with the title of fatherhood. You’re making a difference, even when you think no one notices. (Peterson is a Serve Daily contributor.)
FUNNY-ISH
There are Thousands of Bad Photos on my Phone By Joe Capell
These days everybody has a camera in their pocket. If you want to take a picture of something, you pull out your phone, take anywhere from one to 47 photos, then slide your phone back into your pocket. Next, you look at the pictures, decide which one or two you like the best, and delete all of the rest. Ha ha! Just kidding. You keep all of those pictures on your phone until the day you have a really important picture you want to take, but you can’t take a picture because your phone
memory is too full of all those pictures you never got around to deleting. Back in the day, we didn’t take as many pictures. Why? Because we were limited by the number of photos available. Usually, a roll of film or a disposable camera (remember them?) would hold 24 pictures. Because of the scarcity of available pictures, we were much more selective as to what we would take pictures of. (Not nearly so many selfies, or photos of food.) That’s not to say there weren’t any bad pictures taken back then. (I’ve always had the skill of not quite
being in focus.) It’s just that we didn’t have so darn many of them! (And we didn’t know how bad they were for at least an hour (if we splurged on the one hour photo developers) or maybe even a week or two (if we sent the film off in the mail.) Today, we can take as many pictures as our phones will store. That’s hundreds of pictures, or thousands of pictures, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of pictures. As a result, we are not very discerning about what we take pictures of. If it’s a useless picture, we’ll just ignore it. But we’ll still carry it around on our
phone for months, and we’ll still download it onto our computers. Some time ago, one of my kids got hold of my phone for about 30 seconds. In that short amount of time, he was able to take 114 blurry pictures of what I think is my nightstand. Several months later all of those pictures are still on my phone. They will remain on my phone until it dies (or I do.). These pictures will never be deleted. Oh, we’ll say things like, “one of these days I’m going to go through all of my pictures and organize them,” but it won’t ever happen.
The pictures of my blurry nightstand will forever be a monument to how terrible we are at photography. (and when I say, “we,” I mean “me”). (Capell is a Serve Daily contributor.)
“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” TO ADVERTISE IN SERVE DAILY CALL 801-477-6845
Howard Zinn JUNE 2021
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