What I've Learned from Paul (Not the One you Might Think)

I remember a time when I had come home for the weekend from college and found a folded, twenty dollar bill stuck in the driver side window of my truck. It was from my dad. That twenty and a cigar box of rolled quarters was just about the total amount of financial help I got from my dad for college. I remember him telling me once he wished he could have given me more to help pay for college. I don't think he's ever realized just how much he did help pay for college...and for so much more ever since.

You see, I grew up spending weekends with my dad (he and my mom divorced when I was three), and a lot of those weekends I was holding the light so he could see where the oil leak was coming from, or I was holding the other end of the board so the saw wouldn't bind when he was cutting it, or I was the extra pair of hands to tote bags of sakrete. I was (sadly) the best help available when there was a leak in the roof or a chicken house to tear down for the tin. I've got a scar on my left palm from where a piece of tin snagged as I was loading on dad's truck and it sliced my hand--I remember trying to pretend like the blood running down my arm wasn't a big deal; I even remember helping him on the roof of the house one day, trying to bolt together some metal rafters and I kept dropping the ratchet, turned out I had had a broken thumb for two days, but I wasn't about to act like it hurt!

As I got older, I learned the difference between drums brakes and disc brakes, how to clean and glue pvc pipe, how to dig a trench by hand, how to use a drill, a circular saw, a reciprocating saw, a pipe die, a pipe wrench, a torque wrench, and countless other hand and power tools. I learned how to spread bondo, how to spray paint without causing too many runs. I learned how a small engine works, how to shingle a roof and install a toilet. I learned all kinds of things that (apparently) most other folks paid someone else to do, because I was the one there to help dad most of the time he had to do something.

I learned all that stuff and more, and it's helped me out a time or two. Like the times my friends in college learned I knew how to "fix cars," and I was the first person they called when their cars wouldn't start or something broke. Or the time, in our first apartment, when I fell and knocked a giant hole in the wall, but I knew exactly what it would take to fix it; it saved us our security deposit. Then there was the time at my first church when we replaced the floor in the kitchen and fellowship hall and I installed a new water heater, sink, and stove, or the time it only cost us $35 to put all new brakes on Sallie's car because I did all the work. I don't think I could list all the times I've fixed this or that on our cars or around the house (I'm currently replacing the floor in our downstairs bathroom, shouldn't cost us even $200).

Then there are all the times I've been able to help other people. I bet he doesn't even remember, but there was a time when I was a teenager that dad asked me to ride with him and help him at this guy's house. When we got there, we met a guy who was installing cabinets. We helped him put the cabinets in (maybe we plumbed the sink or helped paint too), and we left after a few hours (without getting any payment). I asked dad who the guy was, and he told me it was someone who just got out of jail trying to get work and he wanted to help him out because "everybody deserves another shot."

Over the last few years, I've joined with folks from the church I currently serve as we've replaced bathrooms in crumbling homes, built wheelchair ramps, built on to a church three miles from Mexico. I've installed and repaired water pumps in Haiti and repaired houses in the poorest county in Alabama.

All of those things I've done--every single one of them--I've been able to do because dad showed me how. Now, I don't mean he's shown me exactly how to do everything, but he's shown me I can do those kinds of things, and because I can do those things, because I own and use my own tools, I've saved us thousands of dollars over the years and have been able to save others some as well. So the way I see it, dad may think he's only given me a few dollars for college, for an education, but really, I probably actually owe him that twenty and all those quarters back--with a load of interest.