The Hot Solder Dance

My old Dad loves his kids, two girls and two boys, he used to get pretty fired up when we were misbehaving, he was pretty tough and most of the time expected us to be, I can remember a time when I was about twelve, I was working with him on a new house, during the school holidays and he was soldering a length of spouting on the roof and a bit of hot solder dropped down my shirt as I was looking at what he was doing from below. I called out and did the hot solder dance that goes like this,………… far out that hurt. The pain is burnt into my memory like the solder was into my chest.

He looked at the whole drama and called down “give it a rub and get water out of the tub by the concrete mixer on it”.

After I’d shifted through the drowned and dying grass grub beetles…….. (you know the little brown ones that crop up in summer), I scooped a few handfuls of cold water out of the tub ……

splashed them on my chest, well that felt a bit better, for about oooooh that long.

After Dad had got off the roof he wandered over looked at my wet shirt and pants said something like you’ll be right and ruffled up my hair with his great right hand…..Picture my Dads hands; Dad’s fingers look like the proto type for Heller’s sausages.

Well that was a right of passage, he respected the way I handled the accident.

Interestingly there are no scars but there is a patch on my chest, free of hair.

Dad and I didn’t spend heaps of time together and most of the time he was flat out at work or recovering by playing golf, or tied up in some lodge ceremony or other. But we enjoyed the time he did spend with us though he was also a pretty strict disciplinarian, but fair with it.

I’ve got two sons of my own and I can see the challenges in bringing up kids, I have found it really hard when things aren’t going well for them.

Something I’ve noticed about kids and I think that this applies to the whole human race is that the wee tackers are all different.

You can have two children in the same family…they look different they, they sound different they even smell different. One of my boys…… you will have to trust me on this. As a toddler, I would put him to bed and lie next to him till he went to sleep, otherwise he would be out of bed and down the hall way,….. during the process of falling asleep he would drain the energy from me, the other son had no such effect.

One can be as straight talking and honest as anything and the others words you need to filter through your mental lie detector.

One might bring you to tears with their humour one day and the next day just bring you to tears. You can only hope there’s more humour than not.

You can’t guess which of my sons does what because it’s constantly changing and guess what, while they might frustrate the daylights out of me and drive me around the twist sometimes, I still love them!

A really hard thing happened a couple of years ago, I would rate it on the hard scale as being as hard as breaking a bone in your arm but different, it feels as if you’ve got this lingering hurt that just hangs around for months. One of my boys left home and went back Oamaru to live with his Mum.

School wasn’t working out for him and he made a tough decision I’m proud of.

We still had a great relationship, but man it hurt not having him around all the time.

It hurt not being able to reach out and give him a hug when he’s having a hard day or tuck him in at night and pray with him.

It hurt hearing those words “I miss you Dad” but it’s nice to hear I was missed.

Well he’s now back living with us, it’s good to have him home.

I’ve have a good relationship with both my Dad and my boys. I know that not all people are able to say the same.

There is a Father who wants a relationship with us; right at the start he created man in his own image….. I like this bit, image if my children were little copies of me, they thought like me, they behaved like me, oh what a wonderful world it would be!

But were not little copies of God, he’s completely prefect and we belong to a fallen race our first parents blew it. God like most parents wanted us to be like him and we are in so many ways….. We work, we rest, we give life to new ideas, we feel, we care, we love and long to be loved, we suffer and we long to be heard, and we want relationships!