The Hand of God - Fathers Day

Father's Day is a celebration inaugurated in the early twentieth century. to celebrate fatherhood and male parenting. It is also celebrated to honour and commemorate our forefathers. Father's Day is celebrated on a variety of dates worldwide and typically involves gift-giving, special dinners to fathers, and family-oriented activities. Contrary to popular belief, the first observance of Father's Day actually took place in Fairmont, West Virginia on July 5, 1908. The special day was organized by Mrs. Grace Golden Clayton, who wanted to celebrate the lives of the 210 fathers who had been lost in the Monongah Mining disaster several months earlier in Monongah, West Virginia, on December 6, 1907. The First Father's Day Church, now the Central United Methodist Church, still stands in Fairmont today.

Various other sources believe (possibly because West Virginia didn't officially register the holiday, that the first Father's Day was held nearly two years later on June 19, 1910 through the efforts of Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington. After listening to a church sermon at Spokane's Central Methodist Episcopal Church in 1909 about the newly recognized Mother's Day, Dodd felt strongly that fatherhood needed recognition, as well.She wanted a celebration that honoured fathers like her own father, William Smart, a Civil War veteran who was left to raise his family alone when his wife died giving birth to their sixth child when Sonora was 16 years old.

The following year with the assistance of Reverend Dr. Conrad Bluhm, her pastor at Old Centenary Presbyterian Church (now Knox Presbyterian Church), Sonora took the idea to the Spokane YMCA. The Spokane YMCA, along with the Ministerial Alliance, endorsed Dodd’s idea and helped it spread by celebrating the first Father’s Day in 1910. Sonora suggested her father’s birthday, June 5, be established as the day to honour all Fathers. However, the pastors wanted more time to prepare, so on June 19, 1910, young members of the YMCA went to church wearing roses: a red rose to honor a living father, and a white rose to honor a deceased one.Dodd travelled through the city in a horse-drawn carriage, carrying gifts to shut-in fathers confined indoors by illness.

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Below is a poem I wrote shortly after my Dad passed away in 2005.

I sit here pondering what to write, my thoughts soon turn to Dad,

To thank him for the home he gave, for everything we had.

I think about the passing years, too quickly gone for good.

It seems like only yesterday, I’d go back if I could.

To a time when he was always there, I thought he would forever,

Always strong when things went wrong, he held us all together.

He worked so hard from day to day, never once did he complain,

With powerful hands he worked and toiled, he kept the family name.

Hard work never hurt anybody, you reap just what you sow,

He said that if you tend your crops your harvest will overflow.

My harvest has been bountiful, he taught me how to give,

And in his firm but gentle way, he taught me how to live .

Dad dwells in Heaven with the Father, he left me much too soon,

He walks on paths of gold, above the harvest moon.

Until the day that I’m called Home, I don’t know where or when,

I know that by the Grace of God I’ll see him once again!

©Doug McVicar – 10^th November 2005

50 Quotes for Father's Day

Celebrate Your Dad...with these meaningful quotes

• "My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn." -- Louis Adamic
• 'Honour thy father and thy mother' stands written among the three laws of most revered righteousness." -- Aeschylus

• "Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are." -- Louisa May Alcott

• "I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well." -- Alexander the Great

• "Every mother generally hopes that her daughter will snag a better husband than she managed to do...but she's certain that her boy will never get as great a wife as his father did." -- Anonymous

• "A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again." -- Enid Bagnold

• "If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right." -- Bill Cosby

• "A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station." -- Bill Cosby

• "Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young, Who loved thee so fondly as he? He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue, And joined in thy innocent glee." -- Margaret Courtney

• "I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week." -- Mario Cuomo

• "I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example." -- Mario Cuomo

"A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be."

-- Unknown

• "A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma." -- Marlene Dietrich

• "Lucky that man whose children make his happiness in life and not his grief, the anguished disappointment of his hopes. " -- Euripedes

• "Fifth Commandment: Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." -- Exodus 20:12

• "My father always told me, 'Find a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life.' " -- Jim Fox

• "The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat." -- Robert Frost

• "You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular." -- Robert Frost

• "A father is a banker provided by nature." -- French Proverb

• "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud

• "Any man can be a Father but it takes someone special to be a dad." -- Anne Geddes

• "Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers - and fathering is a very important stage in their development." -- David M. Gottesman

• "If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement." -- Antonio Gramsci

• "When Charles first saw our child Mary, he said all the proper things for a new father. He looked upon the poor little red thing and blurted, 'She's more beautiful than the Brooklyn Bridge.'" -- Helen Hayes

• "One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters." -- George Herbert

• "If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time." -- Russell Hoban

• "For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers." -- Homer

"A father is a banker...
provided by nature."

-- French Proverb

• "My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, you've had a great life." -- Elbert Hubbard

• "My father died many years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half believe it." -- Natasha Josefowitz

• "The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan." -- Garrison Keillor

• "My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it." -- Clarence Budington Kelland

• "My father told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed him until now." -- John F. Kennedy

• "My father said, 'Politics asks the question: Is it expedient? Vanity asks: Is it popular? But conscience asks: Is it right?'" -- Dexter Scott King

• "His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path." -- Stephen King

• "When I was a kid, I said to my father one afternoon, 'Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?' He answered, 'If the zoo wants you, let them come and get you.'" -- Jerry Lewis

• "I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be." -- Abraham Lincoln

• "Honor thy father and thy mother." -- Matthew 19:19

• "The thing to remember about fathers is, they're men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find Someone chock full of qualms and romantic terrors, Believing change is a threat Like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle It took such months to get." -- Phyllis McGinley

• "My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it." -- Abraham Lincoln

• "Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother." -- Friedrich Nietzche

• "Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards." -- Robert Orben

• "People see Archie Bunker everywhere. Particularly girls; poor girls, rich girls, all kinds of girls are always coming up to me and telling me that Archie is just like their dad." -- Carroll O'Connor

• "A wise son maketh a glad father." -- Proverbs 10:1

• "None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a Father who has not his equal in this world - so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don't be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal." -- Queen Victoria of England

"My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance." -- Ruth E. Renkel

• "Father taught us that opportunity and responsibility go hand in hand. I think we all act on that principle; on the basic human impulse that makes a man want to make the best of what's in him and what's been given him." -- Laurence Rockefeller

• "That is the thankless position of the father in the family-the provider for all, and the enemy of all." -- J. August Strindberg

• "An angry father is most cruel towards himself." -- Publilius Syrus

• "I just owe almost everything to my father [and] it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election." -- Margaret Thatcher

• "A man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and the two become one flesh." -- The Holy Bible

• "It's only when you grow up, and step back from him, or leave him for your own career and your own home—it's only then that you can measure his greatness and fully appreciate it. Pride reinforces love." -- Margaret Truman

• "A man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season". -- Unknown

• "A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty." -- Unknown

• "Small boy's definition of Father's Day: It's just like Mother's Day only you don't spend so much." -- Unknown

• "A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be." -- Unknown

• "For thousands of years, father and son have stretched wistful hands across the canyon of time, each eager to help the other to his side, but neither quite able to desert the loyalties of his contemporaries. The relationship is always changing and hence always fragile; nothing endures except the sense of difference." -- Alan Valentine

• "By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong." -- Charles Wadsworth

6 Quotes by famous people in history

Mark Twain

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Charles Wadsworth

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.

Bertrand Russell

The fundamental defect with fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Johann Schiller

It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Marlene Dietrich

A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox... they would understand the dilemma.

David Gottesman

Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers and fathering is a very important stage in their development.