Lessons from Other Fathers...

From an article on MSN...some words of wisdom...NOT my own!

I saw that debt leads to panic.

You make your own family. He wasn't able to fully verbalize what he meant, but most families are accidents of DNA. As a man, you make your own family unit and you keep that as tight as possible and…you would die for them if you had to. We have that in our lives, I have that in my life.

There's no book to teach you. My father told me you learn how to preach by preaching. The only way you're going to learn it is to go out there and do it and learn from your mistakes. And he's right.

My father is careful with women. He would not even ride in the same car with a woman other than my mother. I remember in Little Rock, Hillary Clinton, when she was the wife of Governor Clinton, wanted to meet my father for lunch. She wanted to have a private conversation. Daddy said, "I'd be glad to meet you, but we'll meet in a public place." My father told me, "I'm going to be above reproach and not allow myself ever to be accused of something that wasn't morally right."
God did not give us religion. Religion is man's attempt to reach a holy God.

Life is a circle. When you are small, your relationship with your parents is one thing, and then you get to be an adult and they start treating you like an adult. And then when you are older, the roles reverse. Instead of the parents providing for the children, now we as children are helping to provide for our parents.

Watching him, I learned the power of alcohol. (That would be a lesson from my dad, Jim, as well. I learned that real well!)

He had a Christian view of marriage. Your wife is to be cherished and taken care of. We are to love and appreciate our wives as we care for our own spirits. He struggled in his marriages, but he also had that sense of determination: I'm going to stick to it. He believed that no matter what, you stay together, you work it out. I saw him do that regularly with my mother, forgive as his religion taught him to, as far as from east to west, as if the wrong had never been done.

He stayed in touch with the mystery. My father often said, "I believe that I am directed." He showed me that there was an excitement and a sense of mystery to life. What is my direction? What does God have planned for me? We can never believe that we have it all figured out.

Honesty surpasses dignity. He was able to show his weaknesses and frailties and not lose his dignity. He was honest, and I believe that honesty has to surpass concern for your personal dignity. You have to expose yourself to be appreciated and respected. My father in lots of ways was like Job in the Bible. He prayed many times for his physical or spiritual pain to be removed. But he never cursed God because of those pains. He owned them.He said to love as strong and hard as you can. At the end of his life, he was sad. He felt loneliness because he was without my mother. What he was trying to relate to me when he said this was "Let people know you love them. Get close. Stay close. And be true. Live life to its fullest, as if each day were the last." I saw him live that way, and I believe that he didn't carry any regrets with him.

it's not about the destination, it's about the journey


I learned about integrity by watching him in his professional life. In order to maintain the respect of the people you do business with, they have to know you're a straight shooter, that when you give your word, you can be counted on.

He was a true gentleman, old school. It wasn't grandiose gestures. You could tell he had great respect, love and affection for Mom, in particular, and other women as well. It's the little things: opening the door, letting her go through the doorway first. To some people it may be corny, but I think it's the little gestures that show the deep-seated respect and affection. I would never profess to be as gallant as Dad was, but I hope it has a carryover effect on my two boys, who are 8 and 10.

When you see a man who respects women, it's a powerful lesson. It's not a hardship, and it's not something you have to work at. You can see that someone can be graceful and gentlemanly and respectful. My father was the exact opposite of the guy who goes out and buys his wife $100,000 earrings and the rest of the time is a jerk

Anybody who thinks marriage is smooth sailing is not being realistic. It's the challenges in life that make us stronger, not the easy times. I'm very happily married to the most wonderful woman in the world, and if I had known how wonderful it was going to be, I would have married her sooner.

He was a very forgiving person. He didn't carry a grudge. He was not that type of man, even though he faced fierce competitors such as Tip O'Neill and Lyndon Johnson and even Ronald Reagan. In a professional sense, they were very fierce competitors, but Dad was one of those people who, when the professional part was over, was the first to reach out. I think he would have called them all good friends. If you go to his remarks when he took office, they sum it up pretty succinctly. He spoke of serving the country at a very difficult time, maybe at one of the most difficult times in our country's history, and he was grateful for his relationship with God, and finally he said, "I'm beholden to no man, but to one woman." And that's who he was.