I have been playing with sand the last few days. I laid a couple of small flagstone patios in our backyard that required sand foundations. The Loews how-to video I watched said I should make the foundations five inches deep, but I think they just wanted to sell me a lot of sand. I wound up using forty of their 50 pound bags of sand!
Laying flagstone in that sand reminded me of the day my dad decided to make me a sandbox. It’s one of my earliest and best memories of him. I must have been only four or five years old.
After watching him build the frame for my future sandbox, Dad loaded me into his Buick – he always drove a Buick back then – took me to the beach, backed the car up to a sand dune, and shoveled as much sand as he could get into the trunk.
Then Dad drove us back home, filled the rectangular wooden frame with the sand from his trunk, and voilà, I was in sandbox heaven.
I played in that sandbox for hours every day. But one day I got what I thought was a fantastic idea. I snuck into the laundry room, found a box of laundry detergent, took it outside, emptied it into my sandbox, turned the garden hose on, and gleefully filled my sandbox – and much of the backyard – with soapsuds!
I was having soooo much fun…until Mom saw me through a back window and ran outside, yelling at the top of her lungs. She turned off the water, grabbed my arm, and marched me pegleg-stiff up to my room.
“Stay here and think about what you have done,” she said sternly. “When your dad gets home, he’s going to give you a spanking.”
I had never been spanked before, but I knew what was coming. David Louwellan Perry, my play pal around the corner, got a lot of spankings. That’s why, over six decades later, I still remember his full name. “David Louwellan Perry!” his mother would shout with a southern accent after he had committed some infraction, and then WHOP WHOP WHOP.
I, on the other hand, was a compliant kid, which is why no one knows my middle name. But there I was, waiting in my bedroom for my dad to come home and spank me.
I didn’t have to wait long. Soon I heard the front door open and shut, then some mumbled conversation in the kitchen, followed by the same sound of heavy footsteps my father made every night when he walked up the stairs to put me to bed.
Dad opened the door and walked over to where I sat crying on the edge of my bed and sat down next to me.
“Herb, do you know that what you did was wrong?” he said softly.
“Yyyyes,” I stammered through my tears.
“And do you promise that you’ll never do that again?”
“Yyyyes,” I answered.
He put his arm around my shoulder, “Then I’m not going to spank you, son. Now let’s go downstairs and eat dinner.”
A wave of relief swept over me. I didn’t know what to call it then, but I would learn later that I had just experienced mercy.
Dad took my hand and together we walked downstairs to a dinner table filled with food.
I don’t specifically remember this, but I’m thinking that after pouring all that laundry detergent into my sandbox it must have smelled really good.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
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