Beginning Tomorrow Today - By Timothy Sherman

ing me and criticizing my choices throughout my younger years. I believe he didn't realize what he was doing and that he meant well. My impression at that time was that all he wanted to do was work. I think the misunderstanding came because I was incredibly different from him and felt only Mom understood me. Dad was a survivor, the oldest of nine children growing up in the Great Depression. He worked to provide for his family all his childhood days, until he joined the U.S. Navy at age nineteen. He fought in World War II as a gunner's mate on an aircraft carrier and was decorated three times for valor. Dad never told any of us about his awards. We did not find out until the funeral director informed us that he had been informed by the Navy. This was an earmark of my Dad's humility and quiet resolve. During the years that my Mom was in a nursing home, my Dad was there every day to care for her. We were all dumb- founded by the love he showed my mother. Every one in Mom's nursing home loved and knew my Dad, and he won many of them to Jesus. He loved my Mom just like in the movie, "The Notebook." During his four years of active duty in the Japanese invasion of the South Pacific, he watched many of his shipmates die or get wounded in battle. He sent most of his Navy pay home to care for his mother and family. He was a man's man, the greatest man I've ever known. At the beginning of this project Dad was eighty-six and still taking care of himself Since that time Dad has passed on to his heavenly reward at the age of ninety-one. Dad won people to Jesus everywhere he went and I know he now wears the soul winner's crown. We were very close, and Dad was and is my hero. I now know that he loved me, but, a good deal of the time I was't sure of that as a child or as a young man. I loved him and want ed his approval, but we never told each other that. He wasn't at all visibly spiritual. He didn't know how to father a strangely gifted and highly sensitive son who was free-spirited and athletically motivat ed. Dad trained me in hard work and the tough things; but, he didn't know how to kindly nurture or father me. He wasn't fathered that way. As a survivor in tough times, he had not experienced much of 28