JosephCanHelp

I have read the story below and thought about an incident when I disappointed my father and vowed to avoid it at all cost in future.

Years ago, when I was still very young, I asked my father if I could use his car. At first he did not want to give it, but after much pleading from my side, he gave it to me.

I had an accident that evening and damaged his car. The next afternoon, after he came back from work, I told him and showed him the damage. He took a chair, sat down and just looked at me, looked at the car and told me that we must wait for my mother and we will talk when she came back.  The disappointment on his face is something that I do not want to see again. My father does not talk alot and in the following 5 days not a lot was said in our house. ( my mother was a teacher and on tour with school children and only came back home 5 days after the incident )

My father fixed the car and never said a word about it again, but it is a day that I will not forget easily. Even though it is now twenty years later and I have my own family, I still try my utmost not to do anything that will disappoint my father.

I have for a long time also been using Proverbs 3 vers 3 as a guide to live by and by keeping mercy and truth at the forfront of my mind when I make dicisions, it has helped me to minimise disappointing others.

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After you have read the story below, think about the times you may have disappointed your parents and what lessons you have learned from it, and send us your comments.

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GET THE MORAL OF THIS STORY

Dr. Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and founder of the M.K.Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, in his lecture at the University of Puerto Rico shared the following story:
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I was 16 years old and living with my parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbors, so my two sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the movies.

One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town, my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in town, my father asked me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting the car serviced.

When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, “I will meet you here at 5:00 p.m., and we will go home together.”

After hurriedly completing my chores, I went straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double-feature that I forgot the time. It was 5:30 before I remembered. By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my father was waiting for me, it was almost 6:00 .

He anxiously asked me, “Why were you late?”
I was so ashamed of telling him I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, “The car wasn’t ready, so I had to wait,” not realizing that he had already called the garage.
When he caught me in the lie, he said: “There’s something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn’t give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure out where I went wrong with you, I’m going to walk home 18  miles and think about it.”
So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads.

I couldn’t leave him, so for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered. I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again.

I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had punished me the way we punish our children, whether I would have learned a lesson at all. I don’t think so. I would have suffered the punishment and gone on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful that it is still as if it happened yesterday.

That is the power of non-violence.

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