CONTENTS

• JUST VISITING
• FEATURE STUDY: The Legacy of a Father
• Guest Article "People Helping and Malpractice"
  By Thomas P Azar

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed the local merchants started promoting "Father's Day" in a big way. I really hope "Father's Day" means a little more than an opportunity to sell socks, fishing rods and chain saws. Ten years ago, I celebrated my first Father's Day with the empty feeling that I no longer had a living father. I enjoy the way my wife and children indulge me on this special day, but I also think about the man who was there when I entered the world and guided me during the first 21 years of my life. On that first Father's Day after his death, I shared a sermon with the congregation where I preached on "The Legacy of the Father." Recently, I looked over those old notes and revised my original thoughts. I'm sharing it with you in today's edition.

Thomas P Azar has contributed an article that is especially helpful to those who are involved in the helping professions - ministers, health workers, counselors, even those who care enough to get involved in trying to help a friend with a problem. He points out a number of pitfalls that well-meaning but naïve persons can fall into. His advice may seem bothersome to those who "just want to be a servant." There's an old adage that says "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." In this instance, the ounce of prevention can save the need for a lot of curing later on. I commend the article to all our readers. Tom is a military chaplain in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Norman

by Norman Bales

Ten years ago this week, I found myself pushing a cart through the grocery store, when I passed the aisle where the Father's Day cards were displayed. I thought about my childhood years when I didn't pay much attention to Father's Day. My father claimed that he didn't believe much in special occasions. After the passage of ten years, I still remember that particular trip to the grocery store because I suddenly that that for the first time in my life, I don't have a living father that I could send a card to. A month earlier, we had taken the sad journey to his hometown to make funeral arrangements. As I stood there in the aisle beside the Father's day cards and realized I couldn't select a car for him, I felt pretty empty on the inside.

Now that ten years have passed since he died, I find myself reflecting on the legacy my father left me. I grew up in the Southwestern United States, where "Daddy" is the most common name that children use to address their fathers. He was not "Dad," "Papa," or "Pop." If I referred to him as "father," it would only be in the third person. I never used that word as a term of address. He was and always will be "Daddy."

Daddy was the oldest of 11 children. He was born in Indian Territory, a year before it became the state of Oklahoma. His home was a Christian home. The Bible was read regularly and with respect. From his early childhood until the day he died, he believed, as I do, that the Bible is the Supreme Court when it comes to settling spiritual questions. Daddy didn't give me any parting words of advice. However, I observed the way he lived his life and I knew how he thought. Had he been able to speak to me in that last hour of his life he might well have echoed David's parting words to Solomon in I Kings 2:1-3, "I am about to go the way of all the earth. So be strong, show yourself a man, and keep his decrees and laws and requirements." The legacy that he left behind was an example, which said that these are the most important priorities in life. Here are some of the priorities I observed.

If ever there was a man who believed in the Christian work ethic, it was Daddy. He was firmly devoted to such passages as the one that says, "if a man will not work, he shall not eat," and "if a man provides not for his own, he has denied the faith and is worse than an infidel." Although it didn't come from scripture, he believed that "idleness is the workshop of the devil." He coined a lot of one liners that he repeated at various times. One I recall he used when he had to wait for me to finish a job so he could start one was "Norman, a dollar's waitin' on a dime."

Everything I remember about my father is not admirable. There were times when he said and did things he shouldn't have. Among the things I regret is the fact he was so devoted to work, that he never took the time to play. When I participated in high school sports, he didn't come to the games. In fact, he and I usually fought over whether I would participate in sports. As he saw it, the sports program was a device to get out of work, so he never got very excited about it.

When I was 19 years old, I came to realize how important it is to have the legacy of the work ethic passed on to you. I was trying to earn my way through college. He helped me get a summer job. I didn't like the work., I didn't like the people I worked with and I was just mainly putting in my time and doing what I had to do to make sure I drew a pay check every week.

One day a visitor came to the construction site where I was employed. For some reason, he came around to see me. He said, "My name is Frank Antilley." I knew who Frank Antilley was, but I had never met him. When my Dad first began to work for the public back in the 1920's, he worked for Frank Antilley who had a very large farming operation. I said, "My name is Norman Bales." He said, "Well you must be either Burl or Murl's boy." I said, "Yes, I'm Burl's son." He said, "Well, you must be a hard worker. Your name couldn't be Bales if you weren't a hard worker. From that time on, I knew I had a reputation to uphold and my attitude toward work changed completely.

That's a part of the legacy my father left with me and I hope that I'll be able to pass some of that same respect for the work ethic along to my own children. As fathers we all need to convey to our children by example, by our teaching and by our discipline the advice of the ancient wise man Solomon who wrote in Proverbs 13:4, "The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied."

He was a diligent student of the Bible throughout most of his life. Only when his eyesight began to fail him in the last two or three years of his life, did he cease his diligent study. Some of my earliest recollections are those of Bible stories. My mother didn't tell me Bible stories. My Daddy did. He could make them very interesting. Sometimes he embellished things with his own commentary, which I've learned to take with a grain of salt as an adult. As a child, I believed every word. As his hair began to thin, he loved to tell the story of the 42 youths who were mauled by bears because they ridiculed Elisha's bald head. To this day I'm not very comfortable with jokes about baldness.

Daddy believed himself to be the world's foremost authority on the book of Revelation. He disavowed the views of all the scholars, theologians, exegetes and commentators. He thought all the commentaries that had every been written on Revelation were a waste of paper and ink. Whether he was right in his view on Revelation, is subject to discussion, but I do know that he knew the text very well.

Several years ago I taught Revelation in a Sunday morning Bible class. I ignored his advice and consulted the best scholars on the subject. I thought I did a credible job, so I sent him a copy of my outlines. He called me up on the telephone and said, "Norman you're a fine preacher of the gospel, but when it comes to the book of Revelation, you're nothing but a baby." It was pretty clear that he and I weren't on the same page. I will say this much for him. I've seen him studying the Word of God until the wee hours of the morning, when he had to be up at 6 o'clock the next morning to go to the construction site and he would do that for weeks on end.

He placed great value on the Word of God. In my mind, his legacy is not that of the world's greatest Revelation scholar, but one of loving the Scriptures. He deemed the Word of God to be worthy of our time, our energy and our diligence in trying to understand it. Because of him, probably more than any other influence, I'm a student of Scripture..

Daddy was never rich in this world's goods and he didn't want very much. Sometimes we had conflicts, because the things that I wanted as a young teenage boy, trying to live with peer pressure, were not always in line with what he thought I ought to have. And of course, I had very little understanding of just how poor we were. We were very poor, but I didn't know that, because we never thought of ourselves that way.

I remember a time during my adolescence when he bought me a pair of shoes. He had a friend named Bill Work, who ran a dry goods store. He would go to the store and complain to Bill that all his prices were too high. He would say something like "That boy's feet are still growing. If I buy shoes today, he'll grow out of them in six months and I'm not paying these high prices." Bill would go into the back of the store and find an old pair of shoes that had been gathering dust for about twenty years and bring them out. He'd say, "I can make you a deal on these shoes." Of course, he knew nobody else would wear them, but I had no choice and had to wear the shoes.

Sometime later I was earning some of my own money (I didn't earn money during my adolescent years, because I was needed on the farm). Slavery had been outlawed, but that didn't apply to sons. With enough money to buy shoes, I found a real shoe store. I certainly didn't go to Bill Work's dry goods store. I knew the owner of the store and told him I needed some new shoes. He looked at the shoes I was wearing and said, "Norman, those are the kind of shoes an old man wears. A young man like you doesn't have any business wearing shoes like that." I left behind my old 1930's shoes and never wore a pair like that again.

Although that conflict in values, set up some tension between us, it also set the stage for determining the values I would live by. I've never really wanted to make a lot of money. Like most people I like to see the bills paid and I'm materialistic enough to want a fairly comfortable standard of living, even a standard of living that's more comfortable than the one my father lived by.

Even so Daddy's frugality taught me the value of our Lord's perspective on wealth. "...a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions"(Luke 12:15). About a year before Daddy died, he chose to share some of his reflections on life with me. He said, "It's been a good life. I've had the health to work." At 78 years of age, he built a house almost single handedly. Pointing to his modest dwelling, he said, "We built this house and it's paid for. I got you through college and we've managed to take care of our own needs." Then he said, "But it when it comes right down to it, at the end of man's life, the only thing that counts is his faith."

In I Thessalonians 2:11-12, Paul says, "For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children?" What kind of fatherhood model did Paul have in mind when he said he dealt with the Thessalonians the way a father deals with his children? Look at the next verse, "encouraging, comforting, and urging you to live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and glory." Perhaps your father wasn't a model father. I don't want to leave the impression that my father always chose to conduct himself according to the model Paul describes. He would have been the first to tell you that he sometimes fell short of being the model father. But there are two things to ponder as we approach Father's Day.

1. If your father did anything that's right, noble and helpful, you need to appreciate it, respect it and be encouraged by it.

2. If you are a father, you need to realize that you are building a legacy every day you live. Think about it this way. Suppose your son decides to send out an electronic newsletter to describe your legacy as a father, ten years after your death. What will he have to say? You are establishing your legacy right now in the way you live and in the way you relate to your children.

by Thomas P Azar
azart@execpc.com

How would you react if you received an unexpected knock at your door and a police officer handed you a subpoena, read you your legal rights, gave you a ride in the back of a police car through downtown, took your picture for the police files, gave your name to the local media, all because one of your patients falsely accused you of making sexual advances behind closed doors?

In my last assignment I was the Senior Protestant Chaplain responsible for a congregation of over 1100 persons, and a supervisor to over 90 lay leaders and deacons in 40 chapel organizations and programs. I worked with lawyers, doctors, counselors and teachers who did not take the need to set up preventive safeguards seriously, in order to deter possible false accusations. Many did not know that according to the latest statistics, in 1996 alone, there were over 25,200 professional malpractice cases according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. In one such case, a doctor was accused of fondling a female patient while conducting an exam. Police, lawyers, and other supervisors jammed his small office. The atmosphere was debilitating. His wife, while trying to support her husband, was nervously rocking back and forth as she hugged their crying eighteen-month-old child. His staff of five was petrified for him, his family and their careers. Short whispers between investigators made big cuts into his soul. His office looked like a crowded observation room in a state penitentiary. He moved like a dead man walking, with his family waiting to see him receive a lethal injection. Fortunately, after months of agonizing legal haggling, he was exonerated, but it had cost him his professional respect, social relationships, his patients, and he almost lost his wife. It became necessary to move to another state and begin his practice over.

This false accusation affects more than just one doctor. It negatively impacts other professionals and their monthly caseload of 200 to 500 persons. If one does not have their guard up, any disgruntled or vengeful person can accuse you of something you never did.

What then can we do? Begin with the Hippocratic oath - an ethical creed that states, "hold yourselves aloof from wrong, from corruption, from tempting others to vice." My concern is for the professionals who intends to follow the oath, but unintentionally fails to go the extra mile to safeguard his vocational routine when taking care of their patients.

The following are a few suggestions I would recommend from my 23 years in the ministry to help you protect the caretaker-patient relationship, and prevent false accusation.

1. When examining or counseling a patient of the opposite sex, always have an assistant present of the same gender as the patient. This shows concern, protects all parties, and builds a climate of trust- all of which are important ingredients in the healing process.

2. If a session is going beyond regular work hours, require a staff member to wait till the patient has departed. Always enter and exit from the main thoroughfare. Never use a private entrance. Let your staff escort your client or patient in, and let them see you concluding the session.

3. In certain circumstances where you have to work one on one, try to keep the door and curtains open, so that the patient is in full view from the outer hallway. When certain individuals appear questionable, or have a history of serious problems, tape your sessions, or have an assistant present in the adjoining room with the door open. If you can't be seen, then be heard.

4. Never see a patient after hours, or in a different facility by yourself. If you are called out, as many of us are for an emergency, chose a recognized public location that is staffed by other helping professionals, like the hospital ER. Call ahead and reserve a room in a high traffic area, preferably facing the doctors or nursing station. Report in and out to the supervisor, note the time, and do not leave with the client.

   I know many are overtaxed, but don't let this be an excuse that could lead to greater hardship. Some argue that we don't need to implement these because it would require more staffing, and slow down the number of persons we see. Others may refuse because it cost more money, or interferes with privacy and confidentially. However, it is better to pay a little going in, than pay a lot going out. Finally, let me conclude the true story of a fellow minister who failed to take precautions. He was asked by an elderly woman in his church to visit her every Tuesday at lunchtime. He drove alone to her home, never thinking a neighbor would accuse him of having an affair with the woman's daughter. Rumors spread. The church elders called a meeting hoping to preempt involvement by police and the media, but it was too late. The young minister was accused without evidence. When the mother arrived she told everyone that "I asked our pastor to come and pray with me and my daughter who has contracted leukemia and has only four months to live. I was always at home with them, and his sincere prayers and Bible reading has given us strength to face the inevitable death of my only daughter."

If you have questions about marriage and family relationships, you can "ASK THE COUNSELOR." Address your questions to Mikal Frazier. Her address is mikalfraz@aol.com

Norman's e-mail address: nlbales@allaboutfamilies.org