Every father’s day I wrote Dad a long email about what I appreciated about him. He had many good qualities: his commitment to God and Biblical teaching and virtue, his discipline and pragmatism and organization, his handiness with tools and giftedness in communication and leadership. The one attribute that was especially beneficial to me was his analytical mind and commitment to honest, rational thinking. It took me half a lifetime to discover that others are not like him but make decisions based on unexamined emotional responses and use logic, if at all, to justify conclusions ex post facto.
Everyone including Dad has biases and faulty assumptions and blindspots that hinder rational processes, but he was remarkably honest in his search for truth. He told me that Moody Press had turned down his book, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics, because it was not sufficiently conservative. I thought at the time that he meant not sufficiently dispensational, but later I noticed such things as his very limited critique of abortion–basically saying that we can’t know if a fetus is a human soul, so we should err on the side of caution, a stand at clear odds with current inflammatory claims from the right. He followed the truth where it took him rather than follow the prevailing winds. His logic was not always accurate or unbiased, but it was as honest as he could be, and in that example I found an invaluable source for my own search for truth, although I have learned, especially from Kimberly, that I must temper logic with truth gained in non-logical ways such as intuition.
It is the tools we are given that shape our life much more than the specific patterns that are handed down, and this was perhaps the most unique contribution Dad gave me. His commitment to God was more valuable, but fairly typical among believing families. His analytical mind was a pure gift to me, one that was passed on without being weighted with baggage, and by that I was profoundly shaped and am deeply grateful.
Janathan Grace Reflections 
Janathan
I have appreciated your reflections on Father’s Day. I consider you to be exceptionally wise and insightful into human nature. Thank you for being transparent and honest while you share your wisdom. These were qualities I saw back when you were a soph-senior at BL. They were what I wanted to imitate.
Live ready. Mike Schreck
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What kind words. Thank you, Mike! I feel as though transparency is the one special gift I have to offer others, an invitation into embracing grace from someone who needs it so profoundly all day long.
In our search for truth we must not deceive ourselves in believing that it cannot be found in God’s unchanging Word of Truth!