God, Family and Hard Work: Baseline for Future Generations.

I want to thank everyone for your thoughts and prayers over the Christmas holidays.  Most of you know that my mother passed away Christmas day and I spent the next week in Virginia with the family and attending the funeral.  I drove up to Virginia and had the chance to reflect on my mother’s life.  My mother was an amazing person.  Some who have known her might have called her opinionated, hardheaded and would not back down from a fight.  They would be correct in all accounts but I feel my mother had that right.  So today I am going to step away from Trinity Security Allies and talk a little about my mother. 
 
Born in 1936, Mom was the oldest of five siblings.  Her family was not rich but I heard they where hard working and provided for all the children.  Mom would tell me that her father was tough on her and even though she didn’t talk about it, I felt there may have been some abuse in the family.  In her teens she lost one of her brothers to an illness and years later she lost a sister in an automobile accident.  She was married at 17 to my dad and proceeded to have 4 sons.  The first three boys were only two years apart in age with my youngest brother not coming into the family until I was 14 years old.
 
The thing I remember about my mom and dad were they were both hard workers and had a strong religious beliefs.  As early as I can remember I have always been in the church.  We were Baptist so on Sunday we would go to Sunday school and then the Sunday service.  We would head home for lunch and a possible nap and then back to church for the Sunday evening service.  Even when we moved from Fort Worth to Glen Rose that tradition didn’t stop.  The only difference was that First Baptist Church in Fort Worth and the First Baptist Church in Glen Rose was the size.  In Glen Rose we knew all the church members and sometime our Sunday would be an all day church function.  Sunday school, the service and lunch with a member’s family or at the church.  Small town living.  Our parents formed our base on family, hard work, going to church and loving the Lord.  My brothers and I lived for making our parents proud of us and we worked really hard on not disappointing them.
 
When my father shot and killed a deacon of our church after a Sunday night service in 1970 the world that we had grown up in just fell apart.  We moved from the small town comfort of Glen Rose and actuality got lost in the larger town of Pensacola, FL.  I went from a graduating class of 35 to a class of over 300.  At 16 years old I became bitter and angry about what had happened and my mother and I drifted apart.  I resented the fact that she would not think about the past but always was looking at the future.  She realized to think about the past would only cause her to loose focus on her mission in life, that of taking care of her four boys.  We never went hungry, always had clothes to wear and a warm place to lay our head down at night. 
 
Even though there was so much uncertainty at times, the three oldest boys never lost sight of our one mission in life.  Making our mother proud.  We feared disappointing her more than anything else.  We knew right from wrong and believe me, we were no saints but the thing we feared the most was having her come and get us out of jail if we did something wrong.  If we got into trouble we had told each other that we would beg the officer to keep us in jail because we knew our life was over as we knew it when she came to get us out of jail.
 
But there was the base.  The Christian and the hard working base that seemed to keep us out of trouble.  I know I tried but it was mostly stupid things that would get me a slap on the wrist and the wrath of Mom but nothing that I would spend time in jail for.  She had instilled in us the golden rule; love your neighbors as you love yourselves.  We were always polite and known as good boys that she could be proud of. 
 
In 1975 when I joined Norfolk Police Department my mother stopped talking to me for a year.  Not that police work wasn’t a noble job; it was that she feared  I might get killed.  She also had a dream of be getting into ministry work. When she finally started talking to me again, two of my  brothers joined the force and now she was mad at me because she felt that I was the instigator on getting them to enlist in the force and now she had to worry about all three oldest.  Later in my career Mom found some pictures of us when we were small.  In every picture we had guns on.  Even in our pajamas we were armed with our toy six-shooters.  She gave me copies of the pictures with a note stating “I should have figured out that all of you boys were either going to be outlaws or lawmen.  I am always proud of telling people what my boys do for a living.”  At her eulogy, the pastor praised her for raising four boys that were servants.  The three oldest serving the community and the youngest serving the Lord as a minister.  That she could hold her head up high for her dedication and hard work she had put into us to build that base.  She built our base and because of that we never disappointed her.
 
What does this have to do with Trinity Security Allies?  When we started this ministry she was one of our biggest supporters.  It was full circle, I was now serving God training people to protect the flock.  She didn’t get her minister but she did get me back into the church.  Without her base on God, family and hard work I would not be where I am today.  According to MARRIpedia, an online social science encyclopedia on all matters related to family, marriage, and religion, the rise in violent crime parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers and that neighborhoods with a high degree of religious practice are not high-crime neighborhoods.  So because of my mother’s strong degree of trust in God, she had four boys that all became servants and not burdens to society. 
 
If we do not get back to the family and our love of God we are going to see more and more violence against not only the family but also the church.  When we look back at the recent church violent incidents we see broken men coming from broken families and we as the church need to step up and change this.  Men with the help of our wives need to lead our families to what my mother and father did which was loving God and hard work, not just work but servanthood.  This is the base that formed the Howard boys and needs to be the base that we use to change the world.  Thank you Mom, I love you and know that I will see you again.

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