“Give the devil a little finger, and he’ll take the whole hand.”

Daddy often quoted that saying, that fact.

The first time I heard him use it was when I was in fourth grade in a Christian school, operated by the church we attended.

The church leadership lost interest, passion, for supporting the school, and voted to cancel the seventh and eighth grades the next school year.

So the saying came true a year later when I finished the fifth grade, and they closed the whole school.

The Godlessness I experienced in public school the next year grieved Daddy severely, the full extent of which I could never know.

But the lifetime effect gave me a passion for Christian education (church schools, private Christian schools, home schools) that likely exceeds Daddy’s.

He ‘gave his last drop of blood’ for Christian education, and so have I (as a student, as a teacher, as a parent, as an advocate).

My dearest memory of the last few years of Daddy’s life, when I was teaching fourth grade in Hollywood, Florida, was his repeated comment on the phone, “I’m so glad you’re telling these little lambs about Jesus.”

That kept this teacher going, on a mission commissioned by God Himself.

– – –

Then, after my years of teaching, I designed and manufactured and installed playground equipment for 25 years, applying my intense insight in child development.

I asked God to provide two things:

+enough money to feed my four children, and

+enough money to send them to Christian schools through eighth grade.

He did—well-fed, healthy, outstanding athletes—and 38 combined years in Christian schools with full tuition and other costs totaling well over a hundred thousand dollars.

And only two years during that time did my income reach twenty-five thousand dollars.

I share that to show (through three generations) the power of God, and the passion of God, and the provision of God—honoring what Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not forbid them.”