“Well, I’m goin home,” he drawled, with the half smile that we had all grown to recognize as ‘Ricky.’
“Could you wait till the service is over at least,” I chided him, “and besides, breakfast is nearly ready. Can’t you wait just a few more minutes?”
“I’m not going to the house,” he replied, his smile now drawn straight. “I’m goin home. Home to Wyoming.”
The young men of this east Texas community were in the custom of gathering for food and a Word each Wednesday morning just before dawn, and Ricky had become a fixture in that group. At first his remarks did not hit home.
Ricky? Leaving?
Going home?
“Now why would you want to leave here,” I asked, a frown of dis-belief beginning to spread across my unshaven face. “Texas is Gods country, and these guys here are some of His finest stock. Surely you can’t be serious. Can you?”
By now the fun had drained clear out of the conversation, and it was serious. Completely serious.
“I love you guys more than you will ever know,” he stammered, “but this ain’t home. The holidays were lonesome, and it’s hard to go home every night to an empty house. I miss my family, and,… and I miss my dad. Most of all, I miss my dad
“My dad,” he said without slowing for a pause, “is my best friend.”
Maybe it was because I am a dad, or maybe it was the way he said it, but those words hit home and stuck with me for quite a spell after that. “My dad,” he had said, “ is my best friend.”
Most fathers, I am sure, would be proud to say that their sons would do anything they asked for their old dad. And most men, I am sure, would be quick to add that they think their dads are very special, very worthy, very honorable, or tough, or proud, or a host of other attributes. Mine would, I am sure, and so, I suspect, would yours.
But ‘best friend?’ Out here, where everything is just naturally big, that remark would cover a lot of ground. An awful lot. ‘Best friend’ stands out there by itself. For a son to call his dad his ‘best friend’ is an honor all by itself. It speaks of trust, of openness, of understanding, of a nearness many relationships do not have. “Best friend’ also carries an undercurrent of respect with it as well. It requires that. Texans would say it means ‘no holds barred.’ Nothing hidden. Pardners.
Ricky saw his dad as a pardner. What an honor.
Later on the idea of my relationship with my heavenly Father came into that same arena, and I chewed upon it for a while. Was God my ‘best friend’? I wandered on that for a while, and, it became clear that the better question was, ‘Does God consider me His best friend”’ If that were the case, and I pray that it is, then those same qualities that Ricky and his dad shared would also be common between God and me. Sobering thought.
Now the yarn would be complete if I were to leave it there, for the picture of the father and the son is very vivid here, and very complete. The story of Ricky and his dad, however, wasn’t finished yet, as I was later to discover. This old yarn won’t be complete til there is a knot tied at the end of it, and the knot was tied at another breakfast just a few weeks later.
Ricky, we all knew, had left the ranges of Wyoming to take a job in Texas, for jobs in his part of the country were hard to come by. But, far from home, and away from family, Ricky soon discovered that the things of his new world, though financially much more stable, were not like they were at home. He never stopped longing for the high mountain rangelands that he and his dad ranched together, and the things of Texas just did not measure up. Like many a wayward son, it was inevitable that the day would come when the land of his childhood would beckon the son homeward. Few are ever complete while they are in a foreign land, and one morning the day came when Ricky could no longer fight the urge to leave, and leave he did.
With his pickup loaded and strapped down with the few possessions he considered worth keeping, Ricky disappeared into the east Texas dawn. We all miss him, but he is now at home with his father. Content.
A few weeks later, while at another Wednesday morning breakfast, I was talking about this event to Tony. Now Tony ran a large saddle factory outside of town where Ricky had worked, and Ricky had been one of his best salesman. Working together, over the last few years, the two of them had become very close friends. “I can still remember Ricky telling me that his dad was his best friend,” I remarked to Tony as I took another pancake off the bar. “That really touched me for some reason.”
“Well, did you know this,” Tony said, as he took two pancakes for himself and we sat down. “ The dad Ricky spoke of was not his real dad.”
“What do you mean, ’real dad’?”
“It seems,” Tony replied, that Ricky’s mom had been married three or four times, and he never knew who his real dad was. Early on he was abandoned, and a Christian man from the community took him in and raised him, eventually giving him his own name. That,” he finished, “is the ‘best friend’ that Ricky talks about.”
Like the father in heaven, Ricky’s dad invited him into his own family, and gave him his own name, making him a son in the truest way. What a picture. And what a question it leaves. Is your father your best friend, it asks? If you can answer ‘yes’, then the story is finally complete, the knot tied.
And, even if you can’t say that, for one reason or another, I suspect that He, from His spread, far away in another place, considers you His. And, like the father in Wyoming, your Father eagerly awaits that certain homecoming day; and the day that you, too, will tell someone else, as I have now done, that God is your friend. Your ‘best friend.’
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