Learning From My Father

Learning from my Father: Lessons on Life and Faith

By David Lawther Johnson, Eerdmans, 2012, 151 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8028-6708-7, $15.00 (pbk).

This is the author's version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source:

Catholic Library World, Sep2012, Vol. 83 Issue 1, p.48.

Learning from my Father: Lessons on Life and Faith by David Lawther Johnson presents lessons that David learned from his father on faith, God, belief, love, sin, evil, and hope. The author was able to spend important time with his father the last three weeks of life. In some sense, David received his greatest lesson on all, how to die. The father he knew at the end was the same man he knew at the beginning: a man of faith. This last lesson was “shown rather than said: make sure you develop a type of rugged faith, a religious belief you hold credible and true, because you never know when the faith you will need to withstand the limits of life itself” (8).

David, a longtime business leader, lawyer, and president and CEO of BioCrossroads, “recalled” a few weeks after his father’s death how forty years before his father had corresponded with him on issues of faith when David was a freshman at Harvard University. He had saved these letters and after re-reading these letters believed they would be helpful to others as they had been to him. David presents in Learning from my Father lessons that his father taught him and his own reflections on these lessons forty years later. Some of these lessons were that faith is a relationship with God and others. Love is an action word, not a feeling. David’s Presbyterian father not only taught him these important truths, but also lived them out before him.

Learning from My Father is a beautifully written book with many pearls of wisdom. It can be read individually or in a group; or even better it can be read by parents in the company of their sons and daughters. This book would also make a good gift to parents and young adults.