I remember the moment I felt my strong, Christian father take a turn for the dark side.

I was just a kid, sitting in the back of the family car. We were driving home from the Wesleyan Church in Spencer, Neb., and Dad stopped to see the foreman who was in charge of building a bridge across the Niobrara River. Dad wanted a job, and I guess to sound manly tough, he said the word “damn.” My mom reprovingly said, “Art!” I’m sure my mouth dropped open because he was the Sunday School superintendent. He wasn’t supposed to say “damn.”

My dad, Art Doty, was one of those characters who really did have a tough life. He was born in Michigan and raised there until his early teens when he ran away from home, hitching rides on the railroad until he landed in Nebraska. He worked on a dairy farm close to O’Neill, Neb. There he met my mother who worked as a helper on the farm. They eventually married, had children and both accepted Jesus Christ while attending the small concrete-block church in Spencer, 15 miles from their farm.

Dad was not tall, but he was big. I think his biceps measured 18 inches at one time. He had an eighth-grade education, but he loved books and read to us at night. “Big Red,” Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told” were a few I remember. He also read the Bible to us. He was kind, and much to my mom’s dismay, he’d always bring home the hitchhikers he’d picked up on the road and give them a meal.

I have so many memories of him, and one of them is standing in front of the congregation making a presentation on buying a stove. He had an easel and a picture of the stove on the easel. Another memory was that he drove around to various farms picking up people to take them to church.

That is why his saying “damn” shocked me. At the time, I didn’t know where Dad was headed, but it wasn’t good. He got the job working on the bridge. He also got into drinking and smoking. Soon he was working away from home, and when he did come home there was fighting and chaos. Within a few years, he sold the farm in Nebraska and bought a bar in Sioux Falls, S.D. It only took about six months to lose the bar and everything he and mom had worked for all their lives.

My mom prayed for my dad for 22 years. Giving up praying for him was not an option. Divorce, to her, was not an option. She put up with his coming home late, his verbal abuse and his not having any money left over to pay the bills.

Dad stopped drinking just a few years before he found out he was full of cancer. Mom and all of us kids enjoyed those years of seeing him plow up a huge garden plot and walk the rows of corn, peas, potatoes, watching and waiting for the harvest. They even took a few trips together.

Mom’s prayers eventually were answered. Dad came back to the Lord.

He only had a few months between finding his cancer and dying. But, as he lay dying, he witnessed to people who came into his hospital room that he had wasted so many years. The impact was great on many people he had partied with and had worked with.

As one of the kids, I have the good memories along with the bad.

I praise God that Dad gave us a good part of him in the beginning, that he always loved us no matter what and that he did come back to God before he died.

I praise God that I will see him with my mother after I die. No matter what lifestyle he lived, he was my father, and I loved him.

I always think of him, especially on Father’s Day.