JAMES
My Father's Story
JAMES
(my father)
My father was a complicated man. He had chronic depression and anxiety that often was directed at me and my mom. There was no abuse, we just had a tendency to trigger his anger. One example: It was my job to dust mop the family room floor every day after school. One day, he came home, went into the backyard, tracked in some grass and accused me of not doing my job. As a teenager, I hated my dad for his high expectations of me and his anger when I didn’t meet them. When I became an adult with a home and children of my own, my mom convinced him to share his story with me.
James Dale Sullins was born in rural west Missouri in a small farming town called Adrian. His parents divorced when he was three years old. He and his mom lived with her parents on a nearby farm. He grew up knowing where his dad lived but was emphatically told he was never to interact with him or the kids in his yard. When he walked to school he had to walk on the opposite side of the street and the neighbors would report to his mom or grandfather
when he didn’t do that, leading to a spanking and scolding. He was confused that he wasn’t allowed to interact with the kids he saw playing at the house where his father lived.
My grandmother eventually decided to leave home. I don’t know the exact chronology of the things that happened but I know she was unstable, had 4 marriages, and used my dad as her primary emotional support. Her choice in men was poor. One marriage lasted 4 days because her husband was already married. One husband was a migrant farmer where accommodations were shacks with dirt floors. The third man she married would beat my father and when she finally objected to the beatings, my dad’s step-father refused to support him further. At the age of 12, my father raised rabbits to sell for food, learned to decorate cakes, and did odd jobs to support himself. My grandmother’s fourth husband was very controlling which led to her death. She had surgery for uterine cancer. The wound got infected and opened up. Her current husband refused to change doctors despite my father and the nurses begging him to do so. She died due to that decision. I was one year old so never knew her.
Adulthood wasn’t much kinder to him. He met my mom in high school and married her at the age of 21. He worked as a bank teller while going to California Baptist College. After completing his bachelor degree, he moved his wife and three young kids (8-, 6- and 5-year-olds) to Dallas where he attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in nearby Fort Worth. Mom worked full time as a secretary and my dad arranged his classes so he could be home with us after school. He held a part-time job at a local church where he wasn’t treated fairly. After he finished his Masters in Religious Education, he received a job in Tulsa, Oklahoma as their Minister of Education—an administrative position. That lasted a year due to the pastor’s wife sabotaging him and spreading rumors of an affair with the wife one of the deacons. We then moved to Poplar Bluff, Missouri where he held the same position at a local church. A year later, the deacons asked him to resign so they could increase the lead pastor’s salary. This nearly broke my dad. The thing he was called to as a way to serve God had rejected him-twice.
Left without a job and with his purpose gone, my dad went back to school. He commuted 2 hours away to the University of Arkansas where he stayed on weekends to complete a Master’s in Educational Administration with the goal of becoming a Vice-Principle. His first school was a small country school where he was the 6th grade teacher and principle. But there were no positions open that paid enough to support the family. He found a position in the St. Louis area as a 6th grade teacher and we moved there in 1968 and finally established a permanent home.
My father was plagued with migraine headaches and irritable bowel my entire life. These often interfered with family plans. He had frequent visits with psychiatrists to deal with his depression and anxiety. I remember visiting him in a psychiatric ward once but I don’t know the details of why he was there. As he entered his 60’s he began having trouble with an aggressive from of osteoarthritis passed to him by his family. Over the next 20 years he had multiple spine surgeries with no relief of his pain. He fractured a hip which was treated by putting a rod to stabilize it. The rod slowly migrated through the bone, sticking out and destroying the hip socket. The rod was removed, but the hip joint couldn’t be repaired—he could no longer walk.
He died and the age of 85 after being bedridden for several years.
As I reflect on my father’s life, I realize what a hero he was. He knew how to persevere. When life stopped him in his tracks, he found a way to remake himself and keep going. But most of all, he never gave up on God. He remained a faithful Jesus follower all of my life. When the church rejected him, he worshipped at home. When he suffered, he prayed. When he could no longer go to chapel services at the Baptist Home where they lived, he would listen to my mom play hymns on the piano and they would do Bible studies together. That is why he is a hero to me. No matter his circumstances, he never turned away from God but sought to draw closer to him.