Oct 10, 2026
Father, Son, and… Holy Crow?
10-12-26
Shared by one of our readers:
An 80-year-old man was sitting on the sofa in his house along with his 45-year-old highly educated son. Suddenly a crow perched on their window.
The father asked his son, “What’s that?” The son replied, “It is a crow.” After a few minutes, the father asked his son the second time, “What is this?” The son said, “Dad, I just told you it’s a crow.” After a little while, the old father again asked his son, “What is this?” This time an irritation showed in the son’s tone when he said to his father with a rebuff: “It’s a crow, a crow”! A little afterward, the father again asked, “What’s that?”
This time the son shouted at his father, “Why do you keep asking me the same question again and again, although I have told you so many times ‘It’s a CROW!’ Can’t you understand this?”
A little later the father went to his room and came back with an old tattered diary that he had maintained since his son’s birth. Opening a page, he asked his son to read that page.
Today my three-year-old boy was sitting with me on the sofa when a crow flew to the window. My son asked me 23 times what it was, and I replied to him all 23 times that it was a crow. I hugged him lovingly each time he asked me the question again and again and again. I did not at all feel irritated. I rather felt affection for my innocent child.”
If your parents attain old age, do not repulse them or look at them as a burden, but speak to them with gracious words. Be cool, obedient, humble, and kind to them.
Be considerate of your parents. Determine to say in your spirit, “I want to see my parents happy forever. They have cared for me ever since I was a little child. They have always showered their selfless love on me.
“They crossed mountains and valleys enduring the storm and heat to make me a person presentable in society today.” Say a prayer to God, “I will serve my old parents in the BEST way. I will say all good and kind words to my dear parents, no matter how they behave.”
Thanks, Lana Lee. Just this week I watched a movie with my wife, Make Way For Tomorrow, a forgotten gem from 1937. Director Leo McCarey was famous for many films, from Laurel and Hardy comedies to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup to the classic Going My Way, but he thought the modest Make Way for Tomorrow was his real Oscar-calibre film. Without stars, the low-budget movie was the simple – but heart-rending – story of an old couple beset by Depression finances hoping to live with any of their children.
The next generation was too busy, preoccupied, and basically selfish to give them time, assistance, or meaningful hospitality. The movie concludes with the loving couple having to go separate ways (they hoped temporarily) but after a day re-living their honeymoon and encountering strangers nicer than their own children, they part.
A happy ending? Not Hollywood’s traditional way… yet sadly true to life. A saving grace in the McCarey film is the last title card, reminding viewers to “Honor thy father and thy mother, that your days might be long…”.
Was this a Salvation message? No, it is Father (!) God’s commandment, the Fifth of 10 instructing us to act in ways pleasing to Him… and beneficial to us.
If you are a child, you might someday have children – a mechanistic or trite syllogism. It is almost a superstitious warning about contradicting God’s purposes. He is indeed our Heavenly Father, and that association is symbolic of all sorts of familial relationships in life. Among memories that flood back, I remember my daughter going through a stage where she seemed to discover the word “Why?” Every topic or observation prompted the question, and every answer inspired another. It evolved from amusing to annoying to… pleasing: seeing her essential inquisitive nature develop.
In the “crow” story, I was tempted to think the old man was growing a bit dotty upstairs. It happens to the best of us. But it was not his mind that was fading; it was his son’s love. Never let that happen. Remember that His steadfast love endures forever. In Psalm 136 that promise is repeated 26 times. God means it. Take it to heart; “Be ye doers of the Word and not hearers only.”
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