VICAR
Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, today brings us Father’s Day, and I find myself thinking of fathers not as they appear in greeting cards or sentimental verse, but as they are in the real, unvarnished life of the British countryside. The father who rises before dawn to check the livestock. The father who mends the same gate for the third time and does not complain. The father who teaches his son to drive a tractor, or his daughter to identify a bird by its song, and who asks no reward but the quiet satisfaction of handing on what he knows.
So today, a prayer for fathers everywhere, but especially for those who find their worship in the fields and their sermons in the hedgerows.
Dear Lord,
We thank You this day for fathers. Not the perfect ones—they do not exist—but the real ones. The ones who get it wrong sometimes, who lose their temper, who fall asleep in the armchair after Sunday lunch. The ones who keep going, even when they are tired, even when they are worried, even when the bills are mounting and the rain will not stop.
We thank You for the fathers who work the land. For those who rise before the sun to feed the stock and who come home with the smell of hay and diesel and honest sweat. Bless their backs, Lord. They carry more than they show. Bless their hands, calloused and cracked, that have repaired a thousand things and built a thousand more. Bless their hearts, which love their children fiercely, though they rarely say it aloud.
We thank You for the fathers who teach. For those who show a child how to plant a potato, how to mend a fence, how to read the sky for weather. For those who pass on not just skills but something deeper: a reverence for the land, a respect for hard work, a love for this green and pleasant country. Let those lessons take root, Lord. Let them flower in the next generation.
We thank You for the fathers who are no longer with us, but whose presence we still feel in the fields they farmed and the walls they built. For the memory of their voices, for the echo of their footsteps in the barn, for the tools they left behind that still bear the shape of their hands. Comfort us, Lord, in our missing of them. And let us honour them by living as they taught us: with integrity, with patience, with love.
We pray for fathers who are struggling. For those who have lost their way. For those who feel they have failed their children, whether through absence or through pride. Wrap Your arms around them, Lord. Send them help. Give them the courage to ask for forgiveness and the grace to begin again.
We pray for fathers who are far from home, serving in difficult places, or working away to provide for those they love. Keep them safe. Ease their loneliness. And bring them home soon to the arms of their children.
And finally, Lord, we pray for those who have no father to honour today. For those who have been orphaned or abandoned or estranged. Be a father to them, Lord. Let them find in You the love and protection they have not found on earth. Let this community of readers and neighbours and friends stand in the gap, offering kindness, offering time, offering the simple gift of being there.
Bless this day, Lord. Bless the ties that bind fathers to children and children to fathers. Let there be laughter around the Sunday table, and something good on the grill, and maybe a cold beer shared in the garden. And in the quiet moments, let there be gratitude—for the gift of fatherhood, in all its imperfect glory.
Amen.
God bless you all. Enjoy your day.