Today I wrote my Dad a letter. It was one I had been pondering for the expanse of a week. It addressed some issues which have been difficult to address with him in the past.

He is getting to be frail and I and my siblings are quite concerned about him. He has been such a strong man and so intelligent all of his years and it is heartbreaking to see the ravages of age eating away at his body.

He is a successful farmer and he still loves to go to the farm. He has always loved working, that is why he has not done what he should do in regards to his estate.

I think he feels if he makes the changes that we, his children, have asked him to make, that he will be forced to stop doing what he loves.

We have met for meeting after meeting with him. Traveling from Mexico to Nebraska for family farm meetings. At each meeting we ask him to do the same thing and he never does what we ask him to do.

There is another meeting scheduled for the first week of December. They want me to fly back to Nebraska to attend this meeting. I wonder what will be different this time? He didn’t listen to us before, I doubt that he will now.

I have to work. I need to get out of debt and my parents have no idea how it is to work for an employer, they have always been self employed. The last thing I want to do in December is to fly back to Nebraska for another one of those stinking meetings.

So I called my siblings and talked with each one of them. We were still all on the same page, we wanted a change. Then I spent a couple of more days pondering and praying about the letter I was going to write.

I wrote it tonight. You would think after trying to get this man to do something for years and years that I would have had some anger when I wrote it. I didn’t. I just told him the difficulty that the family farm had caused me and my family.

He is hard of hearing and doesn’t wear his hearing aids so I figured I may get through to him if he could read what I wrote instead of struggle to hear what I was saying. I also figured if I attract as many people as I do to this blog then I may not be such a bad writer either.

After I was done writing it, I thought maybe I should read it in the morning to make sure that it showed respect for him, before sending it off. Then I thought about the spirit I wrote it in. I wrote that letter in a spirit of love, there was no anger or malaise in the words, only honesty.

I don’t know if it will accomplish my objective but I know that going to all those meetings never did, so to try a new avenue seemed to be the wise way to go.

As I reflected tonight on how I handled this I realized that I have learned something vital in my dealings with difficult situations. Although difficult situations can be angering, it is best not to respond in anger. It is best to respond in love. If I am still angry it is wise not to write a letter, to a man I dearly love, until I have simmered down.

How do you respond to difficult situations? Has responding in anger been an effective method in getting your point across?