As I grew up I never questioned his place in our family. Mom taught me to love the Word of God and Dad taught me to obey it, but the stranger was our storyteller. He could weave the most fascinating tales. Adventures, mysteries and comedies were daily conversations. He could hold our whole family spellbound for hours each evening.

He was like a friend to the whole family. He took Dad, Bill and me to our first major league baseball game. He was always encouraging us to see movies, and he even made arrangements to introduce us to several movie stars.

The stranger was an incessant talker. Dad didn't seem to mind, but sometimes Mom would quietly get up while the rest of us were enthralled with one of his stories of faraway places, go to her room, read her Bible and pray. I wonder now if she ever prayed that the stranger would not have so much of our time.

You see, my dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but this stranger never felt an obligation to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our house -- not from us, from our friends, or adults. Our longtime visitor, however, used occasional four-letter words that burned my ears and made Dad squirm. To my knowledge the stranger was never confronted.

My Dad never even permitted alcohol in his home not even for cooking, but the stranger felt like we needed exposure and enlightened us to other ways of life. He even talked much too freely about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, suggestive and embarrassing. I know now that my early concepts of the man/woman relationship were influenced by the stranger.

As I look back, I believe it was because of the grace of God that the stranger did not influence us more. Time after time he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked and never asked to leave.

More than thirty years have passed since the stranger moved in with that young family. But if I were to walk into my parents' family room today, you would still see him sitting over in a corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.

His name... you ask?

We always just called him, "TV."