You sometimes have no idea of the effect a seemingly insignificant episode can have on a person.

One of the most meaningful memories I have from growing up is the time my Dad showed absolute faith in me.

Our tiny Catholic school system in our tiny hometown in Upper Michigan ran an annual spaghetti feed fundraiser. It was a huge deal (for us, anyway), with meal service in the parish halls of all three Catholic churches in town. Kids and parents alike worked to prepare some of the food in advance, to make and serve the complete meals on the day of the event, and to handle all the other tasks like manning the till, clearing tables, cleaning up messes, and so on.

One year, when I was around 13 or 14, I was doing the money collecting with another boy a few years older than me. At one point my Dad came by to check on us, and calculated that $20 had gone missing from the till.

The other boy was very quick to accuse me of taking it. My Dad didn’t miss a beat. He stared the other kid down and said, “No, Jim did not take that money.”

It was very obvious by his expression that my Dad strongly suspected that the other boy had taken it. But he didn’t accuse him. The other kid hemmed and hawed and quickly found a reason to do some other job, and my Dad took over at the collection table with me. And he never said another word about it. The whole thing took just a few very short minutes.

But those are minutes that have stuck with me. All these decades later, I still get a lump in my throat knowing my Dad had that absolute faith in me.

And I’m certainly not perfect, but I try like the devil to live up that amazing lesson my Dad gave me.