I went to see my grandfather’s cemetery plot today. He died in August of 2005, a man I respected immensely, but it had been nearly four years since I could go near his plot to see him. I wouldn’t say that it was a paralyzing fear, but more in the sense that I really didn’t want to have to conquer those demons. I wanted to live in the idea that I was okay with not going there, that it didn’t matter if I was there or not and told myself “He knows I loved him.” I shirked him, short changed the one man in my life that I wished was still near me, my real mentor, much more than my own father. While he was my grandfather, I looked up to him and admired the man who lived his life for Christ. Who took his family to church every Sunday, no matter what country or place they were living, a true staple and solid foundation to which I started my own path in Christ.
Strange to think that in all my life I shrugged off responsibility and was perfectly comfortable walking in the shadows of existence. Until that is my grandfather got sick, and eventually slipped away from our grasp (my family) into the arms of the Lord. It was kind of unnerving at the time to see my grandfather getting worse, and for all the times I wanted the Lord to heal him, He didn’t. To see such a solid Christian be destroyed from the inside out and to have no one offer him the peace that he needed, but he kept trudging along in his life. He was always that man I admired even when he was falling apart, he read his Bible everyday until I am sure he couldn’t see it anymore and my grandmother had to read it for him, but he still did it. For all the things I hated about myself or wished I could have been, he was. For all you men out there reading this book, I know that you have a family member or a mentor in your life that you feel the same about. There is always one in your life that you look up to as a father more than in the paternal sense, but in the reality that this is who I want to be. I called my grandfather that, but I never got to tell him that I loved him in the capacity.
Even as I write these words it’s hard to imagine that the last thing that I told him was, “You’re gonna be okay. You’ll be out of here in no time and I will see you later.” I had to get home that day to finish a paper, some reading or whatever it was for class the next day and as I walked out of that hospital room with a pain in my chest I ignored it. It was that night he slipped into a coma, and my grandmother the next morning had to make the decision to take him off of life support. The man I admired had been trying to hold on to my hand as I pulled away, because he knew that it was his time and I ignored him. I usually don’t tell this part of the story. Mostly it is too hard to get through, an emotional moment, which I personally don’t really want to share with others. However, as I left that hospital room that day, I did the usual hug everyone and when it came to my grandfather I leaned down and hugged him. He grabbed my hand in the instant that I pulled away and stared at me. The stare I now know was his way of telling me to stay, to wait just a little bit longer, but like the kid I was I patted the top of his hand, I.V. in all and told him everything was going to be okay. How was I knowledgeable enough to know that everything was going to be okay? For the look in his eyes I should have stayed, and talked to him to see what he had to say. My grandfather had told me stories my whole life, and now I wish I could remember half of them. That is what you lose when you fail to listen, when you fail to hear what is being said to you and that is what I miss the most about him.
It’s a moment I will have to live with for the rest of my life, but it was a changing moment for me. From then on I didn’t want to ignore the calling and listened far more intently to the Lord and what He had in store for me. That pain you feel in your gut when you know your doing wrong, listen to it, and turn away from whatever it is that is making you feel sick inside. Some of us, like me ignore Him for so long that we never know we are sinning because we have diluted the feeling too much to be noticeable anymore. We fill our lives with all sorts of pleasures, but never really fill ourselves with the lasting pleasure of coming to Him and submitting to the Lord.
At my grandfathers funeral, Pastor Milhouse, who had been my grandfather’s pastor for years and he told a story of all the times that he mentioned the Lord in a sermon, and how he could look out at the audience and see my grandfathers hand spring up, like God had it on a string. And later even at the wake we held at my grandparents house was the same. Stories of funny moments or sad ones about him and all the things he had done in his life. All the things I had forgotten came flooding back, and it was the same as I stood that afternoon at his grave marker. His name etched in the marble, dates, wars he’d fought in and the cross just above his name was all the marked his existence now. Though as I stood there I realized that it is not the last time I would see him, not the last time I would hold him in my arms and be able to thank him for what he had done in my life. When we are in Christ, held in His embrace we are never free falling. We are held up on solid ground and unwavering when we place our faith in him. So much of my life since then felt like a blur without him, and as I stood there my life still felt empty without my grandfather to tell me a story about a ship he was on or a base he was in charge of. The simple things I missed and being able to talk to him again felt so distant. I did the same things with God over most, if not all of my life. I had let Him slip away from me, because I didn’t want to hear Christ anymore and what He had to say.
Recently I came off the mountain from a Men’s Conference about being mentored and all this started flooding back to me. My grandfather was the first person, or mentor that popped into my head. In a mentoring relationship you share your experiences with one another in the same way that my grandfather was filling my life, my pastor and other men I respect in my church were asking me to do the same. Honestly I would be the last person that I figured could have been a mentor, but for all the things that I had been writing over the last few years, maybe it was the Lord who had given me the ability to write who was trying to tell me something more. And while I am a sub-par writer at best, my abilities grew tremendously in fiction writing once I applied myself and graduated from college with a Creative Writing degree. Some of you may be thinking that it sounds like underwater basket weaving and for a while I thought the same way, but how much of myself I have expressed over the years through characters and stories that I never would have seen before just talking to others. Even as I write this book I find myself pondering on new avenues and stories that I want to tell others. Though to get back on mentoring as I see it, perhaps this was the calling that I was being drawn toward and as I look at the multitude of pages and scribbling’s this is where this book began taking shape and much more so to honor the memory of the man who centered my life on Christ, so for both those reasons I advance as was the theme of the Men’s Conference, to help men to see that being a mentor and being mentored is a process of necessity.