Love and Hydrogen (21 page)

Standards

No schoolteacher could have gotten away with the behavior that Bill Clinton did. No principal, no college president, no corporate president. That he wasn't forced to resign tells me that our standards for the presidency are lower than they are for virtually any other job in America. And that, to me, is a disaster.

Deception

How can we expect individuals to be faithful to us if they're not faithful to the people in their own families?

Government

Revival isn't something that comes from government. Government is not an agent of spirituality. But it can be a moral force. It's said you can't legislate morality. Well, I've got news for those who say that:
all
we should legislate is morality. And we certainly shouldn't legislate immorality.

What's in My Heart

Have I been the man I could be? No. What's in my heart? What do I spend my time thinking about? Could I at any moment make a clean breast of it to people; let them see,
so here's what I've been
thinking
?

I get teased for starting every staff meeting with that phrase: “So here's what I've been thinking.”

Having Good Memories

Is like having gold in your spiritual bank. Nothing can take the place of them. Nothing can diminish them. Nights I can't sleep, I remember floating on my back with Dad down the little stream behind our farm, the sun on our faces, the leaves spiraling overhead. When one of my colleagues from across the aisle is going on about this or that victimized minority, I remember my father and The Judge taking three straight Saturdays to help me with my soapbox racer. Their faces come back to me when I don't expect them, and when I do. Their faces are a gift I have to be strong enough to carry.

Mr. Perfect

Janet gets a kick out of it whenever a publication decides I'm Mr. Clean or Mr. Perfect or whatever they've decided to call me. She's happy for me but she always makes a wry little list of recent shortcomings to keep my head from swelling. “All well and good, Mr. Perfect,” she said after the most recent article, in the
Southern Partisan,
“but you still haven't called Barney back.”

Unfinished Projects

Dear Barney:

Terrible to hear about your terrible news.

Don't want to lecture an old lawyer on the law.

Know full well that spirit of Christ is humility.

Imagine how it felt to read you never thought you'd

“find Bob Ashcroft's son in the pocket of Big Tobacco.”

Full slate.

Sleeplessness.

Wanting to write forever, feels like. Took stock, made notes, as way of preparing self.

Really took stock.

City on the Hill.

Dad's Twenty-One Life Lessons

# 4 Silence sometimes shouts.

# 5 Creative self-doubt fertilizes the field of creativity.

# 7 Never eat your seed corn.

# 8 When you've considered all your options, work to expand your options.

# 11 The lives of fathers and sons are intertwined; when one dies, the other is diminished.

# 12 A father should try to pass on not only his strengths, wisdom, and insight, but also how to handle weaknesses, failures, and insecurities.

# 13 When you have something important to say, write it down.

# 15 Little things mean a lot.

# 21 Saying good-bye is a way of beginning to say hello.

#22

When I was eight, my father took me to the sleepy Springfield airport, once a World War II training field. He was an amateur pilot. We walked up to a 1941 Piper Cub, climbed in, and took off. A few minutes later, he shouted over the engine noise:

“John, fly the plane for a while.”

“What do I do?” I shouted back.

“Grab the stick and push it,” he said. I did. We went into a sickening dive. He pulled us out. He had a good chuckle, and I had a good lesson: Actions had consequences. And when I put my hand to something, I could make a difference.

The Melancholy Truth

Each of us is required to exercise leadership, even if it's limited to our personal relationships.

Groundswells of Support

The Judge said when a politician claimed there was a public outcry for him to run for office that it meant that his mother and father thought it was a good idea. A groundswell of support meant that an aunt and uncle agreed.

My houses are filled with plaques and honorary pictures, keys to various cities: temporary acknowledgments of the offices I held, not indications of the man I am, or hope to be.

Flattery

Think about it: virtually any positive remark you could make about Jesus would be true.

The Long View

I try to adopt a forward-looking approach, focusing on what I might become, not on what others are saying about me today.

Attitude of Gratitude

My father didn't allow us to use the phrase, “I'm proud of . . .” “Say you're grateful for it,” he always said. “Not proud.”

God doesn't ask us to sacrifice our children to Him. He sacrificed His Son for us. Pride doesn't enter into it, here. Gratitude is the appropriate response.

Inner Reserves

Six weeks after my brother's funeral, my father had a massive heart attack.

What Family Is All About

My brother had lived in the same town and used to drop in on him every other day. My father told him he didn't need to feel as if he had to come by all the time. My brother answered that a phone wouldn't work for what he wanted, because sometimes he just wanted to lay eyes on him.

Good Fortune

The story of the Asian man who commissioned a work of art to represent good fortune, the artist free to choose any form or method of representing it. He chose three lines of calligraphy:

GRANDFATHER DIES
FATHER DIES
SON DIES

The wealthy Asian said, “How can this represent good fortune? Everyone dies!” The artist said, “The good fortune is in the sequence.”

Gullibility

When someone promised my father something, he assumed that that person was telling the truth. Every so often someone would say to me, “Your father sure was gullible.” But who'd want to be raised by a cynic? Believing in the best and giving others the benefit of the doubt may not be the most astute financial advice, but it's the only spiritual advice.

Despite Everything

Despite everything, I could hear sometimes in my father's voice the way a certain insecurity invaded his thoughts. A few times he said to me, “If I weren't a college president, I wonder if anyone would still care about my opinions.”

Carrying the Ball

When people say pictures don't lie, they fail to realize that our favorite pictures try to suggest that our best moments are persistent moments. They're not. We might have looked like that for a second, but then our hair moved, our clothes wrinkled, our expressions got tired, our faces sagged back to normal.

Writing

There's something about being able to put writing down and pick it back up that makes it special. Maybe we have a struggle getting what we need to get out face-to-face, or on the telephone. Maybe the deliberate pace of writing allows us to express ourselves more clearly.

The Reason for Discipline

The very nature of Judeo-Christian culture is choice-driven.

Sunday School

When I was in Sunday school one of our songs went like this:

Be careful, little eyes, what you see;
Oh, be careful, little eyes, what you see.
For the Father up above is looking down in love;
So be careful, little eyes, what you see.

Punctuality

My father was never on time: he was always
early.
On time was not an option. If you weren't early, you were late. We were always the first to church, the first to school, the first to work.

More Important Things Than Me

Because of his ministries, he was never home in the summer. At Little League I'd look up and see all the other dads. As I got older I realized that the most important thing my father ever taught me was that there were more important things than me.

Road Trips

Once I was an appropriate age, I was regularly invited to go along on his ministry trips. Everyone talks today about getting involved in their children's worlds. My father invited me into
his.

Hindsight

For a while, I thought he was ignoring me. It turned out that he was
building
me.

Respect

Once when I was twelve, I had just heard him address a group of college students, and he turned to me and said, “What do
you
think, John?” He asked my opinion. You know what that said to an adolescent boy?

When I traveled with him, he quizzed me about tensions or contradictions in any of the concepts he'd been dealing with. I wanted to be able to respond correctly, so I listened as if nothing else mattered.

Our Own Little Prisons

Do yourself a favor: the next time you're driving with someone and you see that faraway look in their eyes, and you wonder what's going on in their heads—
ask.

Courtesy

Even in his latter, potentially lonelier years, my father was passionate about taking the pressure off people. He was always adamant about one part of his dinner invitations: “Come when you can and leave when you want to.”

Discovery

I'm a fan of the discovery school of education. When education focuses exclusively on comprehension, a crucial spiritual element is lost. An educated person is someone who's become addicted to the thrill of discovery. If someone tells me they're feeling prematurely old, I tell them: buy a telescope, go visit a new culture, work through a college textbook.

Open Your Eyes

There's a spot on a twisting farm road near our place in Greene County where, at the right time of year, in the right weather, tarantulas make their crossing. Most drivers don't even notice, but I like to stop and watch, and I've been known to pick up one or two and take them home to Janet. I'll set one on the kitchen counter when I know she's coming. She'll scream loud enough to make me think it's all been worthwhile, but she doesn't appreciate it. She tells people that it's a family joke that I enjoy and she endures.

“Why would you do that?” someone might ask. That's the wrong question. We saw something new. We enlarged our lives.

Cookies

My father never let people leave without putting something in their hands. He developed a signature gift, a plaque he had produced for the sole purpose of giving away. The calligraphy read,
As long as he
sought the Lord, God made him to prosper.
I've never been sorry for anything I've given away (whereas the same is not true for anything I've kept or purchased).

Once I was back in Missouri, I visited The Judge four days running. I said to him, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He said he could go for some chocolate chip cookies. I went back to the house and started assembling the ingredients.

“What are you doing?” Janet wanted to know.

I told her I was making cookies. It was something I wanted to do for myself. She watched for a while and then went about her business.

The stirring, the mixing, the baking, started paying me back. I started to process my prayers and work through my anger at the cigarettes that had shortened his life. I underbaked the cookies so they'd be good and moist. I made them small to stack in a Pringles can. I delivered them when he was asleep.

Generosity

Political liberals take the admonition to be generous in giving as an admonition directed toward the government. In actuality, it's the reverse. Real givers are people who enjoy giving away their own money. Beware the generosity of those who make a living giving away
other people's
money.

Staying on Message

All the good groups in the world, and a few bad ones, bring their causes, purposes, and bills to my office virtually every day, and if I don't happen to speak out on their particular concern at least once a week, I get asked, “What happened to you? Why are you silent? Don't you care?”

What some of these groups don't understand is the necessity of staying on message. Try to do everything and you end up doing nothing. It's like physics: if you don't concentrate your force, you don't penetrate the wall. Some issues have other senators as their champions, and I may stand behind them as a strong supporter. What each of us has to do is determine the primary emphasis of our calling. A good colleague of mine understands this: he says he has 365 titles but only two speeches. My father repeated the same things his entire life. Because he stayed so focused, it was impossible to be around him for any length of time and not know what he believed in.

Write It on Your Hand

Character is what you're made of when everything else that might hold you up evaporates on the spot.

Memories with Staying Power

Everyone was standing when I noticed my father lunging, swinging his arms, trying to lift himself out of the couch, one of those all-enveloping pieces of furniture that tends to bury you once you sit in it.

Good-byes

Back in Washington in our little one-and-a-half-room apartment, in an alley just off Second Street, Janet and I had just fallen asleep when we heard a rattling of the iron bars on the door. She thought it was someone trying to break in. I said, “No. It's my dad.” The next morning we heard the news.

Good-byes

I was told that in the Emergency Room, he finally said to the doctors, “Boys, you better just quit. You're hurting more than helping.”

Everyone who knew him joked about his good-byes. He waved like a person stranded on an island. Fifty, a hundred yards down the road, you'd look back, and he'd still be waving, his arms going like he was helping to park a jet.

Good-byes

As a boy, on days when there were no Little League games, I'd get a bat and a dinged-up softball and go into a field by myself and play All-Time Home Run Derby. It was always the same six guys in a round-robin: Mel Ott, Ernie Banks, Eddie Matthews, Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, and Mickey Mantle. I'd bat for each, and after each swat I'd have to troop after the ball and find it. “What're you doing?” Janet finally said, after having watched me from the kitchen window for about twenty minutes.