Of all the things I ever wanted to be, I think it was always just me I wanted most to be. Hero worship was never really my thing. I can't recall ever wishing I actually was Eddie Van Halen, or John Maxwell, or Billy Graham, or even Batman. I just wanted to be me, doing some of the things those people did.
Whether that's a strength or a weakness, I honestly couldn't tell you. It keeps the ground level enough that I don't trip over myself trying to climb up to anybody's pedestal. But every now and then, in the quieter hours, I catch myself wishing I had someone to look up to. And if I had it to do over again, I think I'd let my dad be my hero.
He was a small man—much smaller than me—and a brilliant what-comes-next artist. I don't even know what you call those drawings he made. Sequential art, maybe. Press a button, a ball rolls down a track, drops onto a lever, flips a spoon into a cup on a scale; the cup sinks, drags a match across sandpaper, lights a candle, and twenty-five steps later, an egg lands cooked on a plate. I was always intrigued. I stopped just short of awe. I wish now I hadn't.
On paper, he was an unlikely hero—but then, what hero isn't, once you get close enough? Adopted into a family of pharmacists who expected him to fall into line, he forged the date on his birth certificate instead and joined the Navy. Even in rebellion, he didn't run far; they made him a Pharmacist's Mate. He sailed off to Hawaii with his bell-bottoms and his ditty bag, a Kansas kid a long way from any wheat field he knew. Then the sky over Pearl Harbor went black with planes, and they handed him to the Marines as a Corpsman, and the war became something he carried home but never set down.
Those were the stories I missed. The war stories. The romance stories. The first marriage, the son lost in Vietnam—none of it spoken aloud. Twenty years I lived near a brilliant man full of buried things. A man who once drove fifty miles with the window down because his mother had promised him a hundred dollars to quit smoking, and he meant to show up smelling like he had.
He died of lung cancer at fifty-seven, shortly after our first son was born. Our last call was mostly gurgling and goodbye. I came to know him best after he was gone—through his Navy buddies, through scraps and stories—and the strangest thing happened. The more I wanted to know my father, the more I wanted to know God.
Heroes have always been hard for me to come by. I'd still rather be me than anyone else. But I'm finally learning that the small "h" heroes—the quiet, complicated, half-told ones—are usually the ones God uses to point us home.