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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday December 31, 2001 Volume III Number 53 |
FOCUS - Whedbee House
I have a close friend who is eighty six years old and he tells me he doesn’t like answering the telephone any more. All too often, it seems, the call brings the unhappy news to him and his wife that one more of his myriad of life long friends has “gone home to be with the Lord.” His wife says with a painful smile, “you know, it’s gettin’ kinda hard.”
My life stage is somewhat different.
The milestone my peer friends seem to be hitting is the Fifty mark. Either they’ve recently hit fifty, or they’re getting close. Fifty looms on the horizon like an ominous dark cloud. Fifty is hardly The End. But there is a profound realization that hits at fifty: you’re pretty well past middle age. Nobody buys it when a fifty-year-old complains about a mid-life crisis. “Mid-life crisis” is now a tired excuse. Put it on the shelf. Deal with it.
At fifty, you are into the second half. You think about “finishing well.”
Over a hundred gathered this week in a country home, tucked away up Keyes Creek in a little nook in the hills, just around the bend from a cranny. Some good friends built a wonderful big house hidden way off the main highway some thirty years ago. You only know it’s there if you get invited to a party… and these people love parties.
It was a fiftieth birthday party for my pal Steve. Three days after Christmas.
It wasn’t the predictable black balloon kind of fifty party, where people feign grief, wearing black arm bands and swimming in a sea of mind numbing drinks, anesthetized against the painful realities of aging, pretending to be young again and together mourning the onset of impending doom as the grim reaper takes one step closer towards his prey. Not this party. Not even close.
Steve married an energetic, party-loving woman when they were both about thirty. They each “waited for the right one,” and tied the proverbial knot a little later than most of their college friends. It was a big production of a wedding. By then, they were established in their careers, each with a wide circle of their own friends. And now, as Steve ventures through the Fifty Passage, his wife, Deedee, jumped right into the planning. It would be a party for the memory books.
There’s no surprising Steve.
The idea of hitting him blindside with a crowd of folks hiding in a dark room behind couches and in hallways hitting the lights and jumping from the shadows into a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” never would have worked. Not with Steve. So he knew – he knew the when and where. But I’m not sure he anticipated the outcome.
They asked me to make a speech.
* * * * * *
This is my third New Year’s LeaderFOCUS.
This week, I went back and re-read the first two. What a revelation.
Two years ago, I wrote from a mountain top in Tennessee. The stock market reacted to Y2K fears by soaring to record highs. Our investment statements never looked better. It was a heady passage from 1999 to the year 2000 when a swaggering President entered into the final year of his second term and when the nation realized we had survived the predicted collapse of the Internet and all things digital, we believed that the good times would never end. I wrote about New Year’s Resolutions (NYRs).
Last year this time, we nursed our wounds, bruised and bleeding at the end of a rough and tumble year. The bottom dropped out of the market. The Presidential election left the nation hopelessly divided into two angry camps. The Florida jokes weren’t funny. We weren’t laughing. On New Year’s Day, I wrote about Kim Peek, the original Rain Man whose parents, thankfully, refused to allow doctors to perform the recommended lobotomy which would have robbed the world of an incredibly productive and inspiring mind. I also talked about an exceptional missionary family serving in Indonesia.
This year, those missionaries are back stateside in our hometown. Their agency considered it wise to remove them and their American colleagues from a high risk zone deep in Muslim territory after our nation’s declaration of war on terrorism.
Back in January, as we tentatively welcomed the year 2001, our economy slowed. In time, corporate dreams got fogged in and earnings dropped and investors chilled out and long-term employees received their pink slips and reports of lay-offs hit the headlines. At the end of a long dull summer, just after Labor Day weekend, three of four passenger jets commandeered by terrorists, loaded with people and fuel, piloted by religious zealots blinded by purple passions, deceived by the authors of a fanaticism gone mad, scored a devastating blow to a weakened America. The fourth hijacked jet never got to its intended target, thanks to a small band of gutsy American heroes. For the month of September, a global economy stood still. Breathless. It felt like Apocalypse now.
But like the mythical Phoenix, our nation seems to be emerging from the ashes of ground zero with a steely new resolve. I am feeling bullish again – the future is filled with possibilities.
It is a brand new New Year.
* * * * * *
In the darkness, we navigated the unpaved country road up the creek following the arrows marked “STEVE.” The house still sparkled like Christmas, twinkling like a starlit night from the windows and the halls, trimmed with garlands and candles and a fourteen foot tree, still fragrant like fresh pine. A crackling fire welcomed us all to celebrate a man passing the half century mark.
Deedee set up a room and filled it with memorabilia. There was a life-sized football player in uniform holding a leather ball and smiling at the camera, destined for a prominent page in the Year Book. He wore number 40, a running back’s number. There were childhood photos, from the ranch and on horseback and at the wedding, and the birth of his two children, now teenagers. In them all, he sported a natural full head of hair. At the center of the table, on conspicuous display, sat a rather large framed Ordination certificate which indicated that in 1984 a select group of individuals, some of them Ordained themselves, recognized what appeared to them to be God’s call to the work of pastoral ministry. Steve’s full name was spelled out in bold Old English Text at the center of the official document.
After a casual dinner, the gang gathered in the living room, all hundred of us, to more or less tell him that we all believed in him, and that he’d made a positive mark on our lives.
Our hostess played Master of Ceremonies to kick things off. She began with a testimonial to Steve’s leadership… and how a small group Bible study a couple years back renewed her marriage and her commitment to community and she had to choke back the tears as she spoke. Her home was testimony enough… set for a party - weeks in the planning. But her words touched a chord in the group, and I bit my tongue, holding on to my speech as others voluntarily joined in.
I had expected something of a roast.
But that’s not the direction the conversation went at all… it was as though my friend Steve was given the gift that came from the Angel Clarence to George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” He heard stories about how his life and influence touched others. About how our town and our community is a better place because of his presence. All this for a guy who just goes about doing what he loves best and being who he is.
A week ago, over breakfast, he gave me an address. On Whedbee Street in a Colorado college town.
He knew I’d be spending Christmas there with my family. He suggested I drive by. Then he told me the story of the Whedbee House.
* * * * * *
Deedee pulled out some notes. She’d prepared a speech of her own.
In a private moment back at home, she dug up Steve’s high school and college Annuals and read through the notes teenagers write in ball point and felt-tip pen addressed to their friends to be pondered in future years, perhaps by future generations. She quoted old girlfriends and team-mates several of whom encouraged Steve to have a “bitchen summer.” But, she said, she was pleased to find that even back then, the friends spoke of “respect.” And “integrity.” He was a guy who knew what he wanted. Knew where he was going. He was “admired.”
Deedee met Steve over a decade after high school graduation. But, she said, she recognized the guy she read about from the high school signature party.
And, she said, he’s the same guy at fifty.
* * * * * * * *
When Steve hit the big college campus as a fresh high school graduate, he celebrated his independence. He had big dreams. Mainly he dreamed about the perks that come to a running back in a college town where twenty thousand students work on their degrees. It was during his second season that his knee caved in, ending his football career, and all those perks for that matter.
In the disappointment that crushes a twenty year old whose dreams are dashed, a guy on campus came along and introduced him to a Steve way of thinking. He invited him to a Bible study group. Steve warmed up to the idea that there was more to life than football. And fast cars. He was a science major. A science major who, thanks to some new friends, found his Creator – the Master Designer.
He started making plans to share the news with his pals on campus.
With
some help from his folks, he put together enough cash to buy a house. Steve,
along with a new set of room-mates, moved in. It was a different kind of
college house. It soon became known as a Christian frat house. Every
weekend, the place was a beehive of activity. Wholesome fun. Good times. But
instead of keggers, people brought their Bibles. Instead of the weekend binge,
the kids would pray.
It was the Whedbee House. 1972.
* * * * * * * *
In a cozy living room by the fireplace alongside the twinkling Christmas tree in the house on Keyes Creek tucked away under the old oak trees in the hideaway canyon, it came to my turn to speak. I told the assembled group about my trip to that same college town and after breakfast in an Old Town café with one of my two sons in law, we turned left off College Avenue on to Prospect and then right on Whedbee Street and with a borrowed digital Nikon camera, I snapped a shot of the aging brick house that in the early seventies housed a fraternity of young believers who to this day remember late nights and long discussions about the things that really matter.
The Whedbee House.
In his novel The Drifters, author James Michener talked about drop-outs. “The children of the sixties became known as drop-outs,” he wrote. But through a character who was certainly biographical, Michener identified the “drop outs” that concerned him the most. They were the teachers who read a single book and devoted an entire career to repeating the same musty themes from the same stale volume, boring their students into intellectual oblivion. Other drop outs that concerned him were the physicians and lawyers and accountants who slip into a predictable monotonous groove and never change, never grow. And those politicians who rail against straw men and make boisterous but hallow arguments and accuse opponents of all manner of indecency while they themselves get comfortable in their own silly hypocrisies. And the preachers, the tepid ministers, who, according to Michener, “build a lifetime of futility based on one moment’s inspiration entertained at the age of nineteen.”
That challenge has always haunted me. Mainly because I had my own moment of inspiration at age nineteen. As did my friend Steve.
But now, so many years later, I can see that this was no lifetime of futility. The commitments that were born on Whedbee Street have served my friend well.
He is a wealthy man. A loved man.
And when his fifteen year old daughter chimed in, with the bright smile and sparkle in the eyes that she inherited from her mother, and announced to all assembled there in the living room, “My dad is the best. He’s raised me pretty well. And he’s not done yet.” She choked with emotion. And so did we.
The whole room felt it.
Fifty’s OK.
My speech turned to a prayer - that the blessing of the first fifty years would spill over on my friend Steve like Niagra on the second.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. The last day of the landmark year, 2001. You are a leader.
They tell us that 9-11 changed everything. That we will never be the same. I agree with Time’s Person of the Year, Rudy Giuliani, that it’s just not true. We’ve been through a paradigm shift. The foundations have been shaken. But for most of us, a whole lot remains the same. We talk differently. We think differently. Our attitudes have been adjusted. But the old issues are still with us. The promises we made prior to 9-11 remain in force. The cast of characters in our world is pretty much unchanged.
If you think hard, chances are you remember your own Whedbee House. There, you learned the truth. There, you were inspired. There, you met people of character. People of promise. You cherished their company. They believed in you. They understood your aspirations. They set you on a positive course. You got perspective on your world. You came to understand your place on the Planet and you cultivated the idea of the kind of world you wanted to make for yourself and your family and your neighbors and friends. Maybe at your Whedbee House, you learned to pray.
On this last day of the year, call up those memories. Ponder them for awhile.
Our son Kevin just this week signed a lease, along with six other guys, and next month will move from their dormitory on campus to a two story house off campus. These are great guys. I’m prayin’ for a rebirth of the Whedbee House right there in his college town.
Tonight, as you send out the old year and welcome the new, thank God for the Whedbee House. Think for a brief minute about how important Y2K once seemed. How the Florida election loomed so large. About a time when Gary Condit ruled the headlines. About how some of the things that have you down today are nothing more than a misty vapor that will surely vanish in the warm light of 2002.
Get bullish about tomorrow.
Happy New Year.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
LeaderFOCUS is brought to you by Good Stewardship Associates
Special Thanks for Design by my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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