As a kid, my father was my hero.
He and my mother divorced when I was four years old. He was moving 300 miles away to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he begged my mom to let him take me with him. My mom had two older kids — my half brothers — and she agreed to let me go. He was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six years old at the time. Truthfully, most guys that age might not have wanted the responsibility of a four-year-old. But he did. He chose it.
He sold suits during the day and went to night school. We lived in a questionable apartment complex, and we didn’t have much money. I have this memory of going to the pool without him — it had a metal gate and fence around it with vertical bars — and I stuck my head through the bars and couldn’t get it back out. I cried until someone walked to our apartment and told my dad. He came and got me free. That was the arrangement. He was building a life and I was figuring out the world, and we were doing both of those things together in a place that wasn’t much to look at but was ours.
I remember two kids in the complex had plastic swords. Star Wars was everywhere at that time, and every boy wanted to be in the fight. We didn’t have extra money for things like plastic swords, so I got creative. My grandparents had given me a Weeble Wobble floating construction set — one of those kits designed for the bathtub. I rummaged through it and found the trunk of a little plastic palm tree, about seven inches long. I decided that would be my sword.
Excited, I carried it outside to where the other boys were dueling. I entered combat. They immediately cut my hand off — not literally, but the palm tree trunk only extended about four inches past my fist, so the first swing from a real plastic sword ended the fight before it started. I also remember them laughing at my “sword.” In hindsight, it was pretty funny. A palm tree trunk against two full-length lightsabers. The odds were never in my favor.
But I showed up with what I had. I think my dad taught me that without ever saying it.
He kept going to night school and eventually became a banker, starting at the very bottom in a small town called Chelsea, Oklahoma. He met my stepmom. I gained a little sister. He quit smoking and put on thirty pounds — which, if you’ve ever watched someone fight that battle, you know is its own kind of victory even when it doesn’t look like one. He wasn’t perfect. He was on his third marriage by then. But he was present, and he was building, and he never stopped doing either of those things.
Eventually he left banking. We’d moved to Chouteau, Oklahoma, and he started his entrepreneurial journey — the thing I think he was always made for. He opened a used car lot. Paul Motors.
I was a kid on that lot. Watching him work. Watching him talk to people, negotiate, figure out what a car was worth and what a customer needed. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was writing things into me that would take decades to surface. The instinct to build something from nothing. The comfort with risk. The belief that you can figure it out as you go if you’re willing to show up with what you have — even if it’s a palm tree trunk in a sword fight.
Years later, on his way home from a car auction, he was hit and killed in a car wreck. I was thirteen. My little brother was born a week after he passed. He never met him.
But here’s what I hold onto. Years before the accident, my dad had followed through on something that outlasted everything else. He got baptized at the local Baptist church we attended. He made a public decision about what he believed and who he was following. And because of that — because of a Christ who conquered the grave — I am confident I will see him again.
He was imperfect. He was on his third marriage. He was a twenty-five-year-old kid raising a four-year-old in an apartment complex with a pool I kept getting stuck in. He was a suit salesman, a night school student, a small-town banker, and eventually a used car dealer on a two-lane highway in rural Oklahoma. He was my hero. He still is.
We all have people who have gone before us. People who shaped us more than they knew, who left too early, who we carry forward in ways we don’t always recognize. My hope — and I mean this — is that you are confident in your eternity and in seeing them again.
If you have questions about that, or if something in this story stirred something in your chest — a tug, a wondering, a door you’ve been standing outside of for a while — I want you to know: the process is simpler than religion has made it seem.
There is no official sinner’s prayer in the Bible. What there is, is a God who has been pursuing you your entire life and an invitation to respond.
It’s as simple as this:
Lord, I believe in you. I want you to be the Lord over my life. I want you to lead me, to help me walk out the life you designed before I was ever born. I believe in your Word. I believe Jesus Christ is your Son — that he lived on this earth, died on the cross for me and my sins so I could have a relationship with you, my heavenly Father, who will never leave me and never forsake me. I believe Jesus rose from the grave and conquered death. I want to be baptized as a public profession of my faith, and from here forward I want to walk out the rest of my days following you, Father — being your hands and feet. I know this isn’t a check-the-box decision. It’s a lifelong commitment to honor you and to walk out my faith on this new journey. There will be hills and valleys. There will be trials. But you will always be by my side. Amen.
If that’s you — if you just prayed that and meant it — welcome to the family. Because that’s what this is. A family. And as your brother in Christ, I love you and I can’t wait until we meet someday on the other side.
The Bible says it plainly: if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. That’s Romans 10:9. It’s not complicated. It’s not a formula. It’s a person — Jesus — and a relationship that starts the moment you say yes.
My dad said yes in a small Baptist church in Chouteau, Oklahoma. And because he did, this isn’t a story about loss. It’s a story about reunion — one that hasn’t happened yet, but will.
I’ll see you again, Dad. And I’ll have a better sword next time.