The Smiler

I struggle for words with this one, not because it’s hard to say things about this person, but because it’s hard to ever feel like you’ve said enough. I hope that you will read these words not as a vendetta for any particular view of the world, but rather an honoring of a man who has walked through hard things with the best of attitudes. Before he sat down with me over lunch, I knew enough to know he should be written about. This was far from our first conversation, but what I heard in that one moment solidified for me this man’s status as a true secret person. This is his story.

When we sat down, he was in the middle of a hunt for a job, and had just had an interview. I knew enough to infer from our conversation that if he didn’t find a job soon, he’d be in a lot of trouble. When I asked about it, he smiled as he replied by telling a few stories of the past, how he’d been more than once very near being kicked out of his home, but that God always provided for him in times of need. That seems to be the story of some, always living on the line between provision and poverty because of factors beyond their control, always needing to trust that everything will work out in the end; and it does. 

He grew up outside a city and moved around a little. As a kid, like so many of us, he was willfully ignorant of any problems in his little world, too busy enjoying and hoping for the good stuff of life. He was too ignorant to see the tension in his family cause by his father. It wasn’t until later that he realized that the many houses he would sit and wait while his father was in the other room were not “visits to friends” and a sign of a deeper problem. Although his mother knew what was going on, it took many years for her to be willing to break up their family. She knew that her quiet suffering was worth keeping her children happy and her family together. Divorce came along later in life after he was older and thus wise enough to see his deepest source of paternal guidance as both a good father and deeply broken man. 

A technician his father worked with taught him the trade during the summers on different jobs. He learned enough to get a job right out of high school at a local college where he met and fell in love with a beautiful young woman. As he was preparing for marriage he earned a trade school degree, saved up money for a deposit on a house, and bought a ring. It was well after engagement, and nearing the wedding day when she called it off. She wasn’t ready to trust someone completely; he had given her everything he had. 

He had to leave. He let his trade take him around the country and he jumped from city to city for a number of years, trying to forget the pain that he’d left behind. But he couldn’t run away from the past forever, and eventually he began to feel a pull back toward home. “I came back,” he told me, “because I realized that all I was doing with my life was running away from my problems. I was searching for a community of faith like I had at home.” So he came back, hoping that a return to the place he knew would bring peace and direction along with the inevitable pain. 

When he returned home, he sought out first a new vocational path. He felt God calling him to become a missionary overseas and so he began the process of making that vocational transition. In preparation for leaving for overseas, he left his job, but a series of situations that were impossible to predict meant that he remained underemployed for almost 2 years. It was during that time that he missed a couple house payments, and lived on little more than ramen. He almost made it overseas a few times but he kept getting hung up by lack of funds and once an issue with a slow arriving passport that made him miss a trip entirely. 

After a long time of living this way, he found a job, only to be laid off again about a year later. That’s where I met him that afternoon, and there were were, sitting there together, back to this place he had been so many times before, with many questions about vocation, a want for resources, and pain in the dreams of the future that had yet to be. And yet, he sat there smiling. Because he’s always smiling, always joyful, always glad to see you, always excited for your successes and encouraging you through your failures. You could have a hundred conversations with him and never know about the pain in his childhood, or his difficult vocational journey because you’d never assume that under his smile could be anything akin to what he’s been through. I asked him about it, why he had this smile, and why it had become such a defining feature. A big part of it, he said, was “genetics”. His father and grandfather (he showed me a picture) have the same big smile that he does. Very photogenic, very kind in the eyes, very courteous in attitude. But unlike his father, he struggles with what he calls “a crippling introversion”. Everything inside of him tells him to stay home, to shy away, and to avoid others, but there is another force at work that brings the smile to the front. “God’s grace,” he says, “keeps the smile on. How could I accept the reality that my worst parts had been forgiven and not smile about it?” he asks me. 

I found out a few days after our conversation that he got the job he was interviewing for. It’s an incredible opportunity for him and will set him up for a new vision of missions that he has for this upcoming year, a move into community in the inner city, helping to revitalize a neighborhood in need. I asked him where he thought he’d be in 5 years, because I always want to know people’s thoughts and perceptions about themselves. Where he’ll be then, to me, is irrelevant because the thing about him that’s best has nothing to do with what he does, and the same is true with every secret person we’ve discussed here, or will ever discuss. It’s his character that makes him stand out, its his smile that I know will still be around in 5 years that makes me so happy for him, it’s the impact that I know that he will have on yet another community once he moves that makes me look across the table at him and smile back. 

Photo used under creative commons license courtesy of Rafiq Sarlie: http://bit.ly/1NICSwX