What Made Him Who He Was

[This is the fifth post on the life of Chester Tyra. Also see the previous posts: The Man Who Never Had a Bad Day, Think of the Difference You'd Make to the One Who Needs It, My Name is Daniel, and I was His Best Friend too, and FUN.]

In previous posts, I've written about how over the years of Chester's life, his habits added up to make him who he was. I very much want to have his habits of generosity, hospitality, joy, and fun in my life, and as I've thought about Chester's life, I’ve also noticed a connection between these those habits that may not seem apparent at first.

I really believe there’s one simple and profound reason that made it possible for Chester to bring so much joy and fun into people’s lives, for him to be so welcoming to me and others to come into his life, and for him to be so generous toward others: I honestly think that reason is, because perhaps more than anyone else I have ever known, Chester had a deep and genuine trust in God’s goodness toward him.

Chester was the man who never had a bad day. He knew before any day started that that day was going to be a good day, simply because he was alive. And he knew afterward that he’d never had a bad day, not because he was naive about anything happening, but because of a deeper level of trust that, regardless of what had happened in that day, things would be okay.

Trusting in God’s goodness to us opens the doors for us to be generous, because we don’t have to be concerned about not having enough of something once we realize that God is our provider. Chester could give generously to others, and welcome others so warmly into his life, because he knew that there is no reason to fear running out of the good things of life if we give them away to others. God’s goodness never ends, and therefore there is simply never any less left when we find ways to pass it on to others.

The 23rd Psalm ("The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not be in want...") is one that we often read together at funerals, and appropriately so. But even though it’s one of the most well-known and widely-loved passages of the Bible, I think that since we hear it so often in situations where people are hurting, we’ve come to think that it’s only a psalm about God helping us through our pain. There’s much more than that to it, though. It speaks in great imagery of God’s abundant generosity toward us, of how David was welcomed so warmly into God’s home, and how regardless of what the circumstances brought, he was able to enjoy life because of the way that he had always experienced and come to trust in God’s profound goodness toward him.

David had experienced repeatedly what Psalm 118 affirms in The Message: His love never quits. His love never quits. His love never quits. I can imagine David on the day that he wrote Psalm 23, perhaps waking up after spending the night hiding in a cave because of the people who were out to take his life without reason. Yet on that morning because of the steadfast love and goodness of God that he had always known, David could have awoken and and said to himself the same thing Chester would have said, “Today’s going to be a good day.” Because God’s love never quits. God’s goodness is inexhaustible. And even though he knew that day might be the last day of his life, he still had such a desire to express his gratitude to God for his unfailing goodness, that David began writing those words, “The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not be in want...”

Sometimes words can become so familiar to us that we can miss their meaning, so sometimes it is very helpful for us to encounter a passage of scripture in different words than the ones we're used to. The Message's wording of Psalm 23 helps us to see how God’s goodness is unlimited and spilling over in our lives. It helps us to know that God’s love never quits. And if you and I can allow these words to sink deeply enough into our souls, we will know something that both Chester Tyra and King David knew in a very central part of who they were: that God, his world, and our lives in it are utterly good.

Psalm 23 A David Psalm

^1-3 God, my shepherd! I don't need a thing. You have bedded me down in lush meadows, you find me quiet pools to drink from. True to your word, you let me catch my breath and send me in the right direction.

⁴ Even when the way goes through Death Valley, I'm not afraid when you walk at my side. Your trusty shepherd's crook makes me feel secure.

⁵ You serve me a six-course dinner right in front of my enemies. You revive my drooping head; my cup brims with blessing.

⁶ Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I'm back home in the house of God for the rest of my life. (Psalm 23, The Message)

Golf Skills, Spiritual Formation, and My Deficiency in Both

I played golf with my father-in-law last week. It was the third time I've played in my life, and the first time in fifteen years. My first two experiences were miserable. At that point in my life, I was still pretty proud of my self-perceived athletic ability (since I had yet to experience the forced humility that my lack of success in college basketball would bring), and those first encounters with a game at which I was totally inept were extremely frustrating.

Last week's experience certainly doesn't qualify as miserable, but a huge gap remains between how much I think I might enjoy golf and how much joy I actually get from the experience of it. When I see pictures of golf courses, I can easily catch myself thinking that I should be very into this sport. I love being outside, and golf courses are very nice places to be. It's a game that appears to go at a relaxed pace, and at this point in my life I'm much more drawn to sports that are popular with the geriatric population than I am to those that involve constant running and jumping. So I was genuinely looking forward to it when my father-in-law invited me to play. But why don't I enjoy that sport more?

The answer is simple: I stink at golf. I wasn't surprised by the number of balls that went flying in a direction more than 60 degrees away from where I intended them to go, nor by the number of putts that missed by at least 15 feet, nor by how many towering drives of 60-80 yards I was able to crush. No, what surprised me most was how many times I completely  missed the ball. I never thought about a "swing-and-a-miss" as a possibility in golf, but it is. Apparently even making contact with the ball requires some degree of skill which I have yet to really develop.

If you're a golfer, you don't want to play with me. I don't have my own clubs, so I'll have to borrow yours, but I'm likely to lose one of them on the course. (Don't worry, Barry, I realized I'd left your 7 on the previous green and went back to get it.) I don't have any golf balls, so will have to use some of yours and will definitely lose some of them. (Rather than keeping my score, I eventually began judging my success by whether or not I lost a ball on each hole.) But on the other hand, if you're okay with the material loss involved with playing with me, the positive thing is that it will provide a boost to your confidence, because you will look really good with me as your partner.

Thankfully, some redemption of the experience came when I began to notice some parallels between my golf experience and spiritual formation:

1. It's incorrect to say that I have no golf skills; the more accurate statement is that the golf skills I have are very poor. You have some golf skills too- it's just a question of whether they are good or bad. This is the same with our spiritual formation, because spiritual formation in itself is neither positive nor negative, but just a reality of human existence. We are all in the process of becoming one kind of person or another. The question is more about whether the spiritual formation we have received and are choosing is good (spiritual transformation) or bad (spiritual malformation).

   It's understandable that every month and year that passes without playing any golf, my already poor golf skills become worse. My body practices doing other things than swinging those clubs. The same is true with our spiritual lives, because it is never the case that we stay the exact same kind of person that we were yesterday. We make decisions each day that shape us (form us), either into a more spiritually transformed person or a more spiritually malformed person. We will be well off to recognize this, pay attention to it, and plan accordingly.

2. While I was on the golf course last week, my main insight was the incredible amount of work it would take to become proficient at that sport, and how I have invested none of it. Being a good golfer (not necessarily measured by my competition against others, but more by the degree to which parts of the game become easy, natural, and enjoyable) would require a lot of practice. Somehow, though, in the spiritual life, we hear Jesus say something which is Christianity's equivalent of Jack Nicklaus-type skills, like "bless those who persecute you," and think that we should be able to do them as beginners and from then on whenever we want.

   But it doesn't take long to realize that life doesn't work that way. Throwing an emphatic "In Jesus' Name!" onto our request to God to give us patience, humility, joy, or peace does not bring the result we desired. No, the Christian life also requires a lot of practice. However, if I practice well, I will eventually become good at the things Jesus taught us to do. Again, my proficiency at them is not measured in a competitive way against others, but rather in terms of how I handle the things of life that come at me. The best students of the way of Jesus through the centuries attest to the experience of parts of life becoming easy, natural, and enjoyable, which apart from his way were only frustration. It was, after all, the Teacher (who would later be crucified and rise from the dead) who told us that in learning to live his way, we would find rest for our souls, because his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

3. The practice pays off. My father-in-law said that one of his favorite things about golf is that, regardless of how you may play the other 17 holes, there's always the possibility that you'll play this hole better than Tiger Woods, or any of the best players in the world. (It was after he said this that I discovered how this statement assumed I at least had the level of skill required to actually make contact with the ball.) But for someone who practices, he's exactly right.

   And no matter how much I make mistakes in my pursuit of God and his kind of life in this world, there's always the possibility that as I practice living his way and opening myself to his grace day after day, that I will be able to genuinely act like Jesus in this situation that comes my way today. Everything adds up, and the practice pays off.

I will not practice golf today, nor probably any other day until my father-in-law invites me to play again. And, as a result, when we do play I will still be a very poor golfer. But in the meantime, I will continue to practice living Jesus' way, so that the next time I'm on a golf course I will hopefully have much more of an awareness of God's presence while enjoying the time outdoors and much less of a desire to shatter my friend's clubs into pieces in Jesus' name!

FUN

(This is the fourth post on the life of Chester Tyra. See also the other posts: The Man Who Never Had a Bad Day, Think of the Difference You'd Make to the One Who Needs it, My Name is Daniel, and I Was His Best Friend Too, and What Made Him Who He Was) I've already written about Chester's generosity and hospitality, and any list of words about his life would be incomplete without including joy and fun. He knew that fun was good, and in having a lot of it, his joy became contagious into the lives around him. Everyone who knew him likely has some story to tell of having fun with him, particularly if they were kids. His daughter told me about a time when she was young and they were visiting their their cousins in East Texas during the winter. They got some very rare snow, and the kids were thrilled. (Now don’t try this at home, but) Chester went to the hardware store and bought a ladder, nailed a piece of lumber into it to hold it together, tied it to the back of his car and drove the kids around town “sleighing” on the snow. She said they had so much fun... The strongest cousin had to sit in front so that any time Chester hit the brakes they could put their feet on the bumper and prevent the whole crew from sleighing right under the car. It left bruises, but it was fun.

Much of our fun with him happened in two places: the back yard of his house, or in church. Our times in his back yard at his swimming pool were a kid's dream: a diving board, toys to play with, and he even had a dome that went over the top so that we could still swim when the weather was cool. ...And there were always hamburgers and "yeller-meated" watermelon.

In church, my favorite fun thing to do with him was to make up names to sign on the attendance register to see if we could get them printed in the bulletin the next week as having been visitors. Our favorite names were Otto J. Krunk and JoAbner Ticklebritches. Chester's legacy carries on- these two men have now visited various churches across the country.

My brother, Adam, recalls a time when he was about 5 years old, as they were waiting for the ushers to come to their row and direct them to go to the front to take communion by taking a piece of bread and dipping it in the cup of grape juice, Chester elbowed him and said, "Hey boy, it's better if you stick your hand all the way to the bottom of the cup. So when Adam's turn came, he trusted Chester's advice. He took the small piece of bread and instead of just wetting the tip of it in the juice, he plunged hand and bread all the way to the bottom of the cup. He then walked back down the aisle with his sweet-soaked hand proudly in their air, proudly looking like he'd just killed something.

Not exactly reverent, but fun. I'm determined to find some good theology in that story one of these days.

Adam also makes a good point about how having fun with Chester in church when we were young shaped us for the rest of our lives. From our very earliest memories of church, we never had to be drug out of bed to go, sit through things that we thought were boring and were really only for adults, for one reason: because Chester was there. We don't remember many Sunday School lessons from those years, and certainly not any of the pastor's sermons, but we can remember how, as soon as we walked in the building we were looking for Chester and how fun it was to sit at his side every week. It was a very effective children's ministry program that didn't even require a budget (other than perhaps for Jolly Ranchers): have adults who help kids to have fun in church.

But the most telling testament to Chester’s gift of fun to those around him came from the person who knew him best. It came the day before he died when his wife told me, “You know, we were married in 1947 (that’s 63 years). That’s a long time.” Then she said, “And it was fun all the way.”

That's the stuff of a life well-lived. If my wife is with me 63 years, and one of the first things out of her mouth about me is how much fun we had, that will have been a truly good life.

I wonder how much fun we pass up for other things, and how often it's worth it? Thankfully, I'm one of many beneficiaries of Chester's ability to not pass it up very often.

My Name is Daniel, and I Was His Best Friend Too

(This is the third post on the life of Chester Tyra. Please also check out the others: The Man Who Never Had a Bad Day and Think of the Difference You'd Make to the One Who Needs it, and FUN, and What Made Him Who He Was.) I described Chester's generosity and shared one of his childhood stories that shaped him to be a generous person in "Think of the Difference You'd Make to the One Who Needs it." But Chester's generosity was not limited to Jolly Ranchers and money; the only reason my family ended up knowing him so well was because he was also generous with his time. He had an amazing gift for making people feel welcome. The clearest evidence for this was on the day of his memorial service when I had three different people introduce themselves to me by saying their names and then, "I was Chester's best friend." I know why they felt that way, because I felt that way too. I was 54 years younger than him, but there was something so genuinely hospitable about him that gave me the sense every time I saw him that our being together had made his day.

I remember writing Chester a letter some years ago because I had to express to him and Kathryn my deepest thanks for their hospitality. I was overwhelmed when I realized that through my childhood there were only two places where I felt perfectly at home: in my own house, and in theirs. And I never walked into their house without feeling completely welcome, being told that they loved me and were proud of me, getting a good hug from Kathryn, and Chester attempting to pick a fight with me. (As a kid, I always looked forward to the point in visiting him when he would look at me, put up his fists and say, "you wide-eying me, boy?" I knew something fun was coming.)

Hospitality isn't easy, nor does it happen by accident. They didn't decide to be hospitable some days and not others. Just like with Chester's generosity, I can remember their hospitality toward me being so consistent because it was deeply ingrained in who he and Kathryn were. Generosity with their resources and hospitality with their time were natural enough habits for them that it became the default thing for them to do, to welcome and to love. To make someone feel unwelcome would have been very difficult for them. (Many folks like me seem to excel at it.)

Perhaps part of Chester's legacy will be in challenging all of us to love so well that at our passing we have multiple people who will introduce themselves to one another saying, "Hi, my name is _____, and I was his/her best friend." That has to be at least as important of a goal as any of the other things we hear about aiming for in our later years, like net worths and nest eggs.

(One of the remarkable things about Chester's ability to make me and all of his other best friends feel so welcomed, with a deep sense that he loved us, was that it wasn't based on him telling us so. I've written about this in regard to parenting in the post "There's a Better Solution than Telling Your Kids You Love Them," but Chester also perfected this skill in friendship.)

Think of the Difference You'd Make to the One Who Needs it

(This is the second post on the life of Chester Tyra. Also see the other posts: The Man Who Never Had a Bad Day, My Name is Daniel, and I Was His Best Friend Too, FUN, and What Made Him Who He Was.) It wasn't by accident that Chester became the kind of man who, at the end of his 86 years of life, could genuinely say- as he always had- that he had never had a bad day. No, it was a lifetime of choices about how he thought, what he did with his time and resources, and how he interacted with others that all added up to make him able to see the profound good in every day he lived, regardless of what the circumstances said on the surface.

As I've become determined to end up having more of the kind of attitude he had when I come into my 80's, I've thought about those habits Chester had that added up to make him who he was, and the first one that came to mind was his generosity.

Not many Sundays went by when I was a child that I wasn’t sitting at Chester's side in his pew about halfway back on the right side of the sanctuary at our church, and if I was there at his side, Chester would always give me two things: a Jolly Rancher to put in my mouth and money to put in the offering plate. I’m sure that over the years he spent a small fortune on Jolly Ranchers, simply because of how much he enjoyed giving them out to kids. And I’m also sure that those dollars he gave me to put in the offering weren’t the only ones that he gave away for the good of others.

One of my favorite examples of his quickness to give to others was when I brought a friend home from college. I was off at school in Kentucky and I made a good friend named Paul, who to that point in his life had hardly been out of the bluegrass state and was making his first visit to Texas with me. I took him to meet Chester, and Paul mentioned to him that one of his goals for his time in Texas was to get a cowboy hat. When he said that, Chester got up from his chair, went into his closet and came back with one of his own for Paul to try on. It fit, and Chester just gave it to him. It ended up that Paul loved that hat so much that he will forever be the only person in our college yearbook who had his picture taken wearing a cowboy hat- Chester’s cowboy hat.

It's likely that the majority of people who ever knew Chester have some story of his giving which few others know about, and it's been fun to hear some of those stories even decades after they happened. For example, his wife recently mentioned that years ago Chester had a young man working with him on one of his oil rigs. Chester found out about the young guy’s desire to go to college. Rather than just wishing him luck and getting back to work, Chester told the boy, “I’ll put you through school.” Then he did.

He didn’t flaunt his generosity, so I’ll stop the stories of them here, and I only include them to illustrate how generosity was a habit for him, something that was ingrained in him deeply enough that it wasn’t at all difficult for him to give for the good of others.

Some of the moments with Chester that I’ll always cherish the most were in these last few years, after I moved back to Midland, when even though his health was declining, it gave me more chances than I’d had ever had before to just sit with him and hear stories of his life. One story from his childhood helped me to understand where his generosity came from:

He said that as a boy he was walking to town with his father one day. His father always kept a dollar bill folded up in his shirt pocket. As they were walking, a man came up to them saying that he was hungry and needed help and didn’t have any money to buy food, so the elder Mr. Tyra took the dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to the man.

As they kept walking, Chester said that he asked his father why he did that since it was the only dollar they had with them, and his father told him that the man asked for help, and he could help, so he gave the dollar.

Later in the day, as they made their walk back home, they walked past a saloon and saw the man they’d given the dollar to inside the saloon drinking. Chester said that he got angry and pointed the man out to his Dad. His father’s response was, “That’s okay, son. If you give a dollar to a hundred people, ninety-nine of them might go do something like that. But think of the difference you’d make to the one who really needed it.”

We often try to make ourselves into generous people, then we just revert back to being as we always were. But with people like Chester, to whom it was more natural to be generous than to be stingy, he never had to grit his teeth and make himself give to others while he really wanted to keep things for himself. No, his generosity began with a story like this that was deeply ingrained in him, then that story shaped his own habits throughout his life so that by the time I came along, giving to others was so deeply ingrained in him that it was simply part of him.

What's a story that has shaped the generosity of someone you've known?

The Man Who Never Had a Bad Day

(This is the first post about the life of Chester Tyra. Also see the others: Think of the Difference You'd Make to the One Who Needs it, My Name is Daniel, and I Was His Best Friend Too, FUN, and What Made Him Who He Was.) This afternoon I will be speaking at the funeral of Chester Tyra, whom I loved dearly. He was a remarkable man in a lot of ways, but foremost among them was his unshakable optimism.

I remember going to visit him in the hospital one day a couple of years ago. Even though he had trouble breathing over the last several years and fought a long hard fight with his health, that day he was just like he always was in the hospital: somehow making everyone's day around him better. Laying there in his hospital bed, he told me something I also heard him say a dozen other times: "I've never had a bad day in my life. I wake up every day, look out the window, and am sure that today is going to be a good day."

I left Chester's room that day and also visited a man in the hospital who was from my church, but whom I didn't know. He was about the same age as Chester (in his 80's), but was in better condition physically although it was hard to tell from the long list of complaints he started relaying to me from the moment I entered the door. He told me how terribly this was going, and how awful that was, while at the same time waiting to be discharged from the hospital because he was well! Finally, his daughter said to him, "Dad, things could be a lot worse." He replied, "Well, I sure don't know how!"

I wanted to tell him to take his Chester Tyra medicine and be quiet for a while, but thankfully I didn't.

I left the hospital that day realizing that neither of those men became like that overnight, but it was a lifetime of choices about how they thought, what they did, how they used their time and resources, and how they treated people that led one to say that he'd never had a bad day (even though I knew him well enough to know he'd had his share of bad things happen to him) and the other to only be able to see bad things around him regardless of how much good was present.

Then I realized that I am already in the process of becoming like one of them or the other. Assuming I make it into my 80's, with the way I live my life right now, how will I naturally end up at that age? How will you? And what do we do (in the midst of this world that has way too many tsunamis and child molesters) to cultivate an awareness of how utterly good today and every day really is?

Welcome to Lent!

"How will I find ways to return to God with all my heart?" Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent, the period of preparation for our remembrance of Christ's death and celebration of his resurrection on Easter. The question above is what Ruth Haley Barton says is the real question of Lent, rather than a surface-level, "What did you give up?"

I've found that the more fully we can enter into traditional Christian practices such as observing Lent, and do so with their context and meaning in mind, the richer times they are for all of us. Ruth does a great job of setting the stage for us in her post today, "Lent: An Invitation to Return to God." Lent will be off to a solid start for anyone who can read and reflect on what she says there, and hopefully also participate in an Ash Wednesday observance somewhere today.

And by the way, if you're giving up something for Lent, good. Do it in the frame of mind described by Ruth in her article. Do not take the approach one of my friends took several years ago of doing something that actually ends up being harmful to those around you: my friend gave up breath mints! Please, for the love of God and all of the rest of us, find an option that reconnects you to God and also keeps your breath fresh.

To read Ruth's post, click the link above or go here.