The Man Who Cried. Thoughts on Liberty University Commencement 2017

So, I’ve been working at my alma mater, Liberty University, for three years now. Because I started in August, 2014, I missed that years’ Graduation and by the time Commencement 2015 rolled around I was already knee-deep in side jobs and had no time on weekends to come see the kids walk. Besides, I knew how bad traffic could get, and if you don’t have a very good reason to be there, it’s better to stay away and watch the live stream.

However, this year a dear friend of mine was walking and she came up from Pensacola to do so, so I promised her I’d come out and see her graduate.

My friend Stephanie is a single mom, who raised four great kids, two of which are college grads and two who are in college right now. She works full time and in 2012, right after I graduated, she got inspired to finish her degree. In fact, I talked her into it. She was wanting to be a teacher, and couldn’t figure out how to balance full-time motherhood, and a full time job, with getting her degree. I told her about Liberty University Online, where I completed my Bachelors, and she enrolled.

Other than talk her into it, all the credit is hers. She did the work and put in the hours and earned that special education degree.

So, that was my reasoning for being in attendance yesterday. Yes, President Trump was speaking at Commencement, but honestly…I’d heard him on campus already, and while I LOVE our president, I hate crowds and traffic, and commencement is the poster baby for both. I was there to support my friend.

(As a side note, the evening before, James Robison delivered probably the best sermon I’ve ever heard at LU’s baccalaureate service. I wasn’t there for that but I wish I had been)

My daughter is in the University Choir and was singing at the ceremony yesterday morning, so I had to be there to drop her off anyway. I met up with Stephanie’s daughter and her mother and we trudged through the puddles, through the body scanners and found some wet seats in the bleachers. Thankfully the rain had stopped and the sun began making infrequent appearances as the morning progressed.

It was exciting having the president there. Even the extra security, and the Secret Service presence, and the hovering State Police helicopter lent an air of importance. The roar of the crowd when president Trump arrived was deafening.

The ceremony was wonderful. It was an emotional tribute to the grit and determination and vision of our founder, Dr. Jerry Falwell Sr. It was a source of pride for me as an alumnus and as an employee of the college. It was a testament to how very well Jerry Falwell Jr. is guiding this ship. There were so many moments of great pride for me but the one moment that burned itself into my heart, that will stay with me until I pass one day, was missed by anyone who wasn’t fortunate enough to have been watching at just the right moment.

We were seated in the bleachers, waiting for the student processional to finish. This takes a long time, since about 7000 students walked yesterday. The ones who had already filed in were standing together, talking, taking pictures, and waving to the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone they knew. The camera crews were roving the audience, taking brief shots of the students and streaming them onto the two giant video boards on the field. There were beautiful ladies and handsome young men all smiling and mouthing “Hi Mom!” or “Thanks Dad!” to the crowd. There was every race, color, and nation on that field. It was already a beautiful, heartwarming microcosm of what Liberty is and does. It reminded me of the line in the classic Andrae Crouch song “Soon and Very Soon” where it says: 

                      “We have come from every nation.  

                          God knows each of us by name. 

                           Jesus took His blood and he 

                              washed our sins away.” 

In fact I was singing that song silently in my heart as I watched the sea of humanity in front of me. And then I saw it. I don’t know how many others in that massive crowd saw it, but I saw it. The cameras picked up on an older Asian man. He was probably around my age and his regalia told me he was there for a graduate degree of some sort. He turned and looked at the crowd, his eyes taking it all in and suddenly, he broke into sobs and his hands went to his face, overcome with emotion. I don’t know if he saw family in the stands or if it was just that the enormity of his remarkable accomplishment suddenly hit home for him and he was overwhelmed. From my vantage point, the latter is what it looked like.

I started to well up myself. Five years ago, that was me. I was homeless, broken, desperate, and holding on to whatever hope I could find. I completed my Bachelor’s Degree in Religion and Biblical studies mostly from the front seat of my car. Or the public library. Or the Fed-Ex Office work stations. Or the pavilion in Pinkerton Park in Franklin TN, where I lived. (or rather, where I parked my car to sleep in) Sometimes it was in a motel room while I was traveling home to Philly to work for my cousins for a week or so, when they had work for me.

The only thing that consistently gave me hope during that six years I was homeless was my daughter, and the pursuit of my degree.

I remembered, as I watched that brief flash of emotion on the screen, how I broke down in my car on the Thursday before my Commencement as I turned off 460 onto the ramp that leads to University Blvd, realizing that I would never again come to this campus with the gnawing feeling that I was not yet a graduate. I wept again when I took a walk on campus and reminisced at how it was when I was there as a resident student 20 plus years before. I got teary-eyed when I got to campus that Saturday morning and saw the last sunrise I would ever see cresting that mountain without being a graduate.

It took a heck of a lot of work, and determination, and grit to finish my degree, living the way I did. I don’t know the story of that Asian man I saw break down yesterday, but I recognize the emotion, and I’m sure his story is every bit as amazing, inspirational, and wonderful as anything I endured.

That man was the lasting memory I’ll take from yesterday. More than President Trump and his terrific speech. More than seeing my dear friend reach her goal. More than hearing the choir and knowing my daughter was in there singing. More than my pride as an alumnus and an employee.

That man…that emotion on his face and those tears…that’s why we do what we do at Liberty. That man’s dream came true yesterday and the importance of that dream showed in his weeping. I don’t know what part I played in his succeeding. I don’t know what his degree is in, or whether any of my business units on campus touched him directly. But I know that somehow, some way my job intersected with his success and so it made it worth it.

The academic year is furious and hectic for those of us who provide support services here at Liberty. It seems as if we just send off a graduating class and another group of freshman arrives without us having a chance to catch our breath. Somewhere around February you burn out a little, and begin to wonder if it’s really worth it. You watch another group of kids move on and you see a new batch coming in their place.

But once in a while you watch a man or woman break down in sobs because this thing they’ve dreamed of –maybe for as long as they can remember- is happening, and there were times when they wondered if it ever would. You realize that this is why you’re here.

And it’s worth it.

Happy Birthday Daisy! (A dad's thoughts on his daughter's birthday)

Nineteen years ago, today, at ten p.m. I became a dad.

My daughter was quiet at birth, not making the slightest sound the entire time and barely uttering a whimper when they pricked her heel for the PK test, a moment when most babies protest the loudest.

She has always been a quiet, introspective soul. That’s not to say she doesn’t get loud and animated with her friends, because she does, from time to time. But most her life has been spent in quiet, thoughtful softness. When she was four, we started attending a new church, and she enjoyed the group she was in. When she turned five, she was moved into the “five-year-olds” class and she was so upset by the noise level that they had to come find me in the sanctuary because she wanted to leave the room.

She doesn’t like to travel in a large pack, preferring instead to hold a few friends close and dear. I’ve wondered, in retrospect, if that isn’t simply a trust issue.

Life has disappointed her very early on. Her mom and I divorced when she was only eighteen months and it left scars that became roots that wound themselves deep into her heart. Her life was, and still is, defined by that divorce. Her mom remarried and moved on, and my daughter saw that as a form of abandonment. She lived with her mom, her mom had primary physical custody, but the fact that she had divorced me and married someone else, felt like she too was being divorced somehow.

I didn’t realize this was still an issue until she wrote the foreword to my most recent book; a book detailing the six years I spent homeless. I thought she’d write about my homelessness and my abiding love for her through the dark days. She did write about those things, but half of what she had to say, was about the divorce. How it hurt her and how all the sadness of the six years I lived in my car, could have been avoided had her mom not left.

I can’t fix that. I can’t undo it. And I don’t know how to help her heal right now.

She is a remarkable woman, this daughter of mine. She has one of the purest, most wonderful voices I have ever heard. She loves to sing and longs to make that her life. But her self-confidence was marred in the wreckage of a broken family and she doubts that she’ll get the same breaks she’s seen others get.

I try to tell her about making your own breaks, and working toward goals, but she’s seen my life and how hard that hard work part really is, and she wonders if she can cut it. So sometimes she gives up. I worry about her. I worry about a nineteen-year-old heart that has already seen so much disappointment and horror and has had much of its natural joy sucked out.

I wonder how I can inspire her to keep trying. To take her gifts more seriously, from the perspective of them being from God, and Him having a plan. A plan that cannot be thwarted. I wonder how to restore her faith in me, in other people, and in God. I wonder if her life is irreversibly damaged.

My grandmother had the same wonderful, sweet voice my daughter has. If this talent is inherited, that’s where it came from. My grandmother sang in “supper clubs” (popular in the day) in the 30’s and 40’s. Then she made some mistakes in life and stopped singing for anyone but herself. I lived with her until I was five, and that beautiful, lilting voice from the other room was one of my earliest memories. She only sang around the house by then. Only when my grandfather wasn’t around. Life, and a few bad decisions, stole her song and quieted her voice. She seldom spoke of her days singing, but when I could coax it out of her, she would get teary eyed and reminisce about how she loved to sing.

I fear that outcome for my daughter. I fear that life will steal the song from her heart and all her music will be locked behind some safe place in her soul, where nobody can damage it and the dream can remain perfect because she never failed, because she never tried.

I can’t believe nineteen years has come and gone already. I still feel like that nervous dad, holding her little form, wrapped tightly in a Winnie-the-Pooh receiving blanket, and telling her over and over –maybe 300 times in three hours that first night- that I love her and that I’m so happy to be her dad.

I can’t believe that at this age she has already endured divorce, the mental cruelty of her mother’s second husband, the homelessness of her dad, and the pain of leaving her life behind at 16. I can’t believe she’s an adult now and has a life that is entirely separate from mine.

Sometimes, I still hear her voice at age four, or six, or ten…asking me to push her on the swing for a few more minutes, or drawing out the plan for our garden, or laughing in a mountain of bubbles so big that I couldn’t even see her, because I’d put a scoop of “Mr. Bubble” in the Jacuzzi and turned the jets on “high.”

I know that God loves His children infinitely more than we love our own. But I have such a hard time grasping that, because I can’t imagine loving anyone or anything more than I love her. I can’t imagine there is anything in my grasp that I would choose over her, or withhold from her if she needed it. I can’t think of a dream she has that I wouldn’t sacrifice all my dreams for without hesitation. I would set my own dreams on fire to light the path for hers to come true. I would breathe my last breath into her lungs and do so with a smile and no regret.

Nothing about my life has been the same since that night, May 7, 1998, when she became a life and I became a dad. Every decision, every goal, the stubborn refusal to quit, and the drive to keep going, all came because I am her dad.

Happy Birthday Daisy. If the love of a dad is a guarantee of the success of your life, then you’ll win a Grammy someday. I love you more than words can say. The two best things God has ever done for me was sending His Son for my sins, and sending my daughter for my life.

I love you,

Dad

About Sean Hannity...

I try to avoid the usual games bloggers play to get readers. I don’t often label my posts with guaranteed keywords that will get hits. I don’t write about current events every day, hoping that I’ll garner fans. I could. I’ve become a darned good writer through the years and I think I could build a base that way if I wanted to. But I don’t, for the same reason that I haven’t thrown in the towel and written a cheap romance novel under an assumed name, to put some beans in my jar while my “real” books await discovery. I have a job; I have a life. All I have left after six years of homelessness is my integrity, and even though there is nothing about doing those things I mentioned that calls my integrity into question…it would do that in my heart. I want people to read my stuff because it’s good, not because they were Googling the most talked about topic of the hour and I worked the system to get hits.

But this morning I’m going to bend my rules a bit. I’m going to touch on a topic that’s trending on social media and in the news and I’m going to do so realizing it will garner readers, if only for the day.

I want to talk about Sean Hannity.

More directly, I want to defend the man. Not that he needs me. But I have a connection and I think I owe it to him to at least tell the story, because his character is being attacked and I’m not going to stand by while that happens.

For six years –from May 2008 until May 2014- I was homeless. I did not drink, or do drugs or gamble my mortgage payments away. I was a hard-working, successful man who made a good income. I wasn’t rich by any means. I barely broke into six figures, but I had what I valued, so that made me wealthy. I had been divorced for several years and was devoted to just being a dad to my daughter and trying to recover from my very broken heart.

I was a manager for a nationally known mortgage company. I had my own branch, had succeeded in the ten years I was in the business and was doing well. Then 2008 hit. The industry collapsed and I was out of a job. Before long, I was out of a home as well.

While this was happening, my daughter’s world was collapsing. Her mom had remarried and her husband began to show his true colors. After a few years of marriage, his drinking and drug use increased, as did his violent nature and emotional abusiveness. My daughter’s mom refused to leave him and my daughter suffered horribly. I can’t recount the events here, it would take too long, but because her life was in such jeopardy at only ten years old, I had to stay in Nashville where we lived. I was the only buffer between her and the monster her mom had married.

I could not find work enough to get a place to live. I could have moved to an area of the country where there was work but my daughter’s life would have been even worse. I stayed to protect her. I slept in my car and showered at the county rec center and did every menial task, and odd job I was offered.

This went on for years and nobody in the government was listening. I held on to the hope that my faith brought me and the love for my daughter. But there were times when I felt like breaking down. Times when my hope waned and I felt like giving up. It was in one of those times when I had my interaction with Sean Hannity and felt his compassion.

In May of 2013, the Obama summer vacation schedule had been announced. Weeks of golf and weeks of lounging on Martha’s Vineyard at the cost of $5 Million bucks. Meanwhile I was living in a Yukon, sleeping next to my carpentry tools and trying not to show my daughter how hard my life was. I was sitting in the parking lot of her high school (she was fourteen by this point) and waiting for her to get out so I could spend thirty minutes with her before taking her home. I was incensed that the President was STILL ignoring the plight of the nation and going on these expensive vacations. I felt alone and isolated and ignored. I felt like I was fading into nothingness. That’s how homelessness feels. You feel invisible. It’s the loneliest thing I’ve ever lived through.

I guess I just wanted to vent and be heard. Sean was discussing the expensive vacations that day so I called.

Lauren was the screener that day and I told her I wanted to discuss the topic at hand. She asked me what my take was and I told her matter-of-factly that I was homeless and trying to rebuild and here is the President laughing in my face. She stopped me right there and said “Wait…you’re homeless? Homeless right now?” I said yes and told her my story quickly.

Lauren put me through to Sean, who listened to my story and my rant about Obama. He listened. Nobody was listening then, but Sean did.

When I was done, he offered me $2000 to get my carpentry business started. He said “You need tools, you need business cards…I’m going to send you two grand to help you get started.” I refused but he insisted and then he told me to hold on and talk to Lauren again. I was on hold briefly and then Lauren picked up and said “Okay Craig, I just need your mailing address so Sean can send you a check…” I told her I was not going to give her the address. I told her I didn’t call to get money and I couldn’t accept it. I had all the tools I needed and business cards galore. I just wanted to vent that day. Lauren laughed and said “I knew you were going to say that,” and then she wished me well and told me they’d be praying for me and my daughter.

I can’t tell you what it meant to me for a guy like Hannity, who didn’t know me or have ANY reason to help, to offer it. It wasn’t the amount…it was the intent behind it. It had been a long time since I felt like someone cared, or since I felt like someone believed that I was trying as hard as I was.

A year later, almost to the day, my daughter and I limped out of Nashville in that same beat up Yukon and headed to Lynchburg, VA, where we now live. I have a great job with my alma mater and she is a sophomore in the music program. I am slowly rebuilding, and able to spend a lot of time with her. She’ll be nineteen this Sunday and I lost some valuable years while I was living in that truck. But we made it.

There is no way to express what Sean’s offer meant to me that day. The terrible invisibility I felt was gone, if only for a few moments. It might sound odd, but the opportunity to not take his money gave me hope. I was broke, homeless, hurting and a bit angry. But I still had my integrity and Sean gave me a chance to remind myself that even after all this loss I was still the man I desired to be at my core.

I don’t have his number on my speed dial and I don’t know any secret email address. I have no way of contacting him other than the same way everyone else does. Yet I think of him as a friend in that he wanted to help when help was rare. I can’t stand by while a guy who did something so literally life-saving for me, is attacked by hacks who are simply jealous of a guy who busted his butt for everything he has and hasn’t forgotten how hard other people struggle.

I hope this story reveals something of his character to those doubters, because to me he is a great man, and I can’t sit still while this goes on. If you dislike his politics, so be it. But you don’t try to ruin a life because you find it disagreeable.

Not while I’m watching anyway.