KINGDOM ETHICS D a v id p. G u shee
Just a Man with a Family Each year during the Christmas season we watch Holiday Inn, the old Bing Crosby movie about a man who withdraws from the show biz rat race and retreats to a farm in New England. Not surprisingly, he finds cow-milking and hay-baling not quite as much fun as anticipated, and finally opens his farm as a “holiday inn,” producing shows only on national holidays. In an early scene in the movie, Bing’s character meets Linda Mason (played by Marjorie Reynolds), a lovely young blonde trying to break into show business. As they talk together by the fireside in his homey inn, Linda reflects on her father and their family life. She says of her dad that “he never amounted to much. He was just a man with a family.” He never amounted to much. He was just a man with a family. Whenever we watch that scene, I feel at least a twinge…of, well, guilt. It touches a kind of raw spot in the life story of my own marriage and family. When Jeanie and I met and fell in love over 25 years ago, we were just teenagers. I was going to be a Baptist minister. She was going to be a minister’s wife. Later the plan shifted a bit and I was going to be a seminary professor. No major change there. We were going to have a family and raise kids together. Jeanie imagined that we would spend every evening together, with the kids and with each other. I might take one trip away a year, as her own father did when she was growing up. I had other kinds of dreams that I shared with her sometimes, but they were pretty remote, so far away. I would read C.S. Lewis or, later, Reinhold Niebuhr, and dream about just maybe, someday,
and others. Most moral leaders either never marry or do marry but place their family relationships under great strain as they engage in their public ministry. It almost seems to be a necessary choice. You can amount to something. Or you can be a man or woman with a family. But most of us end up attempting an ongoing balancing act that requires the very best efforts from everyone in the family, plus a lot of grace and mercy. Jeanie has over the years adjusted to the public life I have come to lead. How grateful I am to her for her grace and patience. And we have established certain relationship-building commitments that have kept us healthy, such as our weekly date night, our family vacations, and our weekend getaways now and then. I spend individual time with each of my kids doing things that we enjoy. But there is less of that time now than there has ever been. And there are many days I seriously consider dropping 90 percent of what I am doing to be just a man with a family. A caveat is called for here: I believe that being a father (or mother) is a worthy calling in and of itself, and one that involves influence as well, albeit in a limited sphere. A man who devotes himself to his family at the price of a career can certainly amount to much in the private sphere, and even exert a public influence in the future if his children Most of us end up attempting go on to lead a public life. an ongoing balancing act But it seems to me that most of the visible history of the world is made by that requires the very best efforts deeply exhausted people whose family from everyone in the family, relationships are often strained and sometimes destroyed by their public responplus a lot of grace and mercy. sibilities.They “amounted to something,” but it cost them and their families. Just about every admirable or heroic It’s time to end this column. I have to person I have studied lived a life like this. get ready for my next speaking gig. n I have a wall at work with pictures of the heroes I like to teach about and imitate. David P. Gushee is a distinguished univerIt includes Mandela, King, Lincoln, sity professor of Christian ethics at McAfee Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, Nightingale, School of Theology at Mercer University in Wilberforce,Wiesel, Day, Mother Teresa, Atlanta, Ga. being a person of influence like that. But everyone knows that only a few people achieve such dreams. All these years later, as presidents like to say, “the state of our union is strong.” But it has had to achieve that strength amid circumstances that Jeanie, especially, did not anticipate. I would blame it on God’s will or just how things happen, but that would be a cop-out. The truth is that I was unwilling to be “just a man with a family.” My desire to leave a mark on the world, to make a difference for God, to be a person of influence, to be remembered after I die, to advance the kingdom of God, was just too strong for that life. I had some gifts, the time was right, and the fire of ambition burns hot within me. And so, this year especially, there have been far too few nights of just sitting on the couch reading and talking. I write in early April, and so far in 2008 speaking gigs have taken me to California, Alabama,Tennessee, Pennsylvania,Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Alberta, Canada. I am speaking about my new book on faith and politics, a good cause indeed, but there is always a good cause, and after a while there are always more speaking engagements and more reasons to be gone from home and hearth, wife and children.
PRISM 2008
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