don't fail watching. fail trying.

Hi.

I know I sound like a broken record talking about Bob Goff. Everyone that knows me know I love his book Love Does and think it should be required reading for life. I read the book the summer before dad died, and thought of him as I turned each page - it’s a book about a man, and a dad, who lives at full throttle, who is bold and goofy and adventurous and witty and loves the Lord. Bob Goff has a pilot's license and flies single engine two-seaters, too. He loves Young Life and spreading the gospel by just being available and loving. He’s not afraid to be goofy, he likes to throw candy to people, he laughs often and he loves people really, really well. He and my dad must be brothers from another mother, right?

His words at a speaking engagement last year were a balm to my often weary heart. He told a story I hadn’t heard before, though I try to listen to podcasts of his speeches/interviews quite a bit.

At the end of his talk, he shared that he had always had the ambition to save one life. If he could just save one life, he said.

Then he told a story about how he went to college in San Diego. He said, I didn’t really realize I was in college. I just went surging a lot and got a lot of Ds. Sounds just like my dad skiing Lake Austin.

Bob said one time, there was a hurricane coming, or maybe just a big storm, but he was out there in the waves. He got pulled by the riptide, and after hours of fighting the tide, he eventually felt certain this was it; this was how he was going to die.

A man up on the cliffs saw him struggling. They were really steep cliffs, most people couldn’t get down to the water safely, but this man did. And he got in the water. He saved Bob’s life that day.

Every year at Christmas, Bob goes back to give thanks for the man who came down the cliffs, got in the water, and saved him. Recently, he was at the cliffs with one of his sons, and a man fell. Bob and his son climbed down the cliffs, as others watched because it was dangerous, and Bob did CPR for about an hour before medics were able to get there. Sadly, Bob told us, the young man died. Bob said he felt so guilty. His life had been saved there at those cliffs, and then he tried and couldn’t save this young man. But, he went on to say, fail trying. Don’t fail watching. Bob said, we failed trying to save that man’s life. We didn’t fail watching.

Bob went on to explain that the kid who died was on his cell phone, and the press was pretty harsh about it. He fell off the cliff because he was distracted by his phone.

Bob was going to Indiana to speak a few months later, and the young man's parents wanted to meet Bob in person.

Bob told us, I didn’t want to go. What was I going to say? What would we talk about?

They didn’t talk about the mistake the young man made. Bob realized that he had pictures of the sunset the night that the kid fell.

Bob took his computer and showed him pictures of the most beautiful, colorful sunset that their son was trying to capture on his camera phone. This is what your son was trying to see, Bob said. He told his parents about the beauty that their son saw on his last night alive.  

Well, at this point, I couldn’t contain the tears. They streamed down my face and I absorbed every word of Bob’s story.

I had such questions about Dad’s accident. Did he do something wrong? Could we have prevented it? He was flying that day because he had found someone to buy the little blue plane. In my mind, he had decided to sell because my wedding was going to be too expensive. Mom says he was selling it because it was foolish to have two planes. And I know that’s true, but I still spent years with many questions. The blue plane he flew the day he died, the one that he had flown to Montana and back, wasn’t worth a lot of money. I have friends who’s cars cost more. His other plane was also a two-seater, amphibious super cub. Really cool but also not the price tag of a jet or anything like it. Just to be clear - saying that we owned two planes gives me a visual picture very different from reality.  

The NTSB investigates plane crashes. They sent a man to the house a few days after the accident to tell us his findings. He drove from the gravel runway in Kingsland to Houston to meet with “the widow.” That word still stops me in my tracks. He answered a lot of technical questions, and he told us a funny story about the bubblegum they found in the tail of the plane.

But I’ve come to terms with the fact that a lot of questions this side of Heaven, about a lot of things, will remain unanswered.

I try to focus on the glorious, bright spot Dads life was in the world. The fullness and depth of his 53 years. I try to focus on the goodness and not the questions. The legacy he left.

I cried tears of joy and laughter at another event where Bob was speaking.  He was telling a ballroom full of West Houston Young Life folks about the fire at their home in Canada, how the refuge of theirs burned to the ground.

Bob said, when people tell me that everything happens for a reason, I want to scissor kick them in the neck. God is good through it all, but that is not how He operates. (said Bob)

Bob has never said (as far as I know) that God burned down his house. In his new book, he talks about the time that thieves broke into his teams van and stole his laptop with his manuscript saved on it. He talks about how that worked out because he had to rewrite the entire book from scratch and that’s okay because it’s better the second time around. But he never says God sent those thieves to smash all the windows in their van. He never says the Lord sends cancer or plane crashes or terrible witch doctors in Africa to teach us things. (Bob does a lot of work in Africa/Middle East. If you don’t know that, my reference of witch doctors might seem way out of left field.)

Bob talks in his new book Everybody Always about how Jesus reveals himself to us through others. My heart thought God was sending me a message when Bob said,

Let me show the beautiful sunset he was trying to see.

I love you, Dad.

Have I told you my Dad’s cell phone survived the plane crash without so much as a tiny crack? My current phone is more banged up than his.

It is hard for me to reconcile the fact that my dad’s earthly body suffered such trauma that he breathed his last on September 8, but the iPhone in his pocket was unharmed. I wonder how many times in the years since dad’s accident I’ve said I don’t understand. And how many times I have seen the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. I wish he was still here, oh man, do we wish he was still here.

But let me show you the beauty of the world around him that our dad was trying to see.