Landing on our feet

When he was a little boy this Daddy picked him up by the leg and held him out over a ledge. Hanging upside down, three stories high, the little boy was terrified. His Daddy laughed and though the little boy was crying and begging he could hear the coins jingling in the man's pockets.

"Oh don't be scared," the Daddy admonished. "I'm not going to drop you ... but I could. I don't want you to grow up to be a scaredy cat."

The boy grew up to be petrified of heights.

He also grew up with an unyielding desire to prove to his father that he was a good boy.

"You know the thing about you Mike," he told me years later, as we sat together ... him drinking coffee and me having a beer ... "had it been you hanging there by a leg, you would've believed it all would have been alright. You're going to land on your feet. You always believe you're going to land on your feet."

"Well," I said slowly sipping the beer, "if you believe you're going to land on your feet then the odds of actually doing is bound to go up."

A few years later I met his Daddy, a small jovial man in a white shirt and dark trousers. He had one hand in his pockets, jingling change.

He didn't know what to make of me. I was the opposite of his son with my long hair, football jersey and faded jeans. Standing in the church which his son was Pastor, the man laughed at things I said but he never took his eyes off of mine.

It was a funny church. Southern Baptist normally don't have a sanctuary built in an Orthodox style with a small balcony that could perhaps seat four twenty feet above the pulpit.

"Oh," I remember saying, "I didn't know you did High Church."

The son laughed loudly.

His Daddy jingled the coins in his pocket.

The son has been Pastors of churches across the nation. He is a great Minister, a most eloquent speaker, a wonderful writer, the epitome of belief. He is beloved by everyone he encounters.

His Daddy's dead and never got the chance to see the boy landed on his feet.

Decades later I remember these things and I raise my glass to the boy, though he is far away. Tipping it to night sky with my bare feet warmed by the fire on the beloved back deck, I say out loud in prayer ... "To you my friend! May we all land on our feet ... even when we don't believe."