Introduction Riches won’t help on the Day of Judgment, but right living can save you from death. Proverbs 11:4 We are enamored with heroes. It seems that we vault anyone to hero status if there is any act or position that warrants such delineation. We make sports figures, actors, or other icons of entertainment into heroes even if their actions or core beliefs prove otherwise. We rightfully declare soldiers, policemen, firefighters, and other emergency service providers as heroes. To most of us our first heroes are our teachers. I can still remember the “Boston” accent of my first- grade teacher. We are a people who long for a model of self-sacrifice, devotion, supernatural performance, or anything out of the ordinary. We are a culture of faster, more powerful, and able to leap tall buildings kind of stuff. We are looking for heroes. I am one of you. I too look for heroes. Unlike most, I have found one. He was not a typical hero but one of humble and quiet character. While he was alive, if you were to spot him in the grocery store, in a mall, or in a physician’s waiting room you would not see the hero inside. You would not find him flying through the skies, stopping a speeding train, or changing into his cape in a phone booth (like there are still phone booths!). But make no mistake, he was a hero. His life left a positive mark on me and countless others. He was my father, and he was a hero. This book is not only about him, but it is also about you. I believe that we can learn lessons from a hero’s life and apply them to our own. Over the next few pages you will discover simple truths that shape a hero’s life and, hopefully, discover the hero within you. As you read, take a look at your life. Looking at your life might be scary, but an unexamined life is really scary! What adjustments do you need to make? What hurts, habits, or hang-ups need to be healed, stopped, or overcome? Remember it is not how you start that matters, it’s how you finish. No matter where you are in your life journey, you can make decisions about your life today that will change your destination. Every decision becomes a destination because each one sets into motion actions that propel your future. I don’t think my father said to himself one day, “I’ll be a hero.” I think the decisions he made, one at a time, and the actions he chose based on those decisions shaped his life. Because my father belonged to Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit guided him. The same God who guided my father will guide you. My dad would tell you the greatest decision you can make is to follow the Lord. I believe that God has placed a hero in you, and that hero is longing to come out. Most of us go through life without ever knowing why we exist or our purpose for living. We long to be happy, but we are not sure what happiness is or how to achieve it. If we look for happiness in prestige, possessions, or pleasure we are disappointed. A task or vocation will never bring happiness nor will a collection of things. What brings happiness is finding God’s purpose for our lives. You have been placed on earth in a specific time and place to make a difference. That difference is always in relation to people. Relationships make life rich. God has placed you here to invest your life in others. Jesus said, “Love God, love people.” Love for God is always expressed in actions of love toward people. I am blessed to have lived in the presence of a hero. Mark Twain said that when he was fifteen he saw his father as the most ignorant man alive. Then, at twenty-one, he saw that his dad was actually the most brilliant man alive. He claimed that it was amazing what his father had learned in those six years. But it can be difficult for children to see the value in their parents in youth. I am far older than twenty-one, and I am still discovering what my father learned in all his years. As I write this, I am looking back over the eighty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-two days my dad lived. His life was full of adventure and hardship, excitement of youth and the challenges of aging, great joy and great sorrow, leadership and learning. He was and is my hero, and I am honored to share the lessons I have learned from his life. Chapter One Heroes Tell Their Story I will not die; instead, I will live to tell what the LORD has done. Psalm 118:17 One of the great traditions of the South is storytelling. As a southerner, part of my father’s culture was storytelling. As a child, I would sit and listen while my father and his brothers retold stories from their youth. These stories got bigger and better every time they were told. They were often epic tales of youthful adventures or mischief that would entertain and inspire me. At times, these stories were about tragedy and heartache. In all of them, there were truths and lessons. If my father’s stories were never told, I would have never discovered how a hero is made. I am sure my dad never thought that his stories would leave such an impression on my life. I believe that he shared his tales out of sheer joy. When he and my uncles were together there was much laughter and fun. Mostly they told stories. My dad and his family grew up in terrible poverty but they never knew it. My Uncle Louie says, “We were raised in the bliss of utter ignorance.” Looking at their childhood, he was right. Lenton Velpoe Weatherford, my dad, grew up in the great depression. This was a very difficult time to be a child, especially a child raised on a farm in Mississippi. Mississippi was historically a poor state, but no one knew they were poor because everyone around them lived the same way. It’s hard to know that you’re poor without a comparison. They wore hand-me-down clothes and had one pair of shoes each. They ate what they grew and raised. They ground their own cornmeal, milked their own cows, and slaughtered their own chickens and pigs. They only bought flour, sugar, and coffee. My grandfather, Henry Hoyt Weatherford, was a sharecropper. That meant he farmed land he didn’t own and gave a portion of his profits to the owner. He married Maudie Belle Johnson and they started a family. She had a way of turning the little food that they had into gourmet meals. She had great ingenuity to make the best of what they had. They never owned much and struggled most of their lives. I remember going to their house and it really being a shack. It was clean but had no bathroom, running water, or electricity. We had to use the outhouse, and we took baths in the kitchen. The house had one level and four rooms: a living and kitchen area, a main bedroom, and two little, closet-sized bedrooms. As the family grew, the kids slept on floors or all together in little beds. No one had their own room or a closet, not that anyone had enough clothes to put in one. They lived and farmed on two hundred acres. There was a 2,000 square- foot house in the middle of the yard that they could have lived in, but my grandmother wanted to live by the road so she could see people coming and going. They lived in the small house by the road for close to thirty years. In the late sixties they finally put in a bathroom, which they installed without a septic system. They simply ran a pipe from the bathroom to the ditch. When we were kids we would entertain ourselves by chasing the sewage through the pipe to watch it expel into the ditch. Now that’s entertainment! I loved my grandparents even though I was a little afraid of my grandpa. He had one eye. I don’t think it was the eye thing that bothered me. It was just that I didn’t know him very well. Every time I went to visit he would sleep in his chair and not say much. After his death we discovered that he had only one functioning kidney. That explained his sleeping. I know from stories told that he was a good man who loved the Lord and his family, but he worked really hard. Grandpa lost his eye at seven. In the south, people either grew cotton or tobacco for a cash crop. My grandfather grew cotton, and when it came time to harvest, it didn’t matter how old you were, you were picking cotton. They would walk through the fields with a pouch around their shoulders and once it was full they would dump it into a bigger wooden box, called a cotton box. Originally I was told that he lost his eye because he was doing flips in the cotton field and hit his eye on the corner of a cotton box. As an adult I learned the truth. He and his brother were picking cotton together and goofing off.