A Walk With Dad by Jeff Bills

A few years back HOPE was engulfed in the most difficult and painful period in our history. As I stood at the epicenter of that crisis my mantra became, “Just do the next right thing.” It was my way of reminding myself and others that we needed to take this one step at a time and to seek to move in God-honoring ways.

Recently, it occurred to me that while that phrase was my own, the premise was from my most significant male role model, my dad. Dad has been a walker as long as I’ve known him. Every Saturday at noon, we would walk the five or six blocks from his father’s real estate office to the boardwalk just to “see how the ocean is doing.” (In the summer that walk would happen again at 4:30 in the afternoon and continue right into the surf.) Since his retirement, one of the great pleasures of his life was his daily three-mile walk on the boardwalk, even in the dead of winter.

A year ago my dad’s world caved in on him. His wife of 56 years died after a 9-month battle with cancer. Three months later, Dad underwent an aortic by-pass that went badly and he nearly died. After spending a month in intensive care he was sent home, a shell of the man that he had been. I never expected to see the man I once knew again. A couple weeks after his release from the hospital I began getting daily reports from my sister (he lived at her house for several months after his surgery) that Dad was driving her crazy because he was walking around the house without his walker. I was thrilled: Dad was coming back, he was determined to go walking again!

As I think about my father’s approach to life, I have come to understand that walking is a metaphor for how he has lived his life. As a boy, I hated walking through town with my dad because we would never go more than a block before someone would stop him to chat. (I’ve always been more of a runner than a walker!) Dad never seemed to be in a hurry, and he always seemed to have time for people along the way. Over the years, when hard times came up, Dad would just keep walking — doing the next right thing along the way. Did I mention my dad has had a compass as he’s walked through life? His compass is his deep faith in Jesus Christ. For Dad, knowing what the next right thing was has always meant looking to the scriptures for guidance.

I call my dad a couple of times a week just to see how he is doing. Last week he told me he had gone for a walk. Up till then, a walk meant he had walked once around the outside of the assisted living facility where he now resides. “That’s great Dad,” I said. “Did you make it all the way around?” “No, today I took a walk up to the boardwalk.” I was stunned. This is easily four times the distance he had been doing. He quickly added, “I just wanted to see how the ocean was doing.” I could not help but smile and wonder how many times he stopped to chat with someone along the way.