Two Leptons and a Nickel

It was an unprecedented time for Iowa Hawkeye football. With a record of 15-0-2 across two undefeated, back-to-back seasons, the Hawkeyes scored 532 points and gave up only 23, none of which came from touchdowns. The years were 1899 and 1900. The sports writer for the 1901 University of Iowa Yearbook wrote of these men Such were the players who made the whole land ring with praises for Iowa’s brawn, Iowa’s brains, Iowa’s courage, and Iowa’s honor.

While some achievements are remarkable, like this football feat, others couldn’t ripple a puddle in a pothole. Consider Constance Hudson, who received the first and last trophy of her life in May 1945 and sixty-four years later, nearly to the day, died at age 81. The fifteen-inch trophy featured an eight-inch solid brass statue, and the brass plate was inscribed High School Activities. I have no clue about the activities my aunt logged to warrant the award. I would need to wade through old yearbooks to come to some understanding of her accomplishments.

Juxtaposed against this nascent achievement was a later life lived in utter insignificance. Connie was nondescript as they come, and while she had a heart of gold, the wake of her presence was featureless and forgettable. Her opinions about everything didn’t matter because someone so unassuming couldn’t be expected to contribute to the enlightenment of anyone or the advancement of anything.

Nine years after entering the gospel music industry and only seven years after he started touring with his band, Michael W. Smith released the single that would become the biggest crossover hit in his decades-long career. In the song Place in this World, he asks Where do I belong? and Is there a vision that I can call my own? The lyrics tell the story of a man standing still while the whole world is moving forward – of a life of pages waiting to be filled, presuming the lives of others are already being written. He is a man desperately looking for a reason to be alive and readily admits he’s tired of roaming through the night to find my place in this world. How can he achieve anything if he can’t find his place in this world?

World history books are full of the men and women who became achievement markers for the rest of us. In a world where over 100 billion people have already lived and died, perhaps a few thousand have accomplished something noticeably worthwhile. Or, they have done something with their lives to make it into a narrative. Sadly, our cultural chronicles leave out the ninety-nine percent of the population that lived alongside the one percent who made it into all the news. Those Iowa footballers made it into our shared story, but Aunt Connie did not. Neither did the widow next door.

On Tuesday, September 19, 1961, at 7:45 am, Catherine McElroy, 77, drove her 1955 Chevrolet through the four-way stop at the intersection of highways 3 and 17 in Pocahontas, Iowa, hitting the 1954 Plymouth driven by Hans Nielson, 79, causing $500 in damages, about $5000 in today’s dollar. She was charged with failure to stop at a stop sign. The accident and subsequent charge may have been why Mrs. McElroy was walking on the sidewalk in front of our house on her way home from the Greystone convenience store just two blocks away. I was drawing something on the sidewalk with a rock when I glanced up and saw the oldest person I’d ever seen in my four short years. Somehow, I found myself helping her carry groceries across the street. When we got to her front porch, she reached into her little coin purse and gave me a nickel for all my trouble.

Sixty years later, I can still remember that shiny nickel, which in today’s economy would be like giving me a Kennedy half-dollar to walk fifty feet while carrying a little lightweight grocery bag. I felt rich and significant. I could buy a whole Hershey chocolate bar with five cents! Plus, I did something for another person who needed help.

For much of my early life, I was driven by daydreams of grand achievements in many fields depending on what captured my fancy: industry, politics, religion, academia, film, advertising, etc. It was never about making money. It was all about making a mark. The objective was to imprint my life upon the times with such force that my gift to the betterment of the world would be undeniable and memorialized with recognition greater than a scorecard or a trophy.

One day in graduate school, my ear caught something that would begin to change this inflated mindset controlling so much of my imagination and, to some extent, most of my career planning. Dr. Phil Bom, professor of economics at Regent University, was lecturing on the seminal life and work of Abraham Kuyper, the prime minister of The Netherlands, at the turn of the last century. His accomplishments and societal impacts are too numerous to articulate here, but one thing stood out. His Calvinist theology and Christian worldview inspired something of a leveling agent when it came to the vocational call of God upon a man’s life. He saw the call to become a king as no more glorious than the call to become a fishmonger. In other words, every call of God comes with equal standing despite the position. Every purpose has an identical worth with God.

Recently, a longtime acquaintance seemingly challenged my life purpose by asking me What do you do all day? This is the kind of question that rolls around in someone’s mind for a long time before it’s uttered. I thought it odd since he was aware of all the constraints in my life. I asked Do you mean when I’m not taking care of Matt? He didn’t answer but kept looking at me anyway. I aimed to be dismissive, so I said I write, work on the family genealogy, and mow the lawn. He shrugged his shoulders and mentioned he mowed his lawn, too. Then he said that my life had purpose. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Before I could ask for clarity, the conversation shifted to trivialities.

Every once in a while, I look at a man and the arc of his life and think he was born for that. He’s the guy who was brought into this world with a destiny hanging over his head. All he had to do was breathe and walk until he’d stumble into his purpose as naturally and effortlessly as getting out of bed. This is the one born with a football in his hands, plays the game all through school, and ends up in the Super Bowl with a diamond ring on his finger. Or the man whose recording career turns every album into gold. Or the others who carve out a slice of exceptionalism and land the same kind of total triumph in multiple fields across cultures.

The world has a way of recognizing purpose and achievement. Blue-collar jobs aren’t as noteworthy as those that command white collars. Any job requiring a college degree must be more essential than one in the skilled trades. If you earn half a million dollars a year, you are more intelligent and have more ability than someone who makes ninety percent less as a high school custodian. If you drive a Lamborghini, you are a more distinguished man than one who drives a ten-year-old Ford 150 pickup. If you are a famous actor, you could earn an Emmy. If you write well enough, you could pocket a Pulitzer. Yet, what if you only act in the community theater and write a web blog? You’re out of luck if you think the ordinary in life is awarded. Of course, you’ve heard it said Go big or go home. What if you merely go and nothing else? Do you still have to go home?

One day, when Christ was observing the faithful coming and going from the Temple, he couldn’t help but notice the self-importance of the filthy rich and their flamboyant generosity, which greatly impressed other bystanders and perhaps even his disciples. Still, Christ was more captivated by an inconspicuous widow who quietly put two leptons into the treasury box. A lepton was the smallest and least valuable coin in circulation in Judea and was worth about six minutes of an average daily wage. Christ told his disciples her contribution was extraordinary, more extravagant than the much larger donations made by the exceptionally affluent. This widow had gone Big with the least esteemed thing in her possession.

Without Christ’s reference in the Gospels, this old widow’s leptons would have been dust in the wind, thoroughly forgotten by a world transfixed with things more obvious but far less meaningful. Aunt Connie was heralded as a high achiever in high school, but more than half a century later, no one who remembers or cares is alive. Mrs. McElroy doesn’t fill one sentence in history until she gives a little boy a nickel for helping her cross the sleepiest street in town, an act which he commemorates in an equally somnolent blog.

Neither can the world remember nor care about the men on that Hawkeye football team: Baker, Brockway, Burrier, Warner, Eby, Williams, Morton, Edson, Watters, Little, Howell, Weiland, Hoover, Stratford, and Griffith. The world moved on a few years later, as it should and always does. The universe can’t expect us to venerate everyone every year after they’re gone. We have new and never-ending concentrations for our shifting gaze even when the former focus was utterly astonishing.

I am an avid, unabashed hobbyist of near-death experiences. I’ve read dozens upon dozens of stories of men and women who have died and gone to heaven or hell and come back to tell about it. I never stop to question the authenticity of the accounts. I’m too busy soaking up all the fascinating details of life in a dimension far different from our own.

One person’s excursion was surprising in a particular aspect. In heaven, she watched a parade pass in front of her – floats and music – the whole shebang. She turned to her angel guide and asked the purpose of the parade. The angel pointed to the approaching float carrying a woman who appeared to be the recipient of all the attention. She asked the angel why the woman was being honored, and the angel replied she had baked a cake for a neighbor while still alive. The parade was God’s way of recognizing and rewarding the woman’s small and simple act of kindness.

I don’t think that woman was born to bake a cake for a neighbor. That was not her purpose in life. That lady with the leptons wasn’t created to sneak into the Gospels. Those Hawkeyes weren’t brought into this world to make football history. Connie Hudson wasn’t born to hoist a trophy. Even Michael W. Smith wasn’t born to become a rock star. Maybe none of us were born with a preordained purpose or destiny. Perhaps we come into this world with a blank slate, and our choices carve out our niche. For some, the niche is unavoidably large; for most others, the niche is unnoticeable – like a niche as small as a lepton or a nickel. Regardless of its magnitude, the niche is duly noted in the Book of Life by the Great Magnifier Himself until that day when the universe turns to marvel at the one and only Catherine McElroy as she stands to hear the words Well done!