The long way around

Where it started

I was fourteen when I started taking calls at a crisis center and suicide hotline in Columbia, Maryland — the youngest volunteer they had ever trained. I had been certified in CPR and first aid since I was twelve, and I was teaching it by eighteen. Whatever else I have done since, that is the work I keep coming back to: being the person on the other end of the line.

Twenty years on the truck

I spent twenty years as a paramedic, and more than forty in emergency medicine and crisis work all told — as medic, instructor and preceptor across fourteen fire departments and ambulance companies in seven jurisdictions and two states, and in four hospitals along the way. I taught physicians, nurses, paramedics and anyone else who would sit still for it, everything from basic first aid through Advanced Cardiac Life Support, and served as affiliate faculty for the American Heart Association.

I am also trained in critical incident stress debriefing — the work of looking after the responders once the call is over. It turns out the people who run toward the worst days of other people's lives need someone to stay with them too.

Coming to it late

I was not raised in church. Faith came to me in adulthood, in a hard stretch of my life, and it came first — before the writing, before the nonprofit, before any of the rest of it.

The question came later. I was in a men’s group at church when it landed on me, and I have not been able to put it down since: what would happen if someone actually decided to love others the way we are taught to in the Bible? Not the sentimental version. The costly one.

I have been running that experiment for more than a decade now. The book is what came of it.

The work now

I founded Families Renewed and serve as its chairman and chief executive. Families rarely come apart all at once. They come apart quietly, in the months when nobody is looking, and the interventions that work are the ones that arrive before the crisis rather than after it. That is the whole thesis of the organization.

I also drive a motorcoach, which people tend to hear as a step down from medicine and which I have come to think of as a calling. A bus is a small room with a door at the front and one adult in it. Kids talk. Driving a school bus I had the same faces for an entire season, long enough to learn who was not eating and who was not sleeping. A motorcoach trip is usually a week — but it is a week of every meal and every mile together, and a week is plenty of time to notice who is not going to say anything to anyone unless somebody asks.

The school bus years are the ones that keep paying out. Those kids are grown now, and a good many of those relationships are still going — which tells me something about what a reliable adult is worth to a young person, even one who only ever saw you for twenty minutes a day.

What I am trying to do

Teach young people the skills that hold up under pressure. Give parents something better than instinct to work with. Say plainly, in writing, what love costs and why it is still worth it. And keep showing up in the rooms where people have already been written off — because in my experience that is exactly where the work is.

The love that changes people is the kind that does not leave when it gets expensive.

Away from the desk

I live in Pennsylvania. My oldest daughter is grown and out in the world. A second came to me at fourteen and simply stayed. My wife lives in Guatemala, which is also where a good deal of my medical mission work happens; she brought three children into our marriage, and we had a son of our own not long after the wedding.

I have never once been able to hold those distinctions in my head — who arrived when, who shares my blood. They are all mine, every one of them.

The same thing has happened, quietly and without anyone signing anything, with the kids I have driven. A school bus season here, a motorcoach trip there, and by now I have unofficially adopted hundreds of them. Two look after my house while I am on the road. A third keeps my lawn. I did not set out to build any of that, and I would not trade it for anything.

The best conversations, in my experience, still happen somewhere between mile forty and mile ninety.