Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

My son Adam was ten (now he is 22). He was on a new soccer team, and I took him to practice and watched. The coach was a tall man just a few years younger than me. The team looked pretty good, real good. Well, they were real good. They won every game they played that season.

They won every game they played the next season, and the next, and the next, and – well they won over 90% of the games they played over the next six years.

The tall man just a few years younger than me stayed with the team all those years. His role changed from year to year as he recruited a former professional soccer player to coach the team. He managed things like leagues, sign ups, uniforms, and all those details that can derail a group of kids if left unattended.

The tall man’s name was Greg. The kids loved him. When he wasn’t around, they asked about him. One season he missed about a month. He had serious surgery for a growth in his abdomen. The surgery went well, and he recovered. They kids didn’t understand why he was away, but they were happy to see him return.

One night while taking a walk in 2008, I received a phone call from a woman whose son played on my son’s soccer team those six years. Greg had died. I asked her several times in several different ways to make sure that we were talking about the same tall man just a few years younger than me. As best as I tried, I couldn’t get her to talk about someone else. Greg had died. Something from that growth in his abdomen had returned and killed him.

I missed Greg’s passing and his funeral because I was taking a walk.

I loved taking a walk. Having the opportunity to do it was one of the great blessings in my life. One of the bad things about taking a walk is that you are away from home and you miss life. Someone who meant much to you and your son and many other parents and sons grows ill, dies, and is buried, and you aren’t there – you miss it.

Such are the days of a life. While you are in one place experiencing one set of events, you are not in another place experiencing a different set of events. What tears at me is that I don’t know the two sets of events ahead of time. I cannot think them through and choose which I will experience. We choose without complete knowledge and take what comes. We then miss life in another way.