Life Travels with our moments, fill them with goodness

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak to a group in Lynchburg, Virginia. Like always, I walked away with a lesson at least as powerful as anything I left behind.

I arrived at the event early. This allowed me extra time to get to know the hosts of the event.

In those conversations, I discovered the owner of the host company was familiar with Randolph-Macon College (RMC) where I work part-time. His son had visited the college recently, exploring the possibility of playing football there.

His son ultimately went a different direction. He chose a school closer to home and to wrestle, not play football. But his father told me the football coach at RMC they spent time with, coach Arruza, was one of the finest coaches he'd ever met.

He told me it was clear coach Arruza was a man of great character and that he was as committed to building character in the young people he coaches as he was to building successful athletes.

None of this surprised me. I've known coach Arruza for several years now. He's a man I openly welcome into my own boys' lives. I often say he's as walk the talk as any man I know.

So nothing about this father's experience surprised me.

But what a reminder, standing there, 130 miles from RMC, hundreds of days removed from an interaction between a father and a coach, and that interaction is living on, alive and well.

That interaction, seemingly long gone, was risen and influencing a moment in the present. It certainly made me feel more comfortable and at peace as I prepared to speak to the group. But it also reminded me that what I was about to say, and how I was about to say it, might have a life of its own that I couldn't begin to predict.

It's easy in a day that is full of so many moments to start writing some moments off as less meaningful than others. But that's because we simplify moments to what we can see in them. We judge moments by what they appear to offer us in the here and now.

But life and moments are more complex than that. Life takes our moments and transports them. We fill the suitcases of the moment, then life travels with them, often to places we never get to become aware of or actually visit ourselves.

What a beautiful life miracle, then, to be standing in one of those moments yesterday. To see what life decided to do with the interaction between a father and a coach.

It's not lost on me that I'm now writing about that moment. I'm sharing it with you. I wasn't even there, yet, in a way, now I was.

How cool is life?

But as powerful and cool as life is that way, we have to remember we are the fuel for that power. We pour into life something that sends a man back home with his son believing he'd just met one of the finest coaches and high character men he'd ever met.

Our stories, our character, who we are, it travels. Which makes every moment in life a very meaningful one.

There's no doubt in my mind that coach Arruza has hosted thousands of those recruiting visits over the years. There's no doubt in my mind it would get easy to just go through the motions of those visits.

But that's not at all who coach Arruza is. His character is beyond routine and complacent. And that's the story that got transported 130 miles away and some 400 days or so later.

What a blessing it was to hear it.

What a reminder that today, you and I will live out stories that life is going to transport somewhere. We have no control, really, over where life takes that story, but we have a whole lot of control over what that story will be.

Make it a good one.

Make it one you'd be proud to hear many days and miles from now.

Make it one you'd be proud for someone else to hear.