One Thank You Can Help Write A Legacy

​I remember receiving a phone call from a young man I worked with at Eckerd Youth Alternatives. Jimmy. He was 12 years old when he came into our care. I was his counselor. He was a kid with tons of struggles in life, and he handled none of them well.

The kid threatened to kill me daily and cussed at me more often than that. After spending a year with us, he graduated the program. Most kids did.

The adult staff and the 9 other boys he lived with at camp all stood up at this ceremony and shared fond memories of their time with Jimmy. I'm not sure where any of them came up with those memories. They wished him well, and stated how sure they were he was going to be a great success in life.

I'm sure I lied and said something along those lines as well. But in reality, I knew the only success Jimmy was going to have in life was the possibility of parole attached to the multiple life sentences he was sure to collect within minutes of departing our lying eyes.

Nearly 5 years later, I inexplicably answered a weekend phone call in the main office building - something I never did on the weekends. It was Jimmy. He told me he had been locked up in a detention center in Florida for the past year. But before I could think or say "I knew it", he told me this:

Chief Keith, (we were all called "Chief" at Eckerd), he said, I know you didn't think I'd make anything of my life when I left camp. And until now I really haven't. But I'm going to. I've spent the past year thinking about all the things you told me about life, and now I'm going to change. I just wanted to say thank you.

Then he hung up.

That thank you has haunted me. Not because of who said it or how little faith I had in that kid, but because it is the starkest reminder I have of how few people I have thanked for helping me along the way.

People who never gave up on me.

Several years later I was sitting in my office pondering how ill-prepared I was to become a father. And since I was less than a few months away from becoming a father for the first time, this depressed me.

Until that day, I had been able to convince myself that raising a child couldn't be any more difficult than tossing a ball or putting a worm on a hook. But the due date kept closing in, like a fire, and as it did, I could hear a baby crying and I had no idea how to stop it.

I began to see images of a boy who needed direction through a world I was far from figuring out myself. I began to wonder what I had gotten this innocent child into.

To distract myself I rifled through the day's mail. That's when I came across a letter from a young man I had worked with several years earlier. Tyler.

Unlike Jimmy, I always knew Tyler would be successful. I often wondered what he was even doing at camp. Most days I was sure my life was more screwed up and at-risk than his.

As I ran my fingers through the envelope to open the letter, it struck me that it was stamped in Samoa.

Tyler began the letter by telling me he was working at a surf shop in Samoa. I wasn't surprised. Then he told me he heard that I was going to be a father. He said that was a great thing - that I was going to be a wonderful dad.

He went on to tell me how I was always a great father figure to the guys in his group. And he said thank you.

I was floored - that from a far away place - he would think enough of my contribution to his life to send a letter. More than that, though, I wondered how many people in my life may have needed some timely reassurance that I could have provided with a simple thank you - and they never got it.

I don't know, but thanks to Tyler's thank you, I never worried about my ability to be a father again. Or at least, not with as much panic.

On December 18th, 2006, Elliott Cartwright arrived. In no simple fashion. In the words of Dr. Knelson, who delivered him, he was born with little more than a heartbeat. But Dr. Knelson pounded our baby's chest and shared breath with him for the next several hours like he was his own son. He saw life in a lifeless baby and willed our boy to see a world beyond that delivery room.

I watched that man, old and graying, steal our boy from the determined arms of death and hand him to us like it was just another day at the office. Elliott spent a couple of weeks in the NICU, but he came home with us.

Today he is a healthy college student.

A couple of days after he delivered Elliott, Dr. Knelson walked into Elliott's mom's hospital room. The timing of his visit was a little unexpected and sent me scrambling for the speech I had rehearsed over and over in my head since witnessing the miracle he had performed. The one that allowed me to be called a father.

My mouth got tired of waiting and without permission spit out the following words: Thank you.

From across the room, Dr. Knelson stared me straight in the eyes and said, "don't thank me, thank Him. I'm not good enough to do what happened in that delivery room."

With his response came two lessons:

One, I do not thank God nearly enough for the blessings in my life. Too often, because I don't think beyond the rush of emotion that comes from receiving an act of kindness, or a miracle, I fail to look for God's hand in the sometimes miraculous but often quite simple moments that construct this astonishing life I live.

Two, God knows what he is doing in my life. He uses each of us to do his His will in our intermingled lives. And although I don't believe He is ever more glorified than when we thank Him personally for our connectedness, he doesn't need it.

I imagine God feels like I feel when I watch one of our boys do something kind for the other that I have secretly directed. And the other, completely unaware that I've had a hand in the act, thanks his brother. I always feel the joy of that thanks as if it is directed at me.

I believe God celebrates each and every time we thank someone for the contributions they have made to our lives.

I remember sitting down at my desk and writing out a thank you note to an old high school football coach. It surprised me that I was doing so. Until I began taking a mental inventory of the people who had made contributions to my life that influenced who I was to that day, I hadn't thought much about him. That's because life had lulled me into some sense of belief that it was me and only me responsible for any good in my life.

I thanked coach for the day he piled the entire team into the backs of a herd of pick up trucks and drove us out the country roads that surrounded our school until we were 10 miles or so from where we left. He then told us to get out and run home. This was troubling. I didn't know how to get home, and I knew there was no way I was keeping up with my teammates who were sprinting away like they were the only ones who did.

I made it home. I ran sprints after practice for a month or so because I didn't make it as fast as coach wanted me to, but I made it.

Many years later I would embark on a career working with at-risk youth. Many times these kids would get upset with me because I was asking them to do things they felt were impossible to achieve. I grew fond of telling them that it's not the people who are asking you to do the impossible you need to be upset with, but the people who aren't asking you to do anything at all - because that's exactly what those people believe you're capable of.

When I finished the note to coach, I began to search the internet for his address. I hadn't talked to him in years so I had no idea where I'd find him, but I was determined to get him this note. I suppose that's what hurt the most when my search turned up that he had died of cancer several years earlier.

He would never receive my thanks. He would never hear me admit that what I once called the dumbest thing I had ever heard a coach ask his players to do clung to me long enough to become a valuable life lesson for others. A legacy of sorts, I suppose.

I think people deserve to know their legacy.

I think they deserve to know it before they unknowingly part from our lives forever.

Maybe that is one of the things a thank you does best. It writes legacies.

It's never too late to say thank you, until it is.....

(re-written from a 2012 article I wrote)