Finding a Family

The truth is, I’d rather do things my way. I thought the confusion I felt growing up without a father was just part of life, and there seemed to be benefits. Life was an open range. I disliked authority figures, because they represented boundaries. And the worst were older men. For reasons I didn’t understand, I resented them. I felt as though they wanted me to submit to their authority because they wanted to feel powerful. But I also wanted their respect and approval. And if I sensed disapproval, I belittled them in my mind. I was a split person: Half of me wanted to be mentored through life — the side, I suppose, who wanted a father — and the other half would rather not answer to anybody. I started realizing this several years ago when I moved in with a family, the family of a man who taught a college class at a church I was attending.

I met John MacMurray at a strange time in my life. I had left my home in Houston and was traveling around the country when I ran out of money in Oregon. I got an apartment in the suburbs of Portland where housing was cheap, and I started going to a church in a town called Boring, Oregon. The town lived up to its name. It had one stoplight, a convenience store, and a burger place. It was very beautiful, mind you, with views of Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens, river valleys and all, but once you were over that stuff, you were out of luck. The church I started attending was in the middle of a shrub farm — landscape shrubs and flowers and Christmas trees. Every November, the Christmas trees would be hauled down to schmucks in Florida who paid fifty bucks to hang lights on them, sing some songs, then watch them dry up and get pine tar all over the wicker furniture. This church was crowded with tree farmers, hunters, fishermen, that sort of thing—men’s men.

I was born going to church, raised going to church, and church had been a significant part of my life. I confess it’s been comforting to me, at dark times, to know there is a God in the cosmos who is paying attention. I had walked away from a lot of it, but when I moved to Oregon, I was feeling lonely so I decided to plug back in to a church. They had a college group that met at a guy’s house way out in the sticks, this guy I was telling you about, and I started driving out there once a week.

At first, I didn’t know what to think of the group. Or of John MacMurray, the guy who led it. We would sit around in his big living room, on the floor, because even though he seemed to have money, he was too cheap to buy his wife furniture. After we made small talk for a while, John would sit down in a chair, the only chair in the room, and everybody would get quiet. The place fell to a hush. This took me a while to get used to, and I don’t mean to make the guy sound like a strange guru or something — it’s just that when he sat down in the chair, everybody shut up, waiting for him to speak. And the first thing John would say is, “What do you guys want to talk about?” He wasn’t being weird or anything, and these people really respected the guy, so I paid attention.

The hush made me wonder what kind of guy I was dealing with, and I half expected him to lay his Bible across his lap, press his palms together, nod slowly, and say something like, “In order for us to become great, we must make ourselves small” — and everybody would respond with a worshipful sigh, to which I would have laughed out loud. Thank heavens, nothing like this happened. He turned out to be pretty normal, and the hush that came over the group was mostly because people didn’t want to miss anything. This guy was that smart. Basically, apart from retreats where all we did was play Scrabble or cards and watch movies, the church’s college program involved sitting around with John leading us in studying and talking about the Bible.

The other thing you have to know about John is that, at first, he can come off a bit cocky. It’s not a bad cocky—in fact, it’s quite endearing sometimes, once you get used to it. Partly, he has this personality trait because he grew up in Philadelphia, and roughly everybody from Philadelphia sounds like they think they are better than you. It’s true. Panhandlers on the street sound condescending in Philadelphia. Anyway, we all grew to like it. Sometimes you get tired of people kissing your butt all the time, and you just wish someone would speak their mind. That’s John.

Now, I don’t know where you are spiritually, whether you are a Muslim or a Jew or an agnostic or just prefer not to think about it, but there is something good about listening to somebody explain complicated ideas, especially when they have to do with ancient themes—meaning-of-life themes—because listening to that stuff gives you the feeling life is a great deal more intricate, and perhaps more beautiful, than you thought. Studying an ancient text makes a person feel as though they are living in a complicated but wondrous reality that is greater than they are.

John was a Bible scholar, but he didn’t teach the Bible for a living. He had a part-time gig teaching at a local school, but for a living, he took landscape photographs. I found this out because some of us would stay around after the Bible study and watch whatever was on television, and one time I asked John about the photographs he and his wife had hanging in the living room. They had landscape photographs, mountains and snow and sunsets and the like, a couple of them on the walls and one of them over the fireplace. These weren’t normal nature photographs, like the ones your uncle took of the family in front of a waterfall in Kentucky, but the real thing, almost like art. These were the sorts of photographs you took by being dropped off by helicopter on a mountaintop just at sunrise, no footprints or anything. And that’s when John told me they were his. I didn’t believe him at first, but he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders like it didn’t matter whether I believed him or not. That’s when I started thinking maybe he was telling the truth.

Even though John is too cheap to buy his wife furniture, they live in a nice house. It sprawls out on a couple acres, and from the driveway you look directly at Mount Hood, all eleven thousand feet of purple-on-snow rising out of the rolling hills of western Oregon. I always wondered, when I went out to John’s house, how he could afford a big place like that on a Bible teacher’s salary, especially only teaching one class a year. It started making sense that he might have some kind of side job.

We would hang out after Bible study, sitting in the den watching Sports Center, and one evening John asked if I wanted to see some of his work. The rest of the guys got quiet. Sure, whatever, I said. The others stood up, and John looked at them with this kind of Bruce Willis glance and said, “I guess you guys want to see, too.”

We went upstairs to John’s office — a kind of library without shelves. There were stacks of black boxes all over the floor and on the desk, and John led us meandering through them. He flipped a switch on his desk and half the thing lit up—not a top light, but the actual desk was made of glass and it lit from underneath. John opened one of the black boxes and set down a couple slides on the backlit desk. These slides were pretty big, four inches by five, John told me, and when they were lit from behind they were remarkable. I couldn’t believe a guy could get paid to go to the most beautiful places in the world to take pictures.

John would tell us what they were — one a mountaintop in Italy, the next the Coral Reef in Australia, then a waterfall in the Jefferson Wilderness here in Oregon. He must have had more than a hundred slides in each box, and there were hundreds of boxes. All the guys stood around the light board like we were looking at pictures of naked ladies, because we were honestly amazed, none of us able to take it all in — the perfection of the colors and the textures, moonlight reflecting on a glacier with a gray mountain peak in silhouette rising up in the background, a single flower in a meadow along a creek banked with green moss, pines so thick with snow you could hardly see the green within the pure white pillows that piled along their laboring branches, water surging over a five-hundred-foot cliff to a blue pool below, the water seeming to move in the still photo.

There were times we would meet at John’s house and somebody would substitute teach, and John would come back the next week with another stack of slides—fall colors on the Blue Ridge Parkway, winter in a Scottish glen, the Swiss Alps, ranges in New Zealand you hardly believed were real. I asked him why he didn’t put his name in huge letters at the bottom of his photos and make a fortune off posters at tourist shops in Yosemite Park or somewhere. But he rolled his eyes. I’m serious, I said, you could get some serious cash out of this stuff.

“I do fine,” John said.

“I’m just saying,” I told him.

I got to feeling pretty comfortable around the MacMurrays. After a while, you don’t notice that whole Philadelphia thing, and it hardly mattered because we were learning the Bible inside and out. I even started going over there when there wasn’t a Bible study. Terri, John’s wife, would invite me out for Saturday breakfast, and then we’d all sit and watch golf or talk about John’s last trip. They had this little boy named Chris, who was cute as a puppy, and it didn’t hurt that Terri looked like a supermodel, either. John would make eyes at her while she chased Chris around the island in the kitchen. I liked being with them and was kind of honored that good-looking, rich people would want me hanging around.

One night after Bible study, I was feeling pretty hungry because I hadn’t eaten any dinner. I went to the kitchen, and Terri said I could make myself a sandwich. I’m not the type to go rummaging around in somebody else’s fridge without permission, but Terri said I could. And there I was all aglow in the light of the refrigerator when John walked into the kitchen.

“Well, make yourself at home, Miller,” he said to me.

“Terri said I could make a sandwich.”

“Feel like you live here, don’t you, Miller?”

“Terri said I could make a sandwich.”

“Well, you might as well move in if you’re going to eat all our food,” John said to me, smiling. “You can pick up the key from Terri. The apartment is above the garage.” And with that, he walked back into the living room. I got a plate out of the cupboard and was opening a loaf of bread when Terri walked through the swinging door from the living room.

“It will be great to have another man around,” she said.

“I always have to lift those bags of pellets for the wood stove when John is out taking pictures, but you can do that. I’ll get you a key.”

“A key to what?” I asked.

“The apartment is above the garage,” she said, and pulled a key out of the junk drawer. “You should just do what John tells you. It’s easier that way,” she said, handing me the key.

“You guys really want me to move in?” I asked.

“Guess so,” she said with a smile.

So that is how I moved in with John and Terri. And that is also how, without knowing it, I suddenly had an authority figure in my life. John is not the kind of guy who wants you living upstairs at his house if he doesn’t want to teach you something. I didn’t know that when he invited me, otherwise I wouldn’t have moved in, but it was true. I lived with him and Terri for four years, and I was there when the next two kids were born, Elle and Cassy. And I was there when they got a dog, and I always took the Christmas picture, and I overheard John and Terri fight, and I—more than once—had to go back to my apartment when they were cuddling a little too intimately.

What I am trying to say is, I saw a family. For the first time in my life, I saw what a father does, what a father teaches a kid, what a husband does around the house, the way a man interacts with the world around him, the way a man—just as does a woman—holds a family together.

I am not going to tell you it was easy. There were times I would have rather lived on my own, played my music as loud as I wanted, come home drunk, whatever. But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren’t real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child. The lessons I learned in the four years I spent with John and Terri will stay with me forever.

I read a passage in the Bible a long time ago that said, “God sets the lonely in families.” Looking back on the time with John and Terri, I know that passage was talking about me.

Excerpt taken from Donald Miller’s, To Own A Dragon and reprinted by permission of NavPress. To order a copy of To Own A Dragon, go to www.navpress.com.

Related Elsewhere:

Also posted today is an interview with Donald Miller.

To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

More information is available from NavPress.

Miller’s website has more information about his books and his speaking schedule.

Past Christianity Today interviews with Donald Miller include:

Finding God in Odd Places | There’s more to faith than grids and logic, says Donald Miller. (Sept. 14, 2005)

The Dick Staub Interview: Why God Is Like Jazz | Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, talks about why Christians need writers who honestly deal with their faults and why penguin sex is an apt metaphor for believing in Christ. (Aug. 5, 2003)

Other reviews and excerpts from his books include: