The story, and what it took
| The story | What it took |
|---|---|
| Underwater, and on foot | |
| A night dive off Hawaii | He and his wife Robin went down about forty feet, at night, and watched manta rays feed. Everyone remembers the manta rays. What made it possible was months earlier: certification, a plan for the dive, a check of the equipment, and the discipline to follow the plan once the light was gone. Nobody improvises at forty feet in the dark. The interesting part of that evening happened long before the water. |
| Eleven days at Philmont, 2018 | Roughly a hundred and ten miles on foot in the New Mexico backcountry with his oldest son. Eleven days is long enough that enthusiasm runs out around day four and something steadier has to take over. You carry what you decided to carry weeks before, and you find out then whether the decision was a good one. |
| Three Eagle Scouts | Three of his sons each earned the rank of Eagle Scout. That is their achievement and none of it is his. What belongs to a parent in that story is the ordinary, unglamorous part: the driving, the sitting through the meetings, and being present for the years in between, when nothing is being achieved yet. |
| Built by hand | |
| Two basements and two decks | Finished himself. Framing, wiring, the parts that are covered up afterwards and the parts that show. Building something that has to pass an inspection teaches you that the standard is not your own satisfaction, and that the work you cannot see later is the work that decides whether the rest of it holds. |
| Talking to whoever is on site | Having done the work himself, he can hold a conversation with a framer, an electrician or an inspector without either party pretending. It is the same muscle used in a conference room with executives, and in a courtroom with people who have never seen the technology. The register changes and the respect does not. |
| At home | |
| Twenty-eight years, four children | Married to Robin for twenty-eight years. Four children. Long commitments are not made once. They are made repeatedly, in ordinary weeks, mostly by showing up when it would be easier not to. |
| Taught, and served | |
| A Master of Divinity, finished in 2015 | A Master of Divinity in Christian Education from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, earned while practicing law full time. Nobody assigns that degree to anybody. It happened in evenings and on weekends across several years, alongside a litigation practice, which is a fact about persistence rather than about theology. |
| The teaching that came with it | Leading a middle school ministry, teaching a church small group, and substitute teaching at his children's school. Standing in front of a room of thirteen year olds who did not choose to be there is a useful and humbling rehearsal for explaining a patent to twelve adults who also did not choose to be there. |
| Five years on a school board | Five years on the board of Northland Christian School. Board work is budgets, hiring, difficult meetings and decisions that affect other people's children. It is the least photogenic form of service and one of the more demanding ones. |
Pictures to come
- Photograph placeholder. Jesse and Robin on the boat off the Kona coast, before the night dive. Nothing posed, taken by whoever was standing there.
- Photograph placeholder. Jesse and his oldest son on the trail at Philmont in 2018, packs on, somewhere in the middle of the eleven days.
- Photograph placeholder. One of the two decks part way through framing, before the boards went down.