reading

“Far too often the pursuit of money takes priority over relationships, leaving children, coworkers, and employees spiritually, intellectually, and morally bankrupt. This book reveals the legacy treasures that will inspire readers to find ultimate purpose and value in life. McAlvany’s insights and solutions to holistic, generational planning make this book a gem! He is transparent and generous in sharing personal experiences as well as professional expertise to deliver a heart warming and practical guide to being intentional about blessing our families far beyond passing along assets.”

“McAlvany reminds readers that we both receive and pass on a legacy to others. None of us do it perfectly. We are awkward and broken and therefore need the wise advice and counsel that this book provides. In fact, David, who has learned well, through careful attention and thoughtful reflection, makes reading about wisdom a pleasurable experience. Every page of the book has something memorable, and often quotable. Well written, and profound, all who are serious about living intentionally and leaving in their wake a legacy to benefit those who follow should make this book a must read!”

“David McAlvany is one of the most impressive individuals I’ve ever met, so it should come as no surprise that his story of “Intentional Families” is so inspiring. His life story combined with his money management expertise and world view all come together to offer a message that must be told. How to intentionally make the world a better place with a solid legacy featuring faith, family and finance is something that everyone should hear. I’m grateful that Dave was willing to share his “Waffle House” lesson with the world.”

“Is there anything, anything at all, that matters more in the end than the love and the legacy of our family? As David McAlvany so powerfully demonstrates in both his testimony and in his book, our most strategic lifetime investments are necessarily those that we make at home and across the generations.”

“David has masterfully woven his personal story of rebellion, grace and redemption throughout his book while giving the reader a contagious vision for paving the way for generational unity and intentional families. Legacy is, indeed one’s life message … it is never too late to begin the journey!”

“A boy up a tree, a teen slopping pigs, a young man in a diner are together one, a son hungry for the blessing and love of his father. Failure and resentment wafted away with the steam of a cup of coffee as his father offered this—forgiveness. Infused with both gospel realism and gospel hope, The Intentional Legacy reminds us of the greatest legacy we have received, and the greatest legacy we are called to pass along. It reminds me that both as a father and a son I am a rich man indeed and calls me to faithfully steward the blessings my heavenly Father has showered upon us. It encouraged me to invest in the one thing under my care that will last forever, the souls of my children.”

“Question: Why do old men plant trees? Answer: To have a legacy! But might there be a better way to “plant” a legacy? Yes and a remarkable book by David McAlvany The Intentional Legacy provides many ways to go about creating and promoting a family legacy. The author identifies how to build a family identity and with it to enrich the personal identity of each family member. Among the chapters are: How to make a financial legacy for your family and its future generations. And many other helpful legacy contributions. So read it and apply it and maybe even plant some trees.”

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This is a book about a future you cannot see or touch, but that is as real as the lives of your children. The subject is legacy—what it means, how to cultivate it, and how to protect it. It is also the story of a real family—mine—and our somewhat circuitous journey toward intentionality.

Here you will read about a modern prodigal son who was reduced to the life of a swineherd, but who found his soul and his future after experiencing a life-transforming act of grace that ultimately paved the way for generational unity.

Here you will meet a woman—actually, several of them—whose indefatigable spirits and refusal to succumb to hopelessness allowed them to provide a legacy of opportunity for their children and to see “years that the locusts have eaten” restored after the pain of abandonment and divorce.

Here you will meet a man whose heroic response as a teenager to the death of two individuals in a plane crash prepared him to maintain presence of mind in the face of an historic catastrophe that claimed the lives of more than 200,000—and, in so doing, modeled for others a principle of survival vital for legacy-minded families.

And before the book is over, I will introduce you to a little boy and his prayers and an island at the end of the world where all of these legacies converged.

But for now, I want to tell you the most important thing I have to say:

Every choice we make will shape the destiny of children yet to be born. Every act of love or hatred, redemption or savagery, thoughtfulness or selfishness, births a future for ourselves and others. We live lives permeated by legacy—the legacy given to us and the legacy we cultivate every waking moment of the day.

We are the custodians of a generational story. Our lives are but one chapter, positioned somewhere in the index of a book of indiscernible length. The narrative began long before we were born. It continues further into the future than we might imagine. We may not do with our lives whatever we choose. There is a higher call. We are the trustees—the caretakers of our great grandchildren’s future.

Our very existence is a gift given by God to be dedicated to His service. That service finds an immediate and practical expression in the context of the life and labor of the family. Our greatest aspirations and highest ideals are reflected in the lives we live with our children. It is not enough that our children succeed; we want them also to build upon our victories and transcend our defeats. It is our children, not our jobs, that are the most important work of our lives.

This book is about the nature of legacy. It is about the duty of families to embrace their legacy with intentionality. Rather than presenting a technical overview of wealth management protocols on the one hand or a spiritual to-do list on the other, I want to present something more fundamental. I want you to understand the very heart of the matter: What is a legacy? What makes it tick? Why is it so often lost? What can you do to cultivate a vibrant legacy that stands the test of time? Why does any of this even matter?

Legacy is an inescapable concept. We may choose to invest in our legacy, or we may choose to neglect it. But either way, you and I will leave one to our children’s children. Because human action is inescapable, legacy is inescapable. We may dissipate a legacy, or we may cultivate it. We may prove ourselves grateful recipients or thankless legatees who despise our birthright, preferring a mess of pottage instead. In the end, how we respond to what we have been given—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and what we determine to leave to others will define for future generations the value of our walk on this earth.

The timing of this book’s publication is not accidental. It is fair to say we are living in the midst of perhaps the largest legacy crisis in recent history. All fundamentals are in question. What is the meaning of a family? Who determines legacy—parents or the state? What do we do with the dramatic increase in our aging population and the decrease in births? How will we care for the elderly when our financial systems are teetering on bankruptcy? And what about the children who are growing up in a virtual social media world detached from physical flesh-and-blood relationships? What legacy will they embrace? We need to be clear on the meaning of things—in this case, the meaning of legacy.

Legacy is far more than assets on a balance sheet. It is our life message—the total sum of values and vision we leave to others in the form of tangible and intangible assets. Our approach to money, property, business, culture, faith, identity, and virtue are the elements of legacy that we receive, develop, and then bequeath to others. The pains you experienced and the truths you stood for, fought for, worked for, waited for—all of this is the stuff of legacy.

The impoverished father who remembered to pray daily with his children at night leaves a legacy of faith. The single mother who denied herself comforts and pleasure so she could care for the life of a child has given a legacy of self-sacrifice. The business leader who arrived early at work each day to build a company leaves a legacy of hard work ethic.

Here is the heart of the matter: Your children are your life’s work. Legacy is not a job, or a credential, or a sum of money, but the totality of an individual’s effort on behalf of others. This totality finds its clearest expression in what you leave for your children. Receiving, building, and transferring a legacy to them is a principal objective of your life as you “love God and enjoy him forever.” Many may be influenced by the well-lived life of a single individual, but it is the children of that individual who are the immediate and principal life beneficiaries.

Throughout this book I will be returning to several distinct concepts, which converge—legacy, intentionality, and the redemptive ethic that holds them together. Legacy presupposes the desire of one generation of parents to transfer value to their blood and kin in the next generation in the form of tangible and intangible assets. In the context of this book, intentionality means the self-conscious act of purposeful living as it applies to a robust and multi-faceted vision for legacy. The redemptive ethic speaks to an optimistic culture of grace that holds the family together—for better or for worse, in sickness, and in health—in the bonds of love.

As you read, keep in mind three things. First, everything matters because everything was designed to matter. There are no areas of neutrality in your life when it comes to legacy. Second, there are no perfect families, perfect parents, or perfect legacies. There are imperfect, needy families who give up and despair, and there are imperfect, needy families who see beyond challenges and persevere. The single most important common denominator of these latter families is that they have experienced grace in their lives and communicate this grace through an ethic of redemption in the context of non-contingent relationships. Third, there is no crisis so great, nor tragedy too painful, where you are left hopeless and without the potential for redeeming a meaningful legacy. Rather than being an end to the story, broken marriages, absentee fathers, deaths of loved ones, financial ruin, moral failure, and every stripe of personal and familial tragedy are opportunities for grace, mercy, and rebirth.

One common legacy theme centers around people who make terrible mistakes and not only become heirs to a significant legacy, but also become ancestors of those who will inherit an even greater legacy in the future. They are not defined by class, gender, age, profession, intelligence, or financial position, but by faith and perseverance. Often these people are an embodiment of weakness and disappointment. Abraham cowers and sends his wife into a veritable brothel. David lusts, commits adultery, and murder. Solomon, the wisest man in the world, becomes so distracted by his numerous foreign wives that he goes through a season of idolatry. Jacob deceives his family. Noah, Lot, Samson—all are righteous men of faith who sinned. The list goes on. There is pain, there is tragedy, but there is also forgiveness, perseverance, and hope because there is grace. Ultimately, there is victory.

Before you read on, there are a few things you need to understand about me. First, I am not a preacher, and I am certainly not a theologian. I am a husband, a father, a son, and a businessman who takes my faith seriously. I don’t know how to divorce my Christian worldview from my perspective, and I would never want to. My faith informs my thinking in economics, finances, aesthetics, wealth management—everything. I recognize that Christians are some of the most inconsistent people on the planet. Ours is a multi-millennia old story of perseverance through generational victory and generational failure. Rather than being a testimony to the weakness of our faith, these strengths and weaknesses remind us of our need for humility and the impossibility of success apart from the grace of God. Our core thesis is redemption based on simple faith in the merits of Christ, who extends that grace to us.

Second, my thinking has certainly benefitted from the writings of many who do not share my own core commitments to Christianity. From Aristotle to Ludwig Von Mises, there is a wealth of economic and practical commentary that speaks to the question on the table. Where appropriate, I draw from the helpful work of these and other giants. But it is the essential message of the Cross that is the heart of the ethic presented in this book.

Third, I have personally been the recipient of much grace, much mercy, and much forgiveness. It is the praise and worship of a merciful Father that serves as the backdrop of both my hope and my ambitions on my own journey of intentionality. I was a prodigal who came home. In Chapter One, I explain how a loving father extended grace to me, opening the door for my own generational legacy. Decades later, I am discovering that the same grace and mercy extended to me as a young man is essential to me as an adult. The process of “coming home” is ongoing. Every new failure, like every new success, is part of an experience that has the potential of drawing us closer to our loved ones and furthering our legacy objectives—if we respond with intentionality.

Finally, I need to be clear that I am not an expert on the subject of intentionality or generational legacy. Frankly, I have never met one. Finding an expert on the subject is like looking for someone to share his personal experience of life after death. You can read about heaven and hell in the Bible. You can listen to people speculate, but until you get there, you’re not an expert. The same is true with building a generational legacy. One of the reasons for writing this book is the lack of experts in the field and my own desire to better learn from my own experiences and the experiences of others. My journey as a second-generation businessman and as a wealth management specialist is ongoing. I am, however, a passionate student of the subject and a would-be practitioner. As you read this book, please take what you find to be helpful, dispense with the rest, and dig deeper yourself.

A quick survey of books on wealth management reveals that much that has been written is aimed at the top 3 percent of income earners. There is a reason for that: wealth managers tend to handle larger financial portfolios. This is a book for the remaining 97 percent, as well as those in the 3 percent who wish to transcend the historic problem of shirtsleeves-to-shirt-sleeves in three to four generations, a problem that has defined wealth transfers for millennia.

The Intentional Legacy is for college students and grandparents, business owners and blue collar workers. Its principles of legacy and intentionality are not bound by income or social status; they are scalable, transcendent, and practical. They apply to families large and small, to third generational legacies, and families from broken homes—to anyone hoping to see the impact of one family generation extended to the next, and beyond.

In a small suburban community of Colorado, a six-year-old boy climbed on a table to give a speech. The subject was inflation. He was wearing a three-piece suit as he faced an audience of friends and family, unaware that six-year-old boys are not supposed to give speeches on economic theory. There were no notes, only a carefully memorized list of ideas and quotes learned from months of standing next to his father and listening to him give the very same speech.

I was that boy, and I still remember every word.

My first business trip with my father was at the age of three. By the time I was six years old, I had listened to my father give that same speech over and over to hundreds of people and dozens of groups. I knew his points line by line. He was my hero. His words, like his business, were gold to me.

It was a golden season of my life in which I traveled beside my father to mysterious and exotic locations of the world from South Africa to Israel, from England to the Bahamas.

My father was a man of business, strategy, and faith with a growing worldwide business of asset protection and wealth management. He started with a brokerage firm in Houston during the 1960s and later worked for a New York mutual funds manager before starting his own business with my mother in 1972.

What began as the International Collectors Associates sprouted the McAlvany Financial Group, which included an influential international newsletter and McAlvany Wealth Management. It is fair to say Dad ensured that I cut my teeth in the world of wealth management, learning about financial risk, its appraisal and mitigation, and value recognition. I stood next to him for hours on end as he sat with clients reviewing their goals and priorities, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to allocating assets and spending money.

One day, three decades and a lifetime later, I flew across the world to meet my father at a hotel in Shanghai, China. He was living in the Philippines, and my base was Durango, Colorado. Shanghai was a midway point between our two worlds. We told each other that we were getting together to discuss business, but that was just an excuse. The truth was, we wanted time together—time shared between two very busy lives separated by ocean and thousands of miles. Time to talk about hopes, dreams, love, and legacy. Once there, we ditched work and never left our hotel. That conversation, and others like it, have served as one element of the impetus for my theories on legacy.

Today, after running multiple businesses and raising four children, my father and mother serve as missionaries located near Manila. Dad is the director of the Asian Pacific Children’s Fund, dedicating his life to serving others. He teaches families how to grow crops and disciple their children. He helps them find redemption in the midst of brokenness and exploitation. It is a good season in the life of a man who does not believe in retirement. Still energetic. Still savvy. Physically stronger than in his younger days due to a rigorous weight-lifting regimen, he is adding a new role to his repertoire—that of elder statesman and sage. He passed the baton of leadership over his company to me just under a decade ago. Like the meeting in Shanghai, that transition is one part of the story behind this book. I am now in the business of helping families secure their legacy, even as I hope to be faithfully building a legacy on my father’s foundations.

But it almost never happened.

Six years after I put on that first three-piece suit, I found myself separated and estranged from my father. I was lost, hurting, and angry. By the age of thirteen, I was living apart from friends and family, under miserable daily conditions and up to my waist in pig slop—literally.

My life had become a metaphor for prodigality. It was not just that I was experiencing a crisis of implosion, but the generational legacy of my father was also at stake, including his ability to pass on the benefits of a lifetime of work and sacrifice. Just when things appeared as if they were about to hit rock bottom, I was given a gift—one of the most precious gifts an individual could ever hope to receive. My father forgave me, and I forgave him. It was an encounter with grace. We reconciled, and from that moment on, everything changed. My problems were far from solved, but I had new hope and a fresh start.

That event—to be detailed shortly—launched a lifetime journey through inquiry, success, failure, redemption, further inquiry, self-examination, loss, gain, more redemption, more failure, and even more redemption. It was the beginning of my search for the meaning of legacy—what it means spiritually, philosophically, economically, and practically. It was what opened the door for me to live with some fascinating families in the United States and South America, spend a season of philosophical studies at Oxford, and meet Mary-Catherine—the love of my life. It’s what led me to elope with her and start a family, foray into the world of one of the nation’s largest investment firms only to return to work beside my father, and ultimately, be given the responsibility of CEO for the companies he had founded more than a quarter of a century before.

My moment of crisis resulted in a conversation on life and legacy between my father and me that has continued for nearly three decades and overlaps our personal and professional lives. It has brought me to the conclusion that great succession plans require great acts of love, great demonstrations of redemption, and great conversations in the context of an intentional vision for family legacy.

Here is an experiment. Walk into any diner in America, sit down with any random group of people in their fifties, sixties, or seventies, and ask them about their fathers. It doesn’t matter where you live; it’s a subject almost guaranteed to elicit a response. They loved their fathers or hated their fathers. Their father taught them about the world, invested in their lives, and loved them. Or their father abandoned them, betrayed them, and disappointed them. I know of men and women in their eighties who remember their fathers with such tenderness they can’t even speak of them without shedding a tear, and I know others who still physically recoil at the mention of their dads. Decades can pass. A half-century. It doesn’t matter. No one is neutral when it comes to his or her father.

Why does the subject of fatherhood inspire and motivate? Why does it bewilder or infuriate? The first part of the answer goes to the essence of our humanity—we have been created as relational beings and placed in the context of families where our relationship with our fathers and mothers shape and define our identities as sons and daughters. It is at this precise point—the issue of identity—where the modern world finds itself in such turmoil. Historically, issues of gender, heritage, labor, faith, and culture have shaped our identity. And the core questions never change: Who am I? Where did I come from? Does my past matter? What do I believe about God, government, and society? What does it mean to be a man? A woman? How will I provide for myself? Where do I fit in society? What do I enjoy? What do I dislike? What am I willing to die for?

Historically, these and other fundamental questions of identity were answered less in a didactic manner and more through the daily rituals of family life under the leadership examples of fathers and through the nurturing and grace of mothers. Family and national history gave context to the individual. Family faith rooted the individual as a member of a household, which embraced values that were transcendent.

Even more fundamental to the question of identity than our biological or adoptive parents is the fatherhood of God. God is not only our Creator; He is also our Father. Furthermore, God is a Father who loved His son. God relates to us as a Heavenly Father. We communicate to Him as a Father—“Our Father, who art in Heaven.” God has designed earthly fathers, with all of their brokenness and imperfections, to model a defining relationship of strength, courage, compassion, tenderness, and grace. The fact that we carry the very image of God our Father shapes and defines our identity. An Eternal Father who loves us, created us in the Imago Dei, and calls us His children. His fatherhood is not merely a metaphysical reality; it is intensely personal. He asks us to call Him Father and to relate to Him as such. He cares for us, loves us, nurtures us, disciplines us, and communicates to us as a father. And we are designed to have a relationship with Him, which is not only spiritual, but also temporal and practical, finding expression in a life dedicated to “doing the will of the Father.” Consequently, fatherhood speaks to a relationship that is fundamental to the order of creation and the humanity of men and women.

The family is an incubator, not just for our own identity, but also for our view of reality. Our understanding of masculinity and femininity, ethics, and the permanency of relationships is all birthed in the family. Children implicitly look to their fathers to model principles of leadership and represent the ideals and heritage of the family. Sons look to their fathers to model masculinity, but so do daughters. Their view of men is often shaped by the respect and dignity (or lack thereof) conferred on them as women by a father. A wise father will reinforce his daughter’s sense of self-worth. He will model for her a sacrificial masculinity that shapes her perspective on her innate dignity as a woman. Take either father or mother out of the equation, and the gap must somehow be filled.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that a disturbance in the relationship between God the Father and His children can be destructive. There even appears to be a causal connection between fatherhood and faith. Paul Vitz makes this point in his helpful psychological study, Faith of the Fatherless.³ He argues that the link between atheism and fatherlessness is not mere coincidence.

Besides abuse, rejection, or cowardice, one way in which a father can be seriously defective is simply by not being there. Many children, of course, interpret death of their father as a kind of betrayal or an act of desertion. In this respect it is remarkable that the pattern of a dead father is so common in the lives of many prominent atheists. Baron d’Holbach, the French rationalist and probably the first public atheist, is apparently an orphan by the age of thirteen and living with his uncle. Bertrand Russell’s father died when young Bertrand was four years old; Nietzsche was the same age as Russell when he lost his father; Sartre’s father died before Sartre was born and Camus was a year old when he lost his father … the information already available is substantial; it is unlikely to be an accident.

Of all the joys to be experienced in the life of a son, few can ever top the experience of one-on-one time when a boy is really involved in his father’s business—traveling with him, learning from him, and experiencing the ineffable and mysterious wonder of being his confidante and partner in an important quest.

If you have never met my father, Donald McAlvany, then you have missed out on one of the most intense, passionate, opinionated, well-researched, idiosyncratic, humorously paranoid, compassionate, hardworking, and humble men of the last generation. Dad would be the first to deflect praise and tell you he is a man with all the problems of imperfect men living in an imperfect world. All true. Three decades ago, I would have catalogued many of those shortcomings for you, but now I see them and him in a different light. I see them through the grid of humanity and redemption—both his and mine.

My father’s own path was not an easy one. Abandoned by his own dad at the age of six, he grew up without a father. What little he knew of a father-and-son relationship was not positive—absence more than presence, philandering, hardship. Hope springs eternal, especially when the object of that hope is the one thing you have so desperately wanted during the most formative season of your life. In the case of my father, the “hope deferred” made “his heart sick.” There would be no restored relationship and no meaningful redemption between father and son. Dad would simply have to live with the reality of unresolved anger and sadness. It was a heavy burden for him to carry—one he shouldered well into his sixties.

How do you explain fatherhood to a man who has never experienced it? That is not an easy sell, especially when all he knows is abandonment. But God works in mysterious ways. In the case of my father, he discovered the love of an Eternal Father one day on the Guadalupe River in Texas.

On that day, my father was tubing down the river with some friends when he floated by an attractive woman. The two struck up a conversation—probably not the conversation Dad was expecting. She wanted to know if he understood that God had a plan for his life. Keep in mind that I was not there for this life-changing event, but my guess is that Dad may have been thinking to himself, “Yes, there is a plan, and you’re part of it.” That is not how the story played out. Within thirty minutes, she explained to him the Gospel, including the story of man’s alienation from God because of sin and the hope of redemption because the Son of God took the sins of man on Himself. And she introduced him to an idea completely foreign to him—he, Don McAlvany, was loved by a Father.

The girl from the Guadalupe invited him to a Bible study. He decided to go. It was a new world for my father who began in-depth studies of Scripture. He saw the world through new glasses. Dad became a Christian. One of the first tests of his faith was through the loss of his mentor. Just a few months after their meeting on the Guadalupe, the young woman died in a tragic head-on collision.

Where does legacy come from? Part of mine traces back to a girl on an inner tube that cared about the soul of my father. From that season on, Dad developed a new perspective on the past and the future. He had an intense confidence in the authority of the Bible and its application to all of life.

All of this played out in my childhood. Early in my life, my father raised questions that repeatedly pointed me to the intersection of economics, philosophy, and faith. He taught me to love our country, but to distrust politicians and bureaucrats. He brought me to conferences on subjects as diverse as Austrian economic theory and biblical eschatology.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but he was giving me tools for a lifetime of inquiry about value and virtue, sacrifice and hard work, failure and redemption. That is how my life began. Then something changed.

A transition occurred in my own life between the ages of eight and eleven. The little boy who had stood on the table reciting his father’s speech was maturing. So was Dad’s business. With a growing company and significant international responsibilities, Dad was on the road more and more. Mom ran the household like a single parent, filling the voids created by Dad’s travel and business endeavors. My own studies prevented me from the flexibilities of travel we had experienced together when I was a bit younger. By the time I was eight, there was both the expectation and need for a level of relational involvement and intimacy that simply could not happen with Dad away on the road building his business. An unmistakable void emerged. His work schedule changed, and so did our relationship. It came at the time when I needed his influence the most.

It all makes sense intellectually. Dad’s response to the pressure of business success was certainly not uncommon. But none of that matters to a boy. At the end of the day, even with his mom’s wholehearted effort, he just wants his father. And if his father is not there to the degree the boy feels is right, resentment seeps in.

It is nearly impossible for a ten-year-old to understand the pressure in the life of a father, but it is equally difficult for a father to peer into the heart of a ten-year-old and fully understand his need for affirmation and instruction. Confusion runs deep. I found myself growing resentful. There was just one too many missed hockey games.

Legacies, like confidence, can be lost through inattention. It is possible for parents to spend a lifetime creating wealth for children, only to see the currency of their life’s work devalued because they have lost the hearts of their children. This rarely happens from a single moment in the life of a parent and child. Disaffection is usually the result of a continuum of unattended disappointments that lead to broken relationships. It is all too common. One of the great challenges facing modern fathers is that just about the time their business is gathering steam, and work needs special attention, their children reach an age where they too need more.

In the absence of one authority figure, children look for something else to fill the void—peers, entertainment, something. In my case, it was another very special man, my maternal grandfather. While Dad was preoccupied with business, my mother’s father became a special hero in my life. Ellis Augustus Brown was his name—as southern as his style. To me he was Dee Dee. Looking back, I realize that he was the kind of man who set the legacies of others in motion. Dee Dee was a mentor to many. A man’s man. He lived in Louisiana where he was a member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame and a highly respected high school principal. He also had carved out a successful career as a twelve-time state champion football coach.

A small return in the life of a child can yield exponential results. Without attempting to quantify value, or even understand it, a child has the capacity to receive and benefit from input at levels uncommon in adults. Compared to adults, the learning curves of children are typically off the charts. The memories, experiences, and impressions of childhood often carry forward into adult life shaping the collective consciousness of the individual. A child spends one day with his grandfather fishing. They barely talk. They just sit and fish. Grandpa cuts the bait. The child casts the rod. They wait. They look at each other. Still, no talking. There is a nibble. The child reels it in. The fish escapes. It does not matter. For the rest of his life, that moment in time is preserved as the experiential definition of happiness. A quarter of a century later, and the boy is now a man who knows that when life is full of lemons, somewhere out there, a lake is calling him back to a moment of innocence and peace. He can never quite replicate the moment with Grandpa, but he is going to try.

Maybe I was with Dee Dee at his home six times. That’s it. But they were the right times and the right places. His impact was simply monumental. To me he represented goals, aspirations, and the meaning of being a man.

My own tipping point occurred at age eleven when my hero died. The pain from the loss was excruciating. In the context of my growing disappointments at home, the death of my grandfather was the last emotional and mental straw in a series of disenchanting events. It is nearly impossible for an aching soul to properly interpret the meaning of tragedy when you are under the thumb of grief. My takeaway was this—God does not hear my prayers. God does not care. My hero is dead. My father was preoccupied with the grief of my mother. I felt lost in the equation. And I expressed my pain through anger.

Over the course of the next three years, my despair brought me to a point of rebellion and loss of dreams. I interpreted my own reality to myself and to others in the language of hyperbole. And I became an angry teenager. What I did not understand at the time was that I was falling into a generational legacy pit—a downward cycle of destructive experiences and responses to those experiences, perpetuated from one generation to the next. My feelings of loss and disorientation without the knowledge of how to resolve them created a solipsistic world of selfish frustration and anger.

It is a terrible thing for a child to experience the tragedy of abandonment at the hands of a parent. It is even worse when that loss remains unresolved over the course of a lifetime. Dad had suffered greatly at the hands of a father who abandoned him as a six-year-old child, leaving him with unresolved emotional scars he carried with him through much of his life. In their own way, my feelings of disappointment paralleled similar feelings my father had experienced as a young man. Of course, my situation was drastically different. Dad was a God-fearing man who loved me. In spite of the absence of a male role model in his own life as a boy, my father had been a profound influence in my life. But from my vantage point at the time, memories of his influence on my early life were just not enough.

It is not uncommon to meet children who decide they are sick of their parents’ authority and want a break. Their solution? Escape from Mom and Dad to join the military. I took a slightly different route. Just shy of my fourteenth birthday, I ran away from home.

Enough was enough. It was time for some freedom. I had allowed tensions to build, and the precipitating event occurred over something painfully typical and irrelevant; my mom told me not to lock the door to my bedroom. It turned into quite a standoff. “Fine then. If I can’t control my own room, I will leave.” My father and mother were not about to tell me what to do with my life. I was fourteen, self-sufficient, the master of my future. Hear me roar.

My plan was brilliant—grab a backpack, stuff it with a little clothing, get on my bike, and take off into the sunset. Who needs parents after all?! My journey of independence took me approximately one mile. It started to snow. It seemed to be a good idea to take refuge at a friend’s house. Step two of my carefully executed escape plan involved moving in with my friend’s family and telling them that I was running away from home to start a new life. News got back to my parents, but they did not stop me. They did not bring me home. A bit surprising, but fine with me. A week or two went by.

Life had changed, but I wasn’t going to let that get in the way of things I loved. Hockey, a field of battle where raw aggression and speed converge, was an escape for me. My mom knew that and had compassion on me. She decided to bring my practice gear and meet me at the rink.

Time gives perspective. Today I am a parent—a vantage point that makes it a bit painful looking back on those days. I can picture how Mom selflessly minimized the pain I was causing her to help rebuild a relationship. I can close my eyes and see the look on her face. My wonderful mom, she who was ever conciliatory, ever hopeful. Probably deeply afraid that she was going to lose her son. Her willingness to endure was a means of grace in my life, though I did not understand it at the time.

The day that Mom came to the rink, I took a puck to my knee and was completely immobilized. The puck not only left a dent in my body, but also in my long-term personal exit strategy. It is hard to escape when you can’t walk. What was I to do now? Not sure.

Back at my friend’s house, I was settling in and nursing an injured knee. Then the world turned upside down.

A car pulled into the driveway. There was my dad. Beside him was a family friend who was an agent for the DEA—The Drug Enforcement Administration! With them was a police officer. In my absence from home, Dad had been doing some math. He added up the wild friends I was hanging out with, plus my own destructive temper and attitude, and reached the conclusion that I was up to my neck in drugs and rebellion. That was only half right—the rebellion part. During my brief absence, my parents were trying to process the unfolding events in their minds. Dad had reached a conclusion: the only reason anyone would behave like this was if they had a core problem with drug abuse. That was it. David must be a junkie. It wasn’t true, but it was the only box my dad knew to check at the time. So he called the police for a bit of assistance, which was probably more of a show of force.

I was absolutely terrified and shocked at my parents’ response. In that moment, every expletive of panic and fear rushed through my mind. What was happening? How is this even possible? Police? Really? My heart was pounding through my chest. My mind was exploding with confusion. Eventually, the police officer left. Shortly after his departure, I found myself in a car with Dad and the DEA agent. Destination unknown. Hours later I found myself in a drug rehabilitation center in Houston, Texas. My little exercise in self-emancipation had turned into a living nightmare.

At the drug rehabilitation facility, I sat through classes, meetings, and examinations. It was my first real glimpse into a world of people hurting far more than I was—young men and women with personal stories that should have been the equivalent of neon signs reminding me just how much God had given me for which I should be thankful. That realization would not come for some time.

The team of psychiatrists and doctors quickly figured out that my problem was not drugs. Telling me what I already knew provided little relief, but it was better than nothing. At last I finished the program. About forty days after walking through the front door, I emerged—more defiant, more anxious, and more alienated from my father. Meanwhile, it became clear that my mother was suffering greatly through the entire process. She just did not know what to do.

The next big test was before me. I had made it through drug rehab. Great. Now it was up to me whether or not I would play by the rules and re-enter family society. So while I was still in Houston, Dad presented me with a document, approximately the length of one of his newsletters. Before me was a lengthy list of requirements, my acceptance of which was a precondition for returning home. Was this a test? Was he serious? I refused to sign it.

Apparently Dad was serious because he brought another friend with him to Houston to meet me—one who appeared to me a giant of a man obviously selected as an enforcer. In Dad’s hand was an airline ticket with my name on it. The two men escorted me to the airport where I was to board a plane bound for Arkansas.

If Dad was serious, then so was I—about escape. The plan was simple—make it through security, run for my life, and then head for my own “city of refuge,” a corner of Houston a friend had told me about during my time at the drug rehab facility. It was a bold plan, except for two things: 1.) The city of refuge was actually one of the most depraved and dangerous locations in all of Houston, and 2.) The idea of escaping by running at breakneck speed through an airport was ill-conceived, to put it mildly.

At the Houston airport I played it cool, waiting for the moment of escape. Then it came. Ready! Set! Go! I was off and flying, rocketing through the airport, hurdling over obstacles, and sliding down stairwells with an Olympic resolve. The mad dash to freedom appeared to be working …

Then it happened. With escape clearly in sight, my body met a door that simply refused to open. And that was that—flat on my face and essentially down for the count. There would be no escape. Dad’s friend scooped me up and escorted me to the plane.

That moment in my life—sort of a Steve McQueen failed motorcycle escape meets Mr. Toad’s wild ride—is now a humorous bookmark in a chapter of a larger story I am passing on to my children. Whenever we pass through the Houston airport I point out to my children “the very spot” where I made the crazed run—hallways, hurdles—the whole shebang. It has become a “teaching opportunity” and part of our family lore.

Crisis tests everyone. Sometimes when parents are desperate for answers, they are willing to entertain ideas previously beyond the scope of their normalcy threshold. They are looking for someone or something that will provide a solution—even if the path to get there is extreme.

So I arrived at Glenhaven, a special facility for troubled youth, which felt to me like The Island of Lost Souls. There I would spend the next ten miserable months of my life. The stated purpose of Glenhaven was to “redeem at-risk youth from a broken past.” At the time, the operation was under the care of a Christian couple who sought to provide an environment of discipline and order for a vast array of young men and women coming from checkered pasts ranging from drug addiction to violence. My class included several hard-core alcoholics, some drug abusers, and a boy who had been given the choice of Glenhaven or jail after beating his father senseless with a bat.