Random Act of Heroism

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever the cost.”

—Arthur Ashe

“Heroes aren’t heroes because they worship the light, but because they know the darkness all too well to stand down and live with it.”

—Ninya Tippett

I don’t live an “exciting” life of glitz and glamour or heart-pumping adrenaline adventures, but that doesn’t mean that exciting events don’t follow me.

Like the time when I was a young missionary and my companion and I saved a drunk man who had passed out while peeing on a wall and hit his head on the curb and started bleeding from his ear. Or the time where my wife and I helped to rescue a young couple and their baby from their wrecked car after it had flipped across the highway medium and into our lane.

It’s been a number of years since such an event has found me. After rescuing the couple from their flipped car I’ve gone on to live a quiet life. As quiet of one as a person can have with three kids and only a three-year age gap between them.

My style of excitement these days includes board game nights or playing cards after a good Sunday lunch. I love road trips, like visiting the Indianapolis Children’s Museum or touring the Ark Encounter in northern Kentucky on our way to visiting Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I like spending my days on the beach eating sandwiches or hotdogs with just enough sandy grit in them to not ruin the test as I watch the kids splash around in Lake Michigan. For some this may be a boring life. For me it couldn’t get better.

My quiet, tranquil, “routine” life was disrupted recently. Like any week day at 4:30 in the afternoon, I jumped in our van, turned the radio up and started to head out to pick up my wife from work. Pulling up to the first stop sign on my route I noticed them: two little children walking around in front of the elementary school. Neither child, a boy and a girl, could have been more than 3-years-old. At best. Slowly I pulled into the street in front of the school, heading away. I watched them in my side mirror. A man on his phone started walking up behind them.

Maybe they’re his and they just got ahead of him, I thought. Maybe he’s their dad and they decided it was time to go home.

No matter how my head tried to rationalize the situation, my heart told me differently. I watched as the man, whose gaze never left his phone, turn and go in the opposite direction of the children.

That’s when I did a U-ey.

I rolled my window down as I approached them.

“I want my mommy!” The little girl’s tear-filled screams rolled in through the passenger’s side. “I want my mommy!”

I unbuckled myself and hoped out, leaving the van running and the door wide open. In another second I was beside her, kneeling.

“It’s going to be OK, honey,” I said reaching out to her. “Where’s your mommy?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the little boy walking over to us.

“Where’s mommy?”

“I don’t know!” she wailed.

“OK,” I said, rubbing her shoulder. “Where is daddy?”

At that moment the little boy had gone out of my peripheral and nose-to-nose with me.

“Daddy left,” he said. “He got in car and left.”

An image came to my mind of a man getting up from the couch, grabbing his car keys and heading out the door. He doesn’t even look back as the screen closes. He opens his car door, slides in and turns on the ignition. In another second he backs out of the driveway and heads off, not looking back even once.

As I squat next to the little boy and the little girl another car pulls up. A woman gets out. I think she is a school teacher from the looks of her. She is wearing a polo shirt with a purple and gold “SH” on it, the school district’s colors and initials.

“Are you their dad?” she asks me.

“No, I’m not. I found them wandering out in front of the school.”

“Have you called the police yet?”

“No,” I shout back. “I don’t have my phone.”

“OK. I’ll call them.”

I start to feel better. Now I have help, and that help has now called in the calvary. Only problem is the calvary is downtown in the middle of an active shooter situation on the pier.

What a day!

The little girl, whose name I never did learn calms down complete and starts to laugh and smile with me. Her brother’s name, the little boy, is Tommy, and he likes rocks. He showed me the ones he’d picked from the playground while out hunting for daddy. Both of them are dirty, and must have dressed themselves. Tommy’s shorts are on backwards and falling down due to the rocks, revealing baby butt crack to the world.

The school teacher eventually comes over to us. After her comes my neighbor’s daughter. My twins go to school with her son. She is followed by another neighbor who suggests we take a picture of the kids and post in on Facebook to find out if someone knows them. More neighbors from our street and the next street over continue to come, and eventually we have a mini block party going on. I tell the story of how I found the kids nearly a dozen times. How mommy—as I later found out—is at “the flower shop” and that daddy took off in a white car.

Eventually one woman recognizes them. They are her neighbor’s children, and she works at the flower store downtown, not too far from where the other madness is happening. As she gathers them up a tan, four door sedan stops in the middle of the road. A woman hops out, balling. It’s Mom and she had no idea her babies had even gotten out of the house. She grabs both of them. She kisses them from head to toe, sobbing all the while. Her neighbor points to me, “This man found them in front of the school and didn’t leave them.”

The mother thanks me. All I can say is your welcome. She finishes putting the kids in the car, and slowly the crowd begins to disperse. That’s when the police officer shows up. I fill him in on what happened, how I found the kids and the overall happy resolution. He smiles, tells me usually this kind of thing happens at the beach all the time. A child wanders off and is later found with a different family member. I tell him that this is a little different, that these two went looking for the adult family member that wandered off. He nods. “I wouldn’t want to be Dad when he gets home,” he says. I agree.

I’m the last one to leave. I still need to pick up my wife, but as I close the door I start to breakdown. A rush of emotions gang up on me: relief that the kids are alright; anger at the carelessness and selfishness of the father to leave his babies; disbelief that something can’t be done for the daddy’s negligence; gratefulness to my Heavenly Father for listening to the promptings of his Holy Spirit; and sense of love full of bias for my own children.

I don’t consider myself a hero. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I listened to that inner voice to pay attention and turn around.

I’d like to think that someone would do the same if they were in my position. I guess that makes me an optimist. We tend to believe that there are more good people in this world than evil, and maybe not “evil” in terms of tyrants and murders and the like, but careless, self-absorb types.

I learned a lot that day. I learned that the small things can make a huge difference. Just being a reassuring presence in a child’s moment of crisis helps relieve the feeling of being abandoned by a parent. How going against the routine and doing the right thing helps a mother hug her babies once more.

I learned there are many types of heroes and ways in which people are heroic. There are the big scenes, like the police officer being with his fellow officers while a man holds an entire pier hostage. He’s there protecting the other beachgoers, ensuring nothing happens to them. There are the types like my buddy John, a volunteer fire fighter. He answers calls all throughout the day and night. He’s responded to everything from house fires to car accidents, from cutting up blown over trees blocking the road to guarding a down power line until the utility company arrives so no one gets electrocuted. And then there are smaller acts. Like sitting with a sick parent during the last week of their life. Bringing a warm meal to a family recovering from COVID or surgery. Some of the bravest people I know are the ones that pick up the phone every week to check in on a loved one or a member of their church or their friend to make sure their week is going well.

I find it comforting that these people exist. The world is in such a place right now where we need more of them. They are outnumbered, but it doesn’t matter. The act when needed not because of the reward or the fame, if there is any, but because they know that if they don’t there, most likely, won’t be someone else that will. They try to chase away the darkness, even for a little bit, so that there can be a glimmer of light.