Part 1: Tadpole Hunters -- Friends for Life

Hello, this is Dick Boath and I'd like to welcome you to known stories to make sense of it all. And these stories are found in walking books. That is real-life people in different places, of different ages, in different cultures. We want to have these kind of conversations across disciplines and generations and cultures in order to encourage a kind of knowing that gives us fresh lenses through which to see the world. One of these lenses will be that of scripture and in particular, Jesus of Nazareth, whose life changed the course of human history. We're so glad you're here. Thanks for listening yet. So here we are. Our very first podcast for known stories that make sense of it all. The question is where do we start? Ruth and I have batted that around a bit and we decided that a good place to start would be by reading the first few pages of our book by the same title because it kind of frames the dialogue and conversations going forward. The book is known finding deep friendships in a shallow world and I'm just going to read a few pages and we will have further conversation after that. I'll be back to you in a few minutes. Here we go. Introduction. What really matters? Words are easy like the wind. Faithful friends are hard to find. William Shakespeare from the passionate pilgrim. The question I asked the university student was casual. What's a word that you'd use to describe your generation? He said overwhelmed. I said, what do you mean? Would he overwhelmed by? When I heard overwhelmed, I saw my parents born in 1910 and 1913 respectively who lived through World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1917 and 18, great depression of the 1930s, and World War II. Information, he said, my generation is overwhelmed by information. When he said information, two facts I had recently seen popped into my head. Children born in the 1990s belong to the first generation in the history of the world that do not have to go to an authority figure for information. And we'll be able to access more new information that will be generated this year than in the previous 5,000 years combined. But you're so connected to each other, I continue. He said, oh yes, I'm connected to several dozen people through Facebook and Twitter. I just don't know how to start at conversation. His words jared me. For me, face-to-face conversation is the stuff of life. My thoughts zip to Penn station in New York City 10 years earlier. Ruth and I were sitting in a hole in the wall pizza hut waiting for our train to Washington DC. An older woman approached our table and asked if she could join us because seating was scarce. Absolutely we said. As we talked, she told us of graduating from a major Midwestern university as a young woman and going to work for hallmark in her creative department. She roasted the executive ranks in marketing where she spent the rest of her career and from which she retired. When we asked, what brought you to New York? She said that she'd been talked into coming out of retirement two years earlier to join the marketing department of a large New York company. When I asked, what's the biggest difference in the workplace now for you? She replied, it bothers me when a young person sends me an email on a subject while sitting five feet away in the next cubicle. Well, why does that matter? I asked. It's efficient. She got quiet for a moment and looked straight at us and said, I miss the face-to-face, the eye contact. Eye contact makes us human. I doubt that she had read the work of a Tsushi Senju, a cognitive neuroscientist who says a Richard mode of communication is possible right after making eye contact. It amplifies your ability to compute all the signals so you're able to read the other person's brain. The older woman wasn't making a scientific statement. She was making a visceral statement. Just like my young university friend, when the young man said overwhelmed and I don't know how to start a conversation, it was a Penn station echo. Intrigued, I listened and he schooled me. He had good reason to feel overwhelmed. Come to think of it, I feel that way myself half the time. The Niagara of information we have access to can drown us. How we keep up, sort through, choose and prioritize can paralyze us. Instant access has changed everything. Education, sports, business, politics, and of course, shopping. Still nothing has changed more than the way we talk to each other. Communication is the name of the game. Our brains are exhibit one. A communication marvel. The brain automatically sends and receives millions of messages a day throughout our bodies. Person to person communication, on the other hand, takes intent. Every arena of life, business, sports, medicine, education, the military and families to name a few, work only as well as we communicate. Why? Because great communication creates a relationship and relationship drives our whole lives. At stake in this new reality where we have keyboard control over what we wish others to know about us is the depth of relationships we want to build. We have all kinds of relationships, but apart from family, none is more meaningful than a friendship. Friendship by definition is unique. It's about investment and vulnerability. So trying to make a friend at light speed is brutal. On the internet, I can give you information, but it's hard to give you me. That process does not happen at the tap of a key. How then do relationships get started? What nurtures them? When God says it is not good that man should be alone, we know he's not kidding because we know alone. How do we get beyond that reality? What do we need to understand to create any kind of connection, let alone a friendship? Lance with us for a moment in the rearview mirror. How do kids make friends? When we are young, we develop friendships on the fly. Mostly they come from play. When I was young, I lived to play. Looking back, play set the stage for my first friendship. My parents moved from Oakland, California to South India when I was three years old. The next five years framed how I see the world to this day, but the year we returned to the states framed how I see friendship. We came to Springfield, Missouri in the summer of 1950. The Blue Mountains of Southwest India were as different from the Ozark Mountains of Southwest as Curried Chicken was from Biscuits and Gravy. It was there that I got my first bike, a bright red twin. That bike became my ticket to a world. A royal crowned colas and Eskimo pies saturated in Ozark accents and open door hospitality. Those were good times. And John David made them better. John David lived three doors up from us on Williams Street on the north edge of Springfield, born within two months of each other in the spring of 1942. He and I had chemistry. Whatever that means, we had it. We were Marco Polos on bikes, racing through the nearby local zoo and county fairgrounds, ranging out when time and parents allowed to doling park in the James River. We only lived in Springfield one year, but that year was filled with fishing and hiking and spelunking through caves. The days were riddled with BB gun wars, wrestling matches and games of every kind. The greater the challenge meant the greater the fun. When we explored Doling Park Lake that spring, we found the tepid water at the lake's edge to be a perfect hatching site for tadpoles, hundreds of tadpoles, huge tadpoles, tadpoles with oversized heads and sweeping tails, and we became hunters. They became the hunted. Armed with folders, coffee cans nailed to scrap furring strips, we captured a bunch of those denizens of the shallows. We took them back to the unfinished concrete basement of the foothouse, put them in a galvanized wash tub. I don't remember what we fed them or how many survived the trauma. All I remember is being amazed when tails fell off and legs grew. In a few weeks on a humid June night, the full-throated baritone songs of their cousins back at the lake filled the darkness, and we knew that something wondrous had happened. Looking back on that year, another wondrous thing had happened. I had made a friend, my very first real friend. A friend to talk to and play with, a friend to fight and dream with, a friend with whom I could more often grow, a friend for the adventure, call life. We left Springfield for Oakland, California in August of 1951. John David and I would connect every so often over the next decades, but it would be more than 40 years before we lived near each other again. Then it would be in Washington, D.C. By that time, John David Ashcroft had served twice as Attorney General of Missouri, twice as Governor, one term as Senator, and during our years in D.C. would become the 79th Attorney General of the United States. Relationships come and go. Some are for a season, others just for a moment, but some are for a lifetime. At this writing, John David and I have been friends for over 65 years. So that's how it started with John David and me. 67 years is a long time to be friends. Fortunately, we still are. And when we come back on our next podcast, I'd like you to meet John David. He is quite a person, done a lot of things, very conceptual. There's a lot of great ideas, deep faith, and strong convictions. So tune in next time, and I think you'll find it a hoot. God bless. Bye-bye.