Thanks, Dad. Thanks for making me feel like I’m still thirteen.

“Worry is counterproductive.”

Thanks, Pastor. Thanks for making me realize that I’m a failure.

He made a fist with one hand and squeezed it as hard as he could as his other hand concealed it.

I’m so weak.

Women were the stronger ones. Why else would God choose them to carry children inside them for nine months? Guys would break down and go ballistic. Guys just couldn’t handle the pressure.

He sighed.

It’s so hard surrendering, God.

During the closing prayer, Kevin silently uttered his own. It was simple but sincere. It felt strange and a bit awkward to be knocking at the door of someone he hadn’t visited for a long time.

“Help me, God. Help us. Help this—all of this. Just please help.”

He believed that God heard him. But it was so hard to believe more than that.

Kevin knew that he could work extremely hard and do every single thing he could think of to make his business work. But it still might not.

The same applied to this.

He could pray without ceasing but still it was up to God. All he had to do now was to simply let go and believe.

But you haven’t sweated a single solitary drop for your faith in a long time, have you, Kev? So what makes you think you have any right for those prayers to be heard?

As the benediction played and the congregation began to file out of church, Kevin knew he was terrified.

He’d spent so long working so hard. Yet he was beginning to realize that he’d been working for one person: himself.

Family Portrait

“This kid is going to love this. He’s going to be blown away.”

Kevin held the autographed Chicago Bulls jersey in his hands. Ray had come through big-time.

“I probably should do something noble like you with that Christmas tree program you’re doing,” Ray said as he opened a couple of beers and handed one to Kevin. In Ray’s world, it was about who you knew and how much you spent on them.

“Angel Tree.”

“Yeah, sure.”

As he followed Ray downstairs into the basement game room with its flat-screen television, Kevin figured his friend would probably forget what kind of tree it was. Ray didn’t have time or energy for details like that. He did, however, have time to focus on his Clemson Tigers or his golf game, which was easier to do now that he lived on a golf course. Or maybe the million-dollar mansion his family lived in.

It was a world that Kevin had always hoped to step into one day.

A world that suddenly feels empty and hollow.

Sipping his beer as he sat on maybe the most comfortable love seat ever—something he noted every time his rear touched the luxurious leather—Kevin thought about that wonderful myth, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” It was a myth and everybody knew it, even those with the toys. It wasn’t about dying with the most toys. It was about living and playing with them day after day after day.