The Tank Man's Son (33 page)

A
S AN ORPHANAGE
director in Cambodia, speaking at churches back in the States was part of my job description. It was a good way to raise funds for everything the orphans needed, from job training to English classes to hot meals to hospital and funeral services. I never needed notes: after living side by side with the staff and kids for years, I had seen God do so many amazing things that I could fill an entire book. I would simply speak from my heart, telling the congregation first about my own childhood and then about the orphanage.

Telling my story with Dad in the audience was never part of the plan.

When it came to choosing churches, I avoided my old neighborhood. Speaking to strangers in Ohio or North Carolina, I could almost pretend I was talking about someone else, but I knew that wouldn’t be possible if I ever spoke near where I’d grown up.

Yet on one fund-raising trip to the States, for some unfathomable reason, I felt compelled to call a church that had been started a few years
earlier just down the road from Blakely Drive. When I told the pastor over the phone about what God had done in my life, he agreed to let me speak. And then he asked, “Why don’t you invite your dad to the service?”

Sure, why not?
Dad and Ann lived nearby, and he had never heard me speak at a church before. This time I would simply stick to stories about what God had done in Cambodia. There was no need to bring my childhood into the picture.

As soon as I hung up with the pastor, I dialed my father’s number. “Hey, Dad, I’m going to be speaking about Cambodia at a church near you. Would you like to come?”

“Sure, Son. Which church?”

Two days after I invited Dad to the service, the pastor called me back. “Mark, I know you said you would speak about Cambodia. And that’s great! But Mark, I believe God wants you to share your
testimony
at that service.”

My heart sank. I knew exactly what he meant by that word.
Testimony.
The things I had witnessed. My story. My
entire
story.

“Mark? Mark, are you there?”

“How can I do that?” I managed. “My
dad
is going to be there.”

“I really believe that’s what God wants you to do, Mark. There’s a reason for this.”

“I don’t know,” I said, stalling. “I already invited my father to the service, and he said he was looking forward to hearing me speak. I can’t undo that, can I?”

“Don’t undo anything
 
—just have him come like you’ve already planned, and then plan on sharing your testimony.”

I hung up the phone with a shaking hand.
How am I going to get myself out of
this
mess?
I was trapped. The pastor’s words continued to race through my mind. There was simply no way I could describe my childhood with my father in the same room. And there was no way I
could share my testimony without describing my childhood. Hardest of all, something in my heart told me the pastor was right: I
did
need to share the whole story.

I tried to look on the bright side. Maybe I would get violently sick on Sunday morning.

The next few days were agony. I searched every corner of my brain for a way to uninvite Dad, but every idea was worse than the last. Finally, desperate for help, I reached out to a friend.

“Why don’t you call your dad?”

That thought had never occurred to me. I screwed up my courage and dialed Dad’s number.

“Dad, the service you’re coming to . . . well, I was going to talk all about Cambodia. Look, I don’t really know how to say this, but the pastor wants me to share my life story at that service.”

There was a pause on the other end. I took a breath and kept talking. “I would never do it to make you look bad
 
—I just want to tell people what God has done. But I won’t do it without your permission.”

The pause stretched.

“That’s okay, Son. Go ahead. You can do it.”

I was scarcely able to believe his words. Never in my memory had my father put himself in my hands. I had always been the one who was powerless, but now he had chosen to turn the tables.

I knew it was largely a testament to Ann. She had kept me posted on how Dad was doing over the years, since he wasn’t one to speak much about himself anymore. The shape of their relationship had surprised both of them, from start to finish. One time she recalled, with equal parts surprise and laughter in her voice, one of their first dates, just after Dad emerged from his mother’s basement.

“I pointed out a full moon to him, Mark, rising above the trees, and he stared at it for a minute. And do you know what he said?”

“I could probably guess,” I joked.

“He said, ‘Yep, that’s a great bomber’s moon for sure!’”

Dad had always spent whatever money he had. Whether it was ten dollars or a thousand dollars, he would come across something he needed to buy, right then, before some other guy got it first. Ann, to whom every nickel was absolutely precious, put a stop to that right away.

But there had been deeper issues. Ann believed she had made it this far because of God’s continued provision, and she wasn’t about to turn her back on that, so she laid down the law to Dad: “If we’re going to be together, you will start serving the Lord!”

At first she thought it was her job to make sure that happened. It took many long and painful years for Ann to admit that she couldn’t transform Dad by herself. But since she still loved him and still believed he could change, she looked to her one remaining hope: God.

God answered by starting to wear down my once-dauntless father. He had no kids around on whom to focus his authoritarian tendencies, and Ann refused to be controlled by him. She didn’t scream back at him or hit him. She didn’t curse him or attack him in quieter ways. She simply went on living her life
 
—canning, working, praying, sewing, and believing that Dad was headed in a direction he couldn’t yet see. He began to suffer through various health problems, from back pain to failing eyesight to the early stages of Parkinson’s, and consequently he was forced to do something he had never done before: rely on someone who loved him for everyday help.

It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t without regression and tears. But everything good that happened to Dad after his divorce happened through Ann.

Once, years before, Joan and I had gone to a flea market with Ann and Dad. It was a bright, sunny day, and Dad wanted to protect himself from getting sunburned, so he donned one of those caps with an umbrella stuck to the top. He brought along his video camera, too, which was just slightly different from the average model. Since changing dead
batteries annoyed him
 
—he could take hours of footage of engines and parts and vehicles
 
—he’d yanked out the original battery and soldered in some long wires that he ran down to a fanny pack. Inside the fanny pack was an entire motorcycle battery.

“He’s all function and no form,” Ann griped to Joan and me when Dad shuffled off to take more video. But there wasn’t any venom in her voice. And the second she saw him turning to walk back toward us, a smile wrinkled the corners of her eyes.

The sound of the three-part
amen
faded, and in the silence that followed I glanced again at the program in my hands. Nothing else was listed that would shield me from what was about to happen. I tried to swallow. I tried to pray, but all I could manage was a kind of wordless, terrified sigh.

The pastor, a neat-looking man in a dark suit, stepped to the pulpit and began his introduction. “Friends, it’s my great honor and privilege to introduce our speaker today. Mark Bouman grew up in these parts, and some of you may remember him. He’s been living somewhere very different from Michigan for quite a while, though.”

The pastor paused, touching each pew with his gaze.

“For the last decade-plus, Mark and his lovely wife, Joan
 
—” he smiled and inclined his head toward Joan, who sat beside me
 
—“have made a home for themselves far, far from here, all the way across the world in the city of
 
—let’s see
 
—See-han-ook-ville, Cambodia. Did I pronounce that right, Mark?”

I managed a nod. It was one of the better pronunciations I had heard.

“Just think of that, friends
 
—Cam
bo
dia! That’s a long way from here, but Mark went there for a very good reason: to be a father to more than a hundred orphans and to share the love of Jesus with each and every one of them. Mark’s going to speak to us about the ministry he directs, and I’m sure his words are going to bless you.”

I stood, thinking the pastor was finished, but he wasn’t. Not quite.

“Oh, and I’d also like to mention that Mark’s father was able to join us today.” The pastor gestured toward Dad, who was sitting next to Ann at the back of the church. I heard more than a few murmurs of recognition in the audience behind me
 
—some of the members remembered his exploits, no doubt
 
—and another small sigh escaped my lips. The pastor was beaming at my father from the pulpit, and all across the sanctuary pews creaked and groaned as people turned to look at him. I turned as well.

Dad was in his late fifties but looked ten years older. What little remained of his white hair was combed neatly across the top of his head. He seemed uncomfortable in his gray polyester suit. His hands were folded in his lap, out of sight, but I knew that his palms would be rough and marked with grease, his fingernails each ending in an arc of dirt. His face was expressionless.

“Mark,” the pastor said to me, “thank you for sharing with us this morning.” With that he sat down in a chair behind the pulpit.

The congregation applauded. Each person there assumed the obvious narrative: a proud father watching his son preach.

Except that for the next hour, I told them a different story.

I tried to tell everyone sitting in that church as much of the truth as I could. I spoke about firing guns, driving the tank, living on the ship, and Dad blowing up a stump with dynamite. I recalled the feeling of Dad’s hand and Dad’s belt. I stalked again through the Grand River in search of turtles and heard Zeke’s eager barking. I revisited Cambodia, witnessing orphans surprised by hope and finding a future they had never dared to dream of. With my father sitting not fifty feet from me, I spoke my way inside my own past. I lived each event as it emerged from my lips and relived it as I watched the crowd absorb what I was sharing.

Finally, I realized my stories were finished. No one moved. I searched inside for what to say next, and I found the words already waiting for me.

“I’m not telling you these things to make someone in my family look bad. I just want you to know what God can do. If God can use me, then God can use anyone.”

You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.

Our ramshackle home, our poverty, our good-enough-if-it-works existence, our injuries, our fights, our familiarity with chaos
 
—even our abject fear and shame and the seemingly bottomless well of pain from which Dad constantly supplied us
 
—hadn’t
all
of that been used for good? Those things weren’t good in and of themselves. Many
were
evil. Rather, my childhood had
become
good. It had been intended for evil but
transformed
into good. Transformed by God, whose reservoir of grace made my father’s well look like a child’s bucket.