For the Right Reasons (3 page)

I remember walking through the front doors on my first day that spring semester and wondering,
How will I ever feel comfortable here?
People teemed through the hallways wearing the navy and gold of their Viking mascot, chatting at their lockers, and laughing in the halls. I ducked my head, studied the printout of my new schedule, struggled to find my classes, and couldn’t figure out the lock on my locker. But even worse was the looming noon hour.

Lunch is the worst part of high school. I had to make some immediate decisions:
Who am I going to sit with? Where should I sit?
I had to think fast on the walk from class to the cafeteria, and even faster once I walked through the double doors and checked out the scene. I needed to have a plan or else I’d end up sitting in the wrong spot and be forever isolated, drinking milk out of a carton by myself all year. Since I’d missed an entire semester, students had already settled in to their groups. Would there be a place for me?

Then I realized something awesome. Lamar students could leave campus for lunch.

“Hey, Mimi,” I said into my cell phone on the way to class. Mimi and Papa, my dad’s parents, live near the school. “Want some company for lunch today?”

She was thrilled that I stopped by, and I—avoiding the lunchroom as much as possible—went there every single day. Eventually, I made friends at school, and Mimi welcomed them all with a smile and big plates of fried chicken and fried okra. She also made sure they never saw the bottom of their glasses of sweet tea. Those were the perfect meals, because I was trying to get bigger. On days Mimi didn’t cook, Papa bought me two foot-long steak subs from Subway and asked me to step on his scale to see how much weight I’d gained. Everyone loved Mimi and Papa, and they loved my group of friends.

One of the advantages of spending more time with my grandparents was that I got to be around a marriage that has lasted more than sixty years.
Papa, a World War II veteran, married Mimi when she was only nineteen years old and he was twenty-one. Now Mimi has white hair, and Papa has lost most of his. However, it’s wonderful to see them interact after all these years of matrimony.

“Papa,” I once asked him, “do you believe Mimi is your soul mate?”

He looked at me a little funny. To him, the phrase
soul mate
was hippie language. “Well, I’ll tell you this. I think men have the ability to be good husbands or not. I don’t think there’s this one magical person out there for you. Proverbs 18:22 tells us, ‘The man who finds a wife finds a treasure, and he receives favor from the L
ORD
.’ Note that the Word doesn’t say, ‘the man who finds that certain someone.’ It’s less specific than that. You find a wife, you get favor from God. It’s not all that complicated.”

“Well, you found Mimi.”

“There were other women before Mimi.”

At this, I almost laughed. My grandparents had been together so long, it was hard for me to imagine Papa existing before Mimi.

“And I think I could’ve made it work with one of them too,” Papa said. “So, no. I don’t believe in that soul-mate stuff.”

I wasn’t sure about the idea of love anyway. In high school, I had lots of friends, went on plenty of dates, and was the type of guy girls’ parents loved. Of course, my dating in high school consisted of walking together between classes and driving girls to the movies in my first truck, a ’97 Ford F-150. Though I was just getting familiar with the idea of girls and dating, I knew I had excellent role models in my own family for lifelong love.

I fit right in with the new Viking team at Lamar. My coach, Eddy Peach, had been the football coach since the school opened, and so had his offensive coordinator, Coach Jones, and defensive coordinator, Coach Ward. They were the coaching team during the 1970s, when my dad was a player. Lamar had a legendary football program and a playoff streak that had lasted fourteen consecutive years. (Oddly enough, the year I played we missed the
playoffs.) The coaches were godly men and were quite a contrast to the screaming, yelling, and cussing coaches I’d left. As the first Texas coach to win three hundred games at the Class 5A level, Coach Peach knew the game. He put me as the school’s starting linebacker, where I thrived for the rest of my high school career.

By the time I graduated, I was ranked fifty-second among inside linebackers across the entire nation by Rivals.com, was a member of the
Dallas Morning News
All-Area Team, was listed in the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
’s top seventy-five prospects, and was Lamar’s most valuable defensive player. In my senior year, I had ninety-six tackles and four sacks. As a “three-star athlete,” several colleges were interested in me, but I narrowed it down to Oklahoma State, University of Arkansas, and Kansas State. In the spring of 2002, I accepted a scholarship to Kansas State.

My family’s decision to transfer me to Lamar was a big risk. I’m glad my parents had the guts to do it. In fact, it was a moment that shaped the person I was to become. Before then, risk taking was not a common Lowe activity—still isn’t, to be honest.

But something changed in me while I was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch that Sunday. My dad, by asking a simple question, taught me an important lesson. He’d already instilled in me the virtue of being even-tempered and steady. But that morning, he showed me what it looks like to put aside fear, to risk comfort, and to dive in headfirst to a new adventure.

It was a lesson I’d use later in life: sometimes the right path might seem like a really crazy move.

And in the fall, I had another move to make.

“How many towels does a guy need?” I asked my mom, pointing to a stack Dad was loading into the back of our car.

“You can’t blame me for wanting you to be clean, can you?” Mom asked.

“No, but we might need a third car just to bring all this stuff,” I said, looking at the bags and boxes we had to load. “Or an extra dorm room.”

“Okay, I think I’ve got just enough space for the mini fridge here,” Dad said, making room in the Tahoe before slamming down the hatch. Mom had apparently been preparing for this moment all summer—physically, if not emotionally.

“Do I really need these?” I asked, holding up a pair of flip-flops.

“You never know how filthy the shower might be,” she said.

“Maybe I should explain to Sean what this is.” Shay held up a bottle of laundry detergent.

“How would you know?” I asked.

The worried expression on my mom’s face indicated that she doubted I could handle the pressures and demands of college, but I knew I was ready.

“I guess that’s it,” Dad said as he stuffed the last bag into the vehicle and wiped his hands on his pants.

I took one last look at our home—the place where I shot many basketball hoops and tossed many footballs with friends—grabbed my keys, and jumped into the driver’s seat toward a new life. Mom and Shay rode together in the car behind Dad and me. For the next eight hours, we drove—through the city of Dallas, the lowlands of Oklahoma, and the Flint Hills of Kansas. You know that song “Home on the Range”? Whoever wrote it was probably imagining buffalo roaming in an area like the gently rolling acres of Kansas tallgrass prairie.

As the miles passed, I wondered what it would be like to be a part of the Kansas State team. In my experience, football teams had been, in a way, like a family. At least that’s what I’d felt at Irving High and then Lamar. Would a Big 12 college program have the same kind of vibe? Would I be able to hang with the other guys? I’d been recruited as a strongside linebacker. K-State’s previous three were drafted into the NFL. Would I be next?

Dad and I talked about football much of the way, and I assumed Mom and Shay were talking about my sister’s recent heartbreak. She had broken up with a guy she had dated for years, but she seemed to be in good spirits that day. I was proud of her. She took at least eighteen credit hours each semester, sold insurance while working another job, and studied all the time. Ever since she and her long-term boyfriend split up, Shay had been more serious
than usual. I hoped things would look up for her soon, but our family wasn’t the type that sat around and talked about the details of our romantic lives.

“Sean,” Dad said as we neared the school. His voice cracked just a tad. “When you’re in college, things will be different.” Dad might’ve been driving me to college, but he wasn’t finished being my dad. “Remember . . . you’re going to be
in
the world, but you don’t have to be
of
the world.”

I looked through my windshield at Manhattan—a small city tucked away in the northeastern part of Kansas, known as the Little Apple.

Just a couple of months earlier, I’d gone to the bigger version of Manhattan—the one in New York—where my team was doing preseason training and conditioning. Immediately, I noticed my new teammates were huge, a reality check for someone who’d always been the big man on campus. There’s a major difference between an eighteen-year-old kid just arriving from high school and a twenty-two-year-old man who has been in the university weight program for a few years.

K-State’s training program was more intense than anything I’d ever seen. In New York, the summer workouts were led by the strength and conditioning team, and we’d run 7-on-7 in the evenings. It gave me a chance to learn the fundamentals of their defense and get to know the team. The upperclassmen had known one another for a long time and had a casual comfort with each other. They loved to make sure the freshmen always knew our place as the new guys: sit down and shut up! But one guy—Andrew, who was the captain of the team and probably six foot five—was kind to us when we showed up to train for our abbreviated two-week period. He was a senior, an All-American defensive end, and he treated even the lowly freshmen with respect.