That Time My Dad Delivered a Sermon from a Bucket Truck

TL;DR, glory is overrated.

I’ve been keeping this on the down-low, but our neighborhood has been graced by a high-profile celebrity numerous times since Helene ravaged our mountains.

Naturally, I beamed when my daughters boldly yelled, “Hiii!” from a distance, running closer to greet them and introduce themselves and me, their mom: a 37-year-old woman trying to play it real cool in the background.

If you’ve been following my storm dispatches for the past couples of months, then you might have already guessed the “star” that I’m referring to. But, if you haven’t yet: they’re a BUCKET TRUCK!!!

For real (the phrase that my four-year-old now uses liberally and it’s just the best thing ever)!!! There has been a steady stream of “cherry pickers” in our hood for weeks now, removing branches from power lines and repairing utility poles, a.k.a. doing the job that quite concretely supports our livelihoods as WFH people.

After ten weeks, their appearances are still something that cause my preschoolers to go wild. My daughters whoop and holler, finger-point and stop-in-their-tracks, at the sight or sound of the loud machines. Their excitement is an isolated and welcomed joy that starkly contrasts our mountain town’s collective and unwelcomed grief.

One street of our neighborhood just two days after the storm.

When the streetlights are still on in those dark, early morning hours, this all-white fleet of trucks flows into the streets of Asheville, dispersing in all directions—up windy mountain roads, through residential side streets, and down mud-covered pavement by the rivers. And then, when their work is done for the day, they trickle out from their posts, sliding in line with their brigade, and head back home for the night.

And they’ll do it all over again tomorrow and the next day and the next until the job is done. Their loyalty is inspiring and has captivated the attention of many during this dark and challenging time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these blue-collared workers lately and how, without them, my husband and I wouldn’t be able to provide for our family. These line people have quite literally brought light back into our homes, our businesses, our lives, and I’m so grateful for their hard work and devotion and sacrifice.

And yet: I wonder about the private lives of these public heroes. I wonder what story they tell themselves individually and if that story is beneficial or detrimental to their psyche.

As a former middle-grades English teacher, I’ve always found “the hero’s journey” to be a curious one. I’ve remained fascinated by how this story structure, this basic model, has survived the ages and still lives just as vibrantly today as it did centuries ago, originating in ancient Greece.

Heroes take on a variety of forms for many people. For some, it’s one of their teachers. For others, it’s their doctor or surgeon. For an unknown number, it’s their mother or father. For me, it’s a long list of writers, or as I like to think of them, truth-tellers.

For the past two months of our regularly-scheduled programming of the bucket truck garrison, one particular memory from my childhood keeps floating to the surface like a lost but not forgotten relic of the past, like a constellation in my life sky, beckoning me to pay attention, to lean inward, to listen, and to question the very fabric of my own creation.

***

I must have been 11 or 12 when he decided to do it.

We were living in a parsonage in Florence, South Carolina, at the time. My father, the pastor of Northwood Pentecostal Holiness Church, had been working hard to revitalize, to contemporize, the failing church by physically updating its sanctuary space (adding sheetrock to cover up its hokey, old wood-paneling) and by emotionally overhauling the institution (hoping to attract new, younger members to the church).

His tactics were considered unorthodox and “secular-leaning” by the deacons and founding members of the church. I remember picking up on the depleted and stressed undertone in my father’s voice after closed-door board meetings. He’d then disappear into my parent’s pitch-black bedroom to pray for hours. I remember the smell of anointing oil wafting out into the hallway as he’d emerge from the darkness with a look of determination and positivity because, as he’d declare in his slightly manic, sing-songy voice: “There’s victory, VICTORY, in Jesus!”

I could only assume that he’d heard directly from the Big Man Upstairs and received the go-ahead to keep pushing the envelope, to keep his eyes set on the prize: bringing in as many sinners as he could to fill an almost-empty house.

Unfortunately, his averted gaze left our own home vacant, abandoned, cold.

He’d already done a lot of the things you’d expect from an eager-to-win 31-year-old minister placed by some figurehead of the denomination to grow the congregation: he’d hired a new praise and worship team to lead both traditional hymns and contemporary songs, purchased a new children’s curriculum for the youth director, and re-designed all church materials, including the antiquated church sign out by the highway (which was later shattered by a hurricane’s gale force winds).

He was like one of the utility workers that have been in our neighborhood recently, steadily working towards fixing all individual components in order to get the church back on the grid, a.k.a. supported by tithes.

One day, he had a vision and saw himself in the sky delivering a sermon from a fully-extended bucket truck. From that moment on, it was pretty much a done deal. My father would spread the Word of God from a vehicle that he neither owned nor knew how to operate.

After sharing with his flock this divine undertaking one Sunday morning, a bridled sheep came forward: an employee of one of the local power companies. Quickly, things started to cook. The wheels were in motion.

Within a week or two, preparations had been made. Church leaders had been briefed. Prayers had been lifted. News outlets had been notified. Programs had been printed.

I haven’t a clue what my dad said to convince them, but Channel 13 News showed up on that hot and humid Sunday morning to cover the “historical event,” my dad’s coining of the occasion.

Like any good and obedient PK (“Preacher’s Kid”), I assisted the ushers in distributing paper fans with that day’s commemorative scripture imprinted: “Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’ —Matthews 19:26.”

Before my dad took to the bucket, I remember the atmosphere feeling electric, akin to the atmosphere of our living room when my dad enthusiastically viewed the Oscars, the Grammys, the MTV VMAs, the CMT Music Awards, and even the Miss America Pageant.

I recalled how he’d never missed a single televised awards show. Entranced, he’d watch from beginning to end, commenting on such-and-so’s success and howling at the hosts and presenters’ both good and bad jokes with an obvious desire for fame and fortune.

He was named after Mickey Mouse, after all: a destined performer. His dimples and charisma were the two non-negotiables when it came to his naming by my grandmother, the woman who used to pick up her twin sons early from school to play hooky, taking them out for ice cream, or even on long, spontaneous road trips across the country. She died in her 40s to esophageal cancer, and though I never got to meet her, I’d always felt a closeness to her through my father’s animated storytelling.

With the camera directed at my father on his block, my father’s “high” was contagious, and I remember feeling like my dad was actually going to do it: he was actually going to become famous, which meant that we wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore and that my parents would finally stop arguing for once.

My memory has me standing behind the arrangement of a hundred or so metal folding chairs in the church parking lot. Oddly, I’m not sitting in the front row—our usual assigned seats—with my mom and two younger sisters. I am watching my father, who is too close to the sun like Icarus, and then I look down and beyond him to the wide, open, and abandoned baseball fields: the overgrown slice of paradise where I’d go to get away with getting away.

I used to sneak out of my clamorous home and lay in the tall, itchy grass and stare at the vast sky above. Sometimes, it’d be a clear, bright, and puffy-clouded panorama; other times, it’d be a chaotic, dark, and dense portrait—the underbelly of a tropical storm or hurricane. And, on the rarest of occasions, it’d be a scroll of stars: a living, breathing page straight out of an astronomy reference book.

I remember thinking how incredible it was that the heroes of Greek mythology continued to live above us—forever immortal. I remember asking myself what was it about their stories that stuck with us for all these years. And as I type this and think about that question now, I wonder if its because of our fascination or satisfaction for stories that end in glory. I think so.

Selfishly, everyone wants a happy ending for characters and for themselves.

It was around this age that I also began to comprise a short list of lofty life goals: making a WNBA team, becoming an astronaut, and/or writing an award-winning novel. Already, these archetypal heroes had made an impression on me—and so had my father. It hadn’t occurred to me yet that life could be so much more than reaching the mountaintop, that life could be so much more exciting and fulfilling if we free ourselves from our own story cages.

After my father’s bucket truck escapade, the church grew exponentially for a year or two. And though my dad marveled at his work and noteworthy success, the deacons, the ultimate decision makers of the church, did not share his zeal. So, they voted him out of office. And I think from that point on, the “hero” of my father’s story—one of the two people that made me—began to traverse a steady psychological decline, rapidly speeding up after each obstacle or failure in his life.

And now, as a human being approaching 40 and as a mother to two young children, I’ve landed on this: glory is overrated.

***

After this past summer’s Olympics, I became hyper-fixated on researching “post-achievement depression” (or “post-Olympic blues”), the disorder that some of the world’s top athletes had referenced in various on-screen interviews. (You can read more about it here.)

Through my reading, I found that the condition was non-discriminatory; people of all disciplines experienced this type of mental war after reaching some measurable level of success. Simone Biles has spoken about it. David Chang. Rainn Wilson. Many.

The vulnerable sharing of their stories has led me to question the inherent value of the “monomyth” (or “hero’s journey”) and whether or not it should remain immortal.

***

In 1949, Joseph Campbell, American mythologist and writer, coined the term "hero's journey.” He described the hero's journey as a common pattern in mythologies across cultures, and he called it the "monomyth" in his revelatory book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

If you’re an English teacher or have ever taken an English class, you’re probably familiar with Campbell’s model here:

I don’t consider my father to be a hero, but I think that in those early days of being a minister, he likely adopted the “hero” mindset.

As a die-hard Star Wars and Star Trek fan, there is no question that he did. He cast himself as the Jean-Luc Picard or the Luke Skywalker of his own narrative production. But, because he failed over and over again in various roles (minister, husband, father) in his life, his monomyth journey ended prematurely. He didn’t experience transformation, atonement, or the return home, (or, at least, he hasn’t yet).

The inability to achieve one’s goals in life can be a painful thing—a debilitating thing—if we are not mindful of its control over our agency.

For my dad’s case, I wonder: What would have happened if more helpers had been involved in his life? What would have happened if he had learned from his trials and tribulations? What would have happened if he had adopted a heroine’s quest instead of a hero’s journey?

A couple of weeks ago,

Evelyn Skye

interviewed New York Times-bestselling author Kate Quinn on her Creative. Inspired. Happy podcast. And, around the nineteenth minute of the show, Quinn introduces the idea of the “heroine’s journey” and schools listeners on the difference between a “hero” and a “heroine”:

The Line Between Fact and Fiction, with Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author

As a former English teacher, you can imagine how surprised I was to learn of this alternate paradigm that I’d never heard articulated in this way before. (Side note: Teachers, we should be teaching this model alongside our hero’s journey units.)

I encourage you, dear Reader, to watch the clip (above) from Evelyn’s podcast, but if you don’t, the key difference that you should know is this: The heroine (who could be male or female) starts out in the same known world as the hero and suffers from a similar internal struggle. However, they do not embark on a physical journey, they, instead, set out on a mission to find their truest self. And along the way, they discover profound clods of wisdom, a deeper sense of identity, and a supportive community. In the end, they bridge the gap between the unknown and known world and find peace with who they are.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this idea and how much I wish that my dad and even my mother—all of us, for that matter—would adopt this assignment, this pursuit to find and know our truest selves.

So, here it is: my public proclamation of disavowing the hero’s journey and adopting the heroine’s quest, because, after all, it is our responsibility to let go of the things that no longer serve us. Moreover, it is my job, my duty, to model this relinquishing of unnecessary and unpropitious narrative arcs to my daughters.

One of my favorite scenes of this life chapter.

Of course, our stories are still being written, and they will surely not be a perfect arrangement of words. There will be typos, rough phrasing, and unexpected turns. There will be severe edits and revisions. There will be heart-breaks and heart-mends. But, by our story’s end, if we continue to seek understanding, practice gratitude, and connect with others, then I think we will be left with a wonderfully-crafted masterpiece in the end: a story worthy of a place amongst the stars.

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