Sneak Preview Saturday

UPDATE: A Kindle version is available now on Amazon, and I wanted to figure out how to make it both convenient AND free. The best I could do was to make it free for five days, so . . . it’s FREE between Tuesday, June 13 and Saturday, June 17 (otherwise it’ll set you back a whopping $0.99.)

Father’s Day is still a week away, but I wanted to make something special for, well, all the fathers out there I guess, but especially for mine. I put together an eBook preview of my book (due out in October) especially for Father’s Day. There’s also a flipbook version available here. The readability varies from device to device (feel free to let me know if you find any glitches in either).

This preview includes an opening section I’m not planning on publishing in the book itself, a note about my dad and his nonexistent love of baseball. I wanted you to see it here as well. If there’s a father in your life you think would enjoy it, by all means, please share.

My Father and Baseball

As part of this special Father's Day Gift Preview of Diamond in the Rough: The Gospel According to Baseball, I wanted to include a note about my father, a man who would have been just fine if baseball had never been invented. His dad, my grandpa, pitched for a few years with the minor-league Toledo Mud Hens. Love of baseball sometimes skips a generation. It did for us. 

While my dad has never loved baseball, there are certain things about baseball that he does love. First and foremost, he loves people, and he loves the people who watch and play baseball. He loved going to games in Cleveland with my mom's family but not to watch the game. He'd walk around Cleveland Stadium and watch fights break out in the stands . . . great theater. He'd do the same whenever he caught a game in his hometown Detroit. (Yeah, that's right, he was a city boy born and raised in South Detroit* and he married a small-town girl living in the lonely world of Kirkersville, Ohio.)

*Motown doesn't really have a south side. Sorry, Journey.

Fast-forward almost forty years to when I was a burgeoning young Cubs fan, it was my mom who taught me the game of baseball. My dad would be at work during most Cubs home games, at least on weekdays, but when they did play at night he'd joke that it was raining in New York, Cincinnati, or wherever we said the game would be played in the hopes we'd give up trying to watch the game on WGN. There were a few times when he took us kids to games at Wrigley. He had no interest in baseball, but he loved us more than enough to go. 

And he really did love the human theater that played out in a packed baseball stadium—the vendors, the roar of the crowd, the inevitable agonizing groans of defeat when the Cubs would lose. What happened on the field? Meh. But Harry Caray leaning out the window of the press box to intoxicate further the 40,000 faithful in a spirited rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" that, despite being horridly off-key, somehow managed to hit every note just right? Oh man, that beautiful display of humanity and the power of charisma behind a microphone was the pitcher's mound at the center of my dad's ballpark.

Dad was a radio guy—an epic radio guy in a world-class radio metropolis. And while he may never have taken a midnight train going anywhere, anyone going anywhere at midnight could hear his radio program, Music Thru the Night. It was a pre-recorded nationally syndicated Christian music broadcast with interludes of spoken velvet to soothe the mortal soul. He didn't have guests, interviews, or the slightest bit of controversy. He'd deliver mini-sermons with allusions from literature, passages of the Bible, lessons from his life, and heavily embellished stories from our dinner table. The man knows how to tell a story, and he always knew facts too often got in the way—it was the spirit of the story that mattered. Some of the details would get switched around for effect, but don't think for a second his stories weren't true. Were they ever.

Maybe the best compliment I can give him is he's the reason I write. His medium of choice was radio, but Dad wrote more words than Hemmingway. Papa had nothing on my dad. Writing was an obsession with him. I watched him work—at home, on the couch with a legal pad filled with scrawls of loopy handwriting only he could read, his Bible filled with notes and tabs, and an array of dog-eared books that fueled his never-ending barrage of literary and pop-culture references—and in his office and studio in downtown Chicago amidst an even grander library of resources and a more sprawling arsenal of literature spread out on his desks. The man would go in a zone. He'd get lost in the flow of words, ideas, and spiritual bliss. Most of the time, it seemed people in the office knew as well as I did not to disturb him, but when he would get interrupted, the culprit would always be the most important person in the world.

Of course, it would be someone different every time. I mentioned before that he loved people, but I'm quite sure you don't understand the magnitude. He genuinely loved everybody as individuals and the whole entire world, past, present, and future. He doted on everyone like they were his best friend and hero all in one. I never once heard him say, "I'm busy," to anybody, even though he was typically busy. But to him, the writing didn't mean anything if people weren't the main thing. If you put the question to him, he would probably say Jesus Christ was the most important, but he would also probably say that when you love anyone strongly enough, Jesus is present in that love. I may not believe in that factually, but those details need not get in the way. I guarantee, no debate, that man's love was genuine.

Everyone who heard his voice knew it. Seriously, you could hear in that voice as deep as thunder a love that ran deeper still. As the words hit your ears you could feel the love washing over your soul.

He would begin every program with the same greeting: "Hello, good friend." And he'd close every one with, "Have a great day . . . a great day, indeed." Even though he said the same thing every time, you knew he meant it every time, just like he meant every word and every loving pause from start to finish. He crafted every episode, every musical selection to comfort someone who obviously needed it—they were listening to the radio in the middle of the night, after all.

Now, he did plenty more than Music Thru the Night. There were radio dramas galore. He could make his voice do just about anything, a master of vocal disguise. He recorded an abbreviated version of A Christmas Carol that would trick those uninitiated in his talents into thinking a cast of a dozen highly trained actors collaborated on the production . . . but it was only him. He'd routinely be invited to preach at churches around the country, and he'd take his show of unconditional love on the road. It was incredible to see him captivate an audience. He entertained and related and loved. I watched it happen. Even in a church sanctuary, the place that was to me what a baseball stadium was to my dad, I loved the human theater of watching my dad work. He made being in church great. And he could conduct a song, too.

I'm telling you, I grew up in a Baptist church where dancing was a cardinal sin. But when he led a congregation in song, that dude danced. He had charisma spilling out from every pore, and he put the soul of Motown into every beat. And he got away with it, because the love and joy radiated from him onto every single person in the building. Good luck objecting to that.

Still, Music Thru the Night was his baby. He would hole up in Studio D on the 12th floor of Crowell Hall at Moody Bible Institute and fill that soundproof room with his deepest, truest thoughts. He would speak into that microphone like he was whispering into the ear of a friend who was barely hanging on. Even though it was just him in the studio, even though no one could hear him at the time, he was speaking to someone who feared being alone. My dad was alone with his words . . . but it didn't stop there.

There were times when my dad's program carried the largest audience in Chicago for its overnight time slot. Over the years, he spoke to millions of people lying in hospital beds, nursing dying loved ones, awake with unspeakable grief or inconsolable puppies (I kid you not, our next-door neighbor had hit a wall trying to get their dog to be quiet in his kennel at night, and they desperately resorted to switching on my dad's show . . . the dog was snoring within seconds). This soporific effect of my dad's program made it a tough listen for some truck drivers for obvious reasons, but the ones who were ready to rest their eyes and their souls found Music Thru the Night a godsend.

My dad knew what they were going through. He knew what they were all going through. That's because he loved people. He didn't research just books and the Bible. His life was a series of in-depth interviews with every single person he ever met. The man watched life unfold before him and took copious notes on everybody. If you were sitting two tables away at McDonald's and you kinda almost made eye contact? Sorry! You're next! At the time, I found this equal parts embarrassing and impressive because you just weren't supposed to talk to strangers. As expansive as my dad's vocabulary was, I'm not sure stranger was anywhere in it.

Mike Kellogg always loved people. All people. He has never been perfect, but damn if he didn't get that part exactly right.

So if you think my dad let me down on the baseball side of life because he didn't like the sport, you don't have a clue. He couldn't tell you the rules of baseball to save his life, but he understood what the game was about: people, humanity, drama, love, and the reality that we're never alone.

I'm worried he feels alone a lot these days. After a lifetime of comforting people bedridden and broken, he now finds himself where so many of those listeners were. His body isn't functioning the way a body should. As I type these words, he's lying in a hospital-style bed in a nursing home facility. My mom is less than a mile away from him, but this man who found a way to traverse untold miles into millions of rooms every single night, spends every night light years away from his wife who wakes up every day not remembering he's not at home. Short-term memory is no longer my mom's strength, and surviving without my mom by his side every second isn't my dad's strength. No, right now my dad's strength is waning. He's not recording more programs. He's not writing more words in a nursing home, but his story . . . it didn't stop there.

And when he finally signs off one last time and tells this world to have a great day, a great day indeed, it won't stop there either. Whatever awaits his soul beyond this mortal coil I do not know. But his spirit will be present in the eyes of every boy strolling through ballparks everywhere soaking in the atmosphere off the field. Whenever someone sits with a friend who just lost a child and stays there through the pain, through the silence, he'll be there too. Wherever a really busy father drops everything to hear his son talk about what his favorite baseball player just did and pretends to understand what a word of it means . . . yeah. My dad will live on in that moment.

This book is an invitation to live life the same way we play baseball, full of joy, determination, hustle, and grit. But don't think for a second I'm inviting you to depart from the way my dad lived. Quite the opposite. Whether you find yourself in the heat of a crucial moment or in the doldrums between innings, look around. Find the beauty and wonder in the scene around the game and in the voices of the people who describe it. I invite you to see the love that connects the people in the stands, the announcers in the booth, and even the opposing fans quarreling in the aisles. As you read these words, in the daunting shadows of our vulnerable, fleeting lives, I hope you'll remember the power and the indestructibility of love.

And, Dad, I don't know how many Father's Days we have left together, but I hope this one's a happy one. I love you. I'm proud of you, and when I grow up, I want to be just like you.

Thank you for reading Under Deconstruction. This post is public so feel free to share it.