Friday is Homecoming at my alma mater, Liberty University
I won’t be going back this year…the first time in 5 years I won’t be there. But I’ll be there in spirit…because in a lot of ways my heart has never left. Because in so many ways, Liberty Mountain is home. I guess that’s why they call it “Homecoming”.
When I was in high school, the only college I wanted to go to was Liberty. The only degree I wanted was from Liberty. The only place that mattered was the mountain. In a lot of ways that hasn’t changed.
I was thinking about this post for a few days. I had written something different and wound up changing it this morning. I was thinking about the words to a song that a dear friend of mine, Allan Shamblin, wrote and that Miranda Lambert made into a number 1.
The song is called “The House that Built Me”
I know they say you can’t go home again
I just had to come back one last time
Ma’am I know you don’t know me from Adam
But these handprints on the front steps are mine
Up those stairs in that little back bedroom
Is where I did my homework and I learned to play guitar
I bet you didn’t know under that live oak
My favorite dog is buried in the yard
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me
Mama cut out pictures of houses for years
From Better Homes and Gardens magazine
Plans were drawn and concrete poured
Nail by nail and board by board
Daddy gave life to mama’s dream
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me
You leave home and you move on and you do the best you can
I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could walk around I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me
Allan didn’t know me seven years ago when he wrote this. And he’s never been to Liberty University and as far as I know he’s never even been to Liberty Mountain. But without even knowing it, he captured the heart of what LU means to so many of its alumni. It’s home for us. It’s the “House that Built Me”
I didn’t have a home like the one in this song, where character was formed and love abounded. There isn’t a house in my memory that calls to me from across the years and says “If you can just get back here you’ll figure it all out and be alright” But I have Liberty University.
In a lot of ways, that place is home for me. I met my best friends there. I slugged it out for the hockey team and made the “bad food” jokes. I was there when curfews were ridiculous and dress code was like a “Happy Days” wardrobe. I remember when the DeMoss building was a blueprint and when the Vine center was an overgrown ravine where we played Capture the Flag.
Liberty was where I was first challenged to really know what I believed, and why. It’s where somebody knocked the kool-aid out of my hand and told me to drink beer like a grown-up. (Okay…not actual beer…you get the analogy) It’s where Jim Freeman and Greg St. Clair became my best friends. It’s where Cory Walyuchow and Justian Wylie and Craig Handwerker and Wade Burrows and a bunch of other guys became my team mates, and my dream of playing collegiate hockey came true.
It’s where I first saw mountains. It’s where I first saw mountains move.
Most of all, it’s where Dr. Falwell was. I loved that man. I went there because of him. I would sometimes listen to his sermons in chapel and think “C’mon Doc! Seriously? A D-1 football team with our own first-class stadium beating Notre Dame someday?” Doc had said this when Lou Holtz was coaching ND and they were unbeatable. 28 years later and five consecutive Big South titles in hand, I would dare say the LU teams from last year and the two years prior probably could have done the job. (Brian Kelly sort of changes that possibility for now) I remember one service at Thomas Road Baptist Church when Doc told us of his dream of Liberty having it’s “own channel for spreading the gospel” and it would come through some new technology called satellite. He told us the receiving dish would be “slightly bigger than a pie plate…maybe 24 inches in diameter” and you could hang them from the eaves of any home in the US. I remember sitting there thinking “Right Doc…That’ll never happen” Then came Dish Network and Direct TV. Then came “The Liberty Channel” Doc was right. Again.
He would lay out his grand dreams for the mountain and we’d sometimes sit there thinking “I love the idea Doc…but that aint gonna happen. A law School? A med school? Dorm rooms with only 2 people in each one? That will NEVER happen! (Those of you who are of my vintage remember being crammed 4 deep into dorm rooms built for two.)
Doc was larger than life. He was a cantankerous kid in a grown-ups body who never lost sight of having some fun now and then. He had a passion for Jesus Christ that defied description. He had faith that literally moved mountains. He loved people. He had a knack for seeing people as Jesus saw them. It’s why he could reach out to Larry Flynt after Flynt had done his best to denigrate Dr. Falwell in the most salacious manner. When Doc died, Larry Flynt actually got choked up during an interview with Larry King, when he referred to Dr. Falwell as his friend. Flynt was always downplaying the fact that Doc befriended him and, Doc took a beating for it from his contemporaries. But I thought it was genius. He reached out in love to an obviously bitter and hurting man and openly called him his friend. What could Flynt ever do against that kind of big heart?
I learned about loving people on the mountain. I learned about which battles were worth fighting and which were not.
Mostly I learned that with God, one seemingly unimportant preacher from a small town in central Virginia could be used to touch millions simply because he said “yes" to God and dared to dream big dreams.
Two years ago, my daughter went to homecoming with me. She was 11 at the time. We had gone to an art exhibit and were crossing the road to go to the dining hall for dinner. Standing on the curb in a cold late October breeze on a grey overcast day, I stopped and looked around. Morgan was enamored with “SnowFlex” the giant artificial snowboard slope high on Liberty Mountain across from the campus. The day was dark and dreary so the lights were already on at the slope. I pointed across the street to dorm 22…my first dorm on Liberty Mountain. This was the room I shared with Jim Freeman, who would become one of the best friends I ever made and, my defacto big brother. I told Morgan how there used to be nothing on that side of the mountain but brush that caught fire every spring. I told her how there wasn’t a Vine Center or a Demoss building or an ice rink when I first came here. Then I choked back tears and told her about Dr. Falwell. My daughter has wonderful, daring faith even at her young age. I knew she’d be impacted when I relayed the stories of Doc’s constant biting off huge chunks of this mountain and turning it into a tangible “home” for all of us…his “kids”.
I put my arm around my little girl and swept my hand across the view in front of us and told her; “All of this…everything you see here is because one man said “yes” to God and had faith that God had a plan. And God can do the same thing with you." Morgan somehow understood the importance of what I was saying, and she had heard me talk about Dr. Falwell enough times to know how I loved him. She got a big smile when I told her, “Go ahead and dream big, honey. Jump in and do what God tells you because the same God that was behind Doc is the same God who will see your dreams come true."
My upbringing didn’t lend itself to great faith…I had to learn that on the mountain too. But I had a great example and over time I learned. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating…Dr. Falwell used to tell us all the time “You don’t measure a man by what it takes to knock him down…but by what it takes to keep him down.”
August 1984 was the start of my freshman year. I completed my last 5 semesters online, most of the time living in my car after losing everything I had in this economy.
Next May I will walk across the stage on that mountain and I will receive my long awaited diploma…because there at my home…in the “house that built me” I learned that I do have what it takes to finish what I began. I learned by watching that giant of a man and father-figure, that I will never be measured by what it took to keep me down. Because I watched a man who kept getting up. I have travelled back to the mountain many times over the years, probably, as Allan wrote because
“ I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself”
I think I’ve come home so many times looking to find myself. To find the young man I once was who first came here when there was little here to come to. I think I have travelled back to this house that built me because I knew instinctively I was still being built. Liberty Mountain has, in many ways, been the fixed end of my compass.
Now I will finally return as a graduate. In May I will come home to this house that built me with a little swagger, a little pride. I have some scars from the battles I fought just finding my way back here and I’m limping a bit from my wrestling matches with God. But I’ll be home again. Because this place built me and throughout life we all need to come back and remember who we were when we got here and who we were when we left.
Welcome home LU alumni…and I’ll see you all next year.
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