Jesus told this simple story, but they had no idea what he was talking about. So he tried again… I am the Gate. Anyone who goes through me will be cared for—will freely go in and out, and find pasture. A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of. – John 10:7-10

Once in a while I end up building an entire post around just one photograph. When this happens it is because the image has grabbed me and I have to respond.

Last week, sorting through some stuff back in Wake Forest, I uncovered this framed print of my parents. Unlike many old photographs, there is no having to guess when and where this was taken.

This is the day they leave England and move to America: 1.7.81. Dad is just 52 years old, Mum is still only 49!

It’s pretty remarkable when you consider how completely British they were: born in London between the wars, both growing up in the thick of WW2, raising their family just down the beach from the White Cliffs of Dover, as dyed-in-the wool English as it is possible to be. All that – and more – and there they are, up and moving to America!

So Why?

As they say, “it’s complicated.” Dad’s plastics molding business had been bought out in a hostile takeover a year or so earlier. The new owners wanted him to stay on as director, to steady the ship. Dad tried, but he could not in good conscience continue when the owners and the board put themselves ahead of the workers and the community.

One of the new owners drove a Rolls-Royce, the other tooled around in a Ferrari. Dad kept the nice but modest car he had always driven, and when they tried to keep him by offering more money and additional “perks” he said, “Not at the expense of the employees,” and that was that.

So my mum and dad sold the family home in Folkestone, they purchased a house in Sarasota – not far from my brother Geoff and his family, and they boarded P&O’s SS Canberra for the first leg of its voyage around the world.

Definitive moment:

I thought my parents had lost their minds to be doing something so radical “at their age!” But of course, now that I am 68 the idea of new adventures at 49 and 52 doesn’t hit me in quite the same way.

I am really excited to share the boarding photograph, because it is documentation of definitive family history! This is the exact moment the epicenter of ‘Being a Maul” loosed its moorings in England and drifted four and a half thousand miles west-southwest. It’s a key pivot point in our family story: January 7, 1981, a date every coming generation should know.

I am thinking about this a lot more in light of A) Loosing both parents in the past year and a half, B) Talking with people who do not know their family story, and C) Writing my latest book as a memoir.

The Memoir:

The memoir is a collection of stories rooted in my experience of what it means to live what Jesus calls “Real and eternal life, more and better life than [we] ever dreamed of” (John 10:10). The stories are all true, but the book is by no means a complete family history. It is held together, however, by key historic moments, one of which is January 7, 1981.

What are some of the pivotal, “historic” moments in your story? For me, many of them happened before I was even born, like the day my dad first heard my mother’s voice without even seeing her face; she was praying aloud at a meeting and he fell in love on the spot!

Or this moment, which is huge in my personal story: “Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water'” (John 4:13-15).

Stay tuned, this is a story that won’t quit! – DEREK