The Seven Longest Yards

by Chris Norton

  18

  Tackling Two New Challenges

  CHRIS

  “Em, have you ever heard of Now I’ve Seen Everything?”

  The name almost sounded like a tabloid when I saw it pop up in my email. I came close to deleting the message before I noticed that it mentioned my graduation walk.

  “It looks like they’re some kind of media company,” Emily said after a quick Google search. “They post inspirational videos on Facebook and other social media sites. Why do you ask?”

  I handed her my phone. “They emailed me out of the blue. They found the video of my graduation walk. They want to know if they could post it.”

  Emily shrugged. “Hey, the more people who see it, the better, right?”

  “Yeah, definitely. Who knows, maybe it’ll go viral?” We both laughed.

  No one had asked me about my graduation walk in quite a long time. It’d been nearly two years since graduation. After our initial media frenzy subsided, life returned to normal. Besides an occasional article in the Des Moines Register, I didn’t get calls for interviews anymore. I didn’t think much of it as I typed a response giving the group my permission.

  But when I checked Facebook the next day, my eyes practically bulged out of my head when I saw that this new post of my video had more than one million views. What? I thought. How is this even possible?

  We thought that was huge, but there was more to come.

  Someone with the Facebook profile name Mighty Duck posted the video of my graduation walk with the quote, “True friends know your weaknesses but stick by your side.” Within a few days his post had over twenty million views. When it was all said and done, the video reached 250 million views!

  This was the second time my graduation walk video had gone viral. The first time it happened, Emily and I were so caught up in the excitement of it all that we failed to see the opportunity God had given us. We knew the video inspired people, but now we wanted to make sure we clearly communicated the message that anything is possible when you keep pushing forward, stay faithful to God, and don’t give up. God’s timing for this latest round of exposure couldn’t have been more perfect. Right after Emily came out of her depression, God gave us this platform to make a difference. We knew our story had the power to inspire others going through tragedy or facing difficulty. Now we were given a second chance to do something with it.

  EMILY

  After Mighty Duck shared Chris’s graduation walk video, we stayed glued to our social media accounts for days. We responded to as many comments as we could and stayed on top of any video shares so we could get involved on those threads as well. Our work paid off. Emails flooded in from other social media news groups and podcasts. Within days, Chris’s personal Facebook account went from zero followers to seventy-five thousand. We knew God had opened this door for us to use our story to give hope to others. He had a much bigger plan for us than we had planned for ourselves.

  What struck us were not the likes or shares but the stories people wrote to us. People we had never met poured out their hearts about battles with cancer, abuse, divorce, depression, anxiety, tragedy, you name it. One woman messaged us with the story of her four-year-old daughter who was kidnapped, and all the horrible things that happened to her while her daughter was gone but thankfully was found. One gentleman had attempted suicide and was depressed, but seeing this video gave him hope for his future for the first time. After my own struggles with suicidal thoughts, this gentleman’s response really encouraged me.

  As I read the messages, I felt a growing sense of responsibility. I knew how it felt to be stuck in a dark place with no hope. I remembered all too well what it was like to feel all alone without God in my life. By taking Chris’s graduation walk video viral a second time, God grew our platform and gave us an opportunity to help others realize there is always hope and anything is possible when you lean on God. Now it was our job to step up and communicate this message even more clearly. The wedding walk would do it, I thought.

  When was the last time I thought about the wedding? Chris had given up asking me about it long ago. We had been engaged for nearly two years now. Our families had not-so-subtly asked us many times what we were waiting for, or if we were ever actually going to get married. At the time, we told them we didn’t want to rush it. Our relationship was so rocky then that planning a wedding almost made me feel like a fraud. And as a prisoner of my depression, everything from choosing a color scheme to creating seating charts felt overwhelming. It was too much. Now, thinking about the wedding for the first time in a long time, I felt a jolt of excitement. I wonder what kind of venues they have around here, I thought. I searched for a place that had the right look but didn’t have stairs and was also affordable.

  “Do you think you’d rather get married inside or outside?” I asked Chris a couple of nights later.

  His head snapped up from looking at his phone, and he stared at me as if my hair were on fire. “What?”

  “Would you rather have an indoor or outdoor wedding ceremony? I like the way outdoor ceremonies look, but it’s so hot here that I just don’t know if it would work.”

  Chris grinned at me and grabbed my hand. “Wait, you’re researching wedding venues?”

  I shrugged and nodded. “I mean, we need to plan the wedding if we’re going to do the wedding walk. The two pretty much go together, right? And we have to do the wedding walk now that the graduation walk has gone viral again.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “This is not for me,” I said. “I could not care less if you walk me down the aisle. This is about all those people watching your graduation video. They are looking to us for hope. We have to give it to them.”

  Then I caught myself, realizing how that must have sounded. “And things are good, right?” I searched his eyes for reassurance. “I know I’m happy. I think we’re stronger than ever. I just want to be married.”

  I could see a tear in Chris’s eyes as he nodded. “That’s exactly what I want.”

  “Well, good. But you didn’t answer my question! Indoor or outdoor?” We both cracked up at my not-so-graceful segue.

  “Definitely outdoor. We could always have the wedding in the early spring when it’s not so hot.”

  I laid my arm on Chris’s shoulders and closed my eyes. I still couldn’t believe how close I had come to throwing away our relationship. For months I had convinced myself that Chris was ruining my life, that he was the reason I felt lost and dead inside. Now I didn’t want to imagine my life without him. Chris was my rock, my cheerleader, my biggest fan. He was steady when I was all over the place. He was the brake to my gas pedal. He was my perfect balance, and we needed each other. I could see that now.

  I turned to him and grinned. “Let’s get married.”

  Chris kissed my forehead. “I can’t wait.”

  CHRIS

  Even though I continued working out with Nick at Barwis, I hadn’t put in nearly as many hours as I did right after I proposed to Emily. Why train for something that may not happen? I told myself. But now that she had brought it back up and was excited about getting married, I quickly kicked my training back into gear. My motivation for the wedding walk was nothing like my graduation walk. Then I needed to prove something to myself. Now I wanted to show how faith in God can overcome any obstacle. And I discovered that I was more motivated to do something for others than I had done for myself.

  I like a challenge. I didn’t want the walk to be the same as my graduation walk. Whatever I did had to force me to train harder than I ever had before. And that gave me an idea. For my graduation walk, Emily stood in front of me, supporting me and walking backward as I took each step forward. “What if we walked side by side?” I said to Emily one day. “That’s what couples normally do at the end of a wedding ceremony.”

  Emily was excited, “Let’s do it! We will make it work. We always do.”

  “I know we can’t do it now. But I could work up to it.”


  “If you want to do it, I know it’s going to happen,” she said, smiling at me. “Let’s try it and see how it goes!”

  “Now?” I asked, startled.

  “Why not?” she shrugged. “I can walk you to bed, just like I used to.”

  Slowly I stood up and leaned against her as we slipped our arms around each other. I pushed my weight onto my left leg as I tried to hoist my right foot up to take a step. Nothing happened. I gritted my teeth, tightening every muscle in my body. My foot wouldn’t budge. I underestimated how much I had counted on that supporting person in front of me.

  “Em, I can’t move.” I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me, but I had to fight back tears. “Just help me get in bed. I don’t want to do this right now.”

  But we kept trying. We reinstated our nightly walk ritual, and eventually I could take one step, then two. I cranked up my hours at the gym, working out three hours each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and another hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays with my friend A.P. Later, when A.P. moved to Minnesota, I bumped up my gym hours even higher, to two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  My exercises didn’t necessarily change beyond focusing more on a side support. What was different was my intensity. I had a renewed focus and attention to detail that I hadn’t brought to Barwis Methods in far too long. I was all in and pushed myself every step of the way.

  Over time I learned how to pick up my legs to take a step without leaning on someone in front of me to help me leverage my weight and shift my body. Walking one single step was a battle. Once I mastered that feat, I had to figure out how to sustain it for seven yards—the length I set out to accomplish for our wedding. Reaching this goal took major commitment. It took until two weeks before the wedding before I was confident I could complete the walk.

  Training this time around was different for another reason. Before, Emily was extremely involved and was at the gym with me every single day. That didn’t happen this time. It wasn’t because she was depressed or too tired to come to my training sessions. Instead, she was busy with the next big chapter of our lives—our application to become foster parents to young children had finally been approved.

  EMILY

  Whittley graduated on time at the end of May. On June 9 we moved into the four bedroom house I’d found near the Barwis gym. We were ready to move out of our apartment. We had gone through the most substantial changes of our lives in that apartment. We had grown up so much over the past year and a half, so much so that we outgrew our apartment and needed to move into something bigger. Our bright yellow house was the perfect place to continue our journey.

  When we moved into our new house, I wondered how long we’d have to wait before we got our first foster placement. We didn’t have to wait long to find out. Almost immediately we did respite care for a two-and-a-half-year-old little girl for a week while her foster family went on vacation. I thought it would be a good way to dip our toes into the water and get used to having a kid in the house.

  Then on July 5, while the little girl was still at our house, my phone rang.

  “We’ve got a sibling group placement coming in,” our licensing agent said. “Two kids—a three-year-old boy and a two-month-old girl.”

  “Yes!” I cried. “That sounds great!” Then I caught myself. It wasn’t just my decision to make. “Hold on. Let me talk to Chris, and I’ll call you back.”

  “Emily, that’s too much,” Chris said when I filled him in. “We were only planning on taking in one child under the age of two.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice trailing off. “But it’s only one more than we planned, and the baby will just sleep all the time.”

  “Didn’t you say three-year-old boys had the worst behavior in your group home?”

  I sighed. “Yes. Okay. Well, what if we just took them until they can find someone else? I don’t want to just tell her we can’t do it right off the bat.”

  “I can do that. As long as it’s only temporary.”

  Our caseworker found another family who was on vacation but could take the kids when they returned in ten days. I hung up the phone and looked at the clock. It was 9:30 p.m., and two small children would be here in a matter of hours. We needed car seats, a bassinet, a bed rail, diapers, formula, clothes—basically everything. Meanwhile, the little girl already in our care was asleep in her room, and it was her last night with us. I couldn’t leave her alone with Chris while I ran to the store because he couldn’t pick her up if she needed him. And he couldn’t exactly run to the store by himself. So I did what I had to do. I loaded the sleeping girl into my car, bare feet and all, and drove to Walmart. It wasn’t ideal, but when we signed up to be foster parents, I fully expected that late night car seat runs might be part of the gig.

  At 1:00 a.m. we heard a knock on our door. I had prepared myself to find devastated children on our porch, and I had steeled myself for a rough night. But when the little boy, Trevor, walked into our living room, he was silent and looked scared. He was the tallest three-year-old I had ever seen. He then immediately spotted the toys I had bought for him and darted toward them. He was smiling and happy, as if he hadn’t just been yanked from his home. I made him a snack and played with the toy trucks with him. I wanted him to get a little more comfortable with his surroundings before immediately putting him to bed. I laid Ella, the two-month-old, in her crib, which we had put next to our bed. I had to pinch myself as they went down to bed like it was nothing. Was this real life?

  Both kids kept up their good behavior the next day. Our only problem was their clothes—they came with nothing, and none of the clothes I had bought Trevor fit, since he was the size of a five-year-old and I had bought him 3T clothes.

  Trevor held it together until the moment we brought him into his room for bedtime the second night. His little lips quivered, and his eyes welled before he burst into tears. My heart broke for him. This poor guy was trying to be so strong after he was ripped from his mom and taken to live with strangers. Now he lay on the floor, sobbing the saddest cry I had ever heard, completely devastated.

  I was holding back tears as I brought the boy to Chris in the living room. His two-month-old sister was crying and hungry. I had to get her a bottle.

  Chris held out his arms. “Give him to me.” The boy curled up on Chris’s lap as if he was meant to be there and buried his face in Chris’s shoulder. Within minutes, he fell asleep.

  Chris stayed with him the entire night. As I watched the two of them together, I knew we could not let these kids go somewhere else. These poor children had gone through so much already. Putting them through another transition and confusing them seemed cruel. I couldn’t do that to them, not when I felt this instant connection to them.

  CHRIS

  A couple of days later, I went out of town for a speaking conference. Emily called me between sessions. Oh no, I thought. Something happened with one of the kids.

  “Emily? Are the kids okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” she said. “I was just thinking about how that other family is coming back soon. But I’ve been thinking . . . we should just keep them. They’ve been through enough already without being uprooted again. We’ve just got to keep them.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We agreed that taking in two kids was only temporary. Where is this coming from?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice sounded wistful. “They’re just such great kids, and it’s going so well. We thought it would be crazy to have two kids, but they’re about as easy as it gets.”

  “Yeah, but that’s going to change,” I said, trying to be the reasonable one. “This is the honeymoon phase with them. Sure, it’s easy now, but it’s going to get harder.” When we got the call about the three-year-old and two-month-old, I was dead set against taking them. Why would we jump right in with two when our plan was one kid all along? The fact that it was only temporary helped ease my mind. But now Emily wanted to remove the “temporary” from the placement.

  We talked for a while without
coming to an agreement. After we hung up, I started thinking through my reasons for not agreeing to a possible long-term placement with these two. I had to admit that the experience with them had been much better than I had expected. Ella was a ridiculously good sleeper and wasn’t fussy at all. I bonded quickly with the three-year-old—he was a friendly, playful kid who loved taking rides on my wheelchair. I couldn’t be active and playful with him the way I had imagined, but as we grew closer, we found other ways to keep him busy. I was surprised to find myself developing strong feelings for them too.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized what I needed to do. I called Emily back. “Okay. They can stay with us,” I said.

  “Seriously?” she cried. “Really? I can call our caseworker?”

  “You can call our caseworker. I love these kids too. You’re totally right. We can’t disrupt their lives again. They need stability, and they have that with us.”

  I didn’t know how long these children would be with us or what God had in store for us and them. Less than a week into our foster care journey, God was already stretching us. We had our own plan going into this. God had another. Frankly, his plan scared the heck out of me. I worried it was too much, that we couldn’t handle it, that we weren’t ready. And yet God asked us to step out in faith and trust that he would take care of us. We just needed to keep saying yes.

  “Two kids is a lot,” I remember saying. “I don’t know how we’re going to handle it.” I look back on those words now and laugh. It turned out I could handle a lot more than I thought. It would just take saying yes to God a few more times.

  EMILY

  I couldn’t believe how quickly these kids began to feel like our own. And from the way the kids acted, it certainly seemed like the feeling was mutual. We kissed them to bed, told them we loved them, sang to them. Trevor was extremely attached to me, and Ella didn’t remember a mother before me. Trevor loved to dance. We would play the “Happy Song” or the Jungle Book’s “The Bare Necessities,” and he would start dancing like Baloo. Chris would ask to be transferred to the couch so he could be in a stable spot to hold Ella, and she would lie in his arms while he watched football. I knew the placement was only temporary, but it looked like they wouldn’t leave our care anytime soon, especially since their grandmother had applied for custody, only to have her home study denied.