THE STORY IN 30 SECONDS:

My brutal experience with cancer as a kid had given me a strong heart, but also a proud heart... 

For as long as I have known him, my father was a strong, kind, humble man with a pure heart. However, I was never a humble son. At least not until 2016 when he died, when my business began to fail, and when my life dumped me upside down. Humility then rapidly followed.

I had longed to embody the humility that my dad possessed, but I never could force it on myself no matter how I tried. Then, finally it seems that God used life to force it on me. It was very painful, but I am ever so grateful.

It will make me a better husband, father, and friend for the rest of my life.

Now, after my father is gone from this world, I have finally become his humble son. A man after my father's own heart.

I named my business Humble Son to help me to always keep in mind 1) how low I have been and 2) who's son I am.

Living with humility, compassion, and generosity are my primary goals at this point. Every day is a gift and none of us has done anything to deserve to even be alive.

Life is a gift. Its all a gift. And to serve one another is the greatest opportunity of all.

 OR...

THE STORY IN 5 MINUTES:

My Battle with Cancer as a Kid...

Much of my attitude towards life, adversity, faith, mental toughness, etc was set in motion due to my battle with cancer when I was 6 years old. I was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer called Burkitt's Lymphoma and given only a couple of days to live with basically zero chance of survival due to:

• the advanced stage of the cancer
• the ultra-fast growth rate of this type of cancer and
• the fact that I already had 20lbs of tumors all throughout my abdomen (in and around the majority of my internal organs) in my little 40lb body.

So as to at least try something - rather than throwing in the towel - my doctors proposed pumping me full of absolutely massive doses of chemo as an experimental treatment since I was going to die anyway.

My parents had to sign a bunch of forms that basically said that if the cancer didn't kill me, the chemo almost certainly would. And if by some sheer chance I happened to survive both, then all of my internal organs would be destroyed (and I would need to live on bags for the rest of my life), I would be infertile, and I would have severe brain damage due to the massive doses of chemo they were going to give me.

My parents signed the forms and then sat down in the hallway at the hospital and began praying and reading their Bible together. The doctors thought they were in denial and needed counseling because they were accustomed to parents screaming, cussing everyone out, and flying off the handle - which is a completely understandable reaction in such a situation.

My parents told the doctors that they were not in denial, but were praying for a miracle and trusting God with this. My two main doctors thought this was ridiculous and said so. One of my doctors was a firm atheist and the other was agnostic...so needless to say, they thought my parents were crazy.

As often happens in such a case, a "prayer chain" began. My parents called their friends to ask for prayer. Their friends call their friends. And so on, etc. Before we knew it, thousands of people around the world were praying for me.

The first few days, I was definitely on death's doorstep. They would stick a big needle through my ribs first thing in the morning and then again in the evening to drain my lungs of fluid so that I could breathe.

I remember vividly counting down the hours to the next lung draining, and dreading it because it hurt so badly. I was only 6 years old and had not gone through anything yet to prepare me to deal with such serious physical pain. Little did I know that I was in for an 8 month crash course in that LOL.

Needless to say, I did not die in ICU in those first couple days as predicted. In fact, I improved rapidly enough that they released me from ICU within one week and I was moved to a regular room.

They had begun the massive doses of chemo in ICU, and then they continued this for the next 8 months, as I lived in the hospital nearly full-time - thus missing the majority of my first grade year in school.

NO SIDE EFFECTS...

Even though these huge doses of chemo had all of the normal physical effects of chemo, they did not damage my internal organs in the slightest. My doctors presented this unexplainable "problem" to my parents and said "something is wrong...this doesn't make sense that the chemo is seemingly choosing to only kill cancer cells and leave healthy tissue untouched".

My Mom said something to the effect of "how is this a problem?? And didn't we tell you we were praying for a miracle?" My doctors were always quick to reply with "its not a miracle, its an anomaly"...or something to that effect.

During my 8 months in the hospital, I not only, underwent all of this chemo and the standard brutal day to day side effects that come with that, I also had to have countless spinal taps as a regular course of business - for various reasons - and multiple bone marrows from my hip.

DON'T WANT TO GET POKED TWICE...

Fairly early on in my treatment I realized that I hated the way local and general anesthesia made me feel. It took away my ability to control my body and it made me loopy mentally. I also didn't see any benefit to "getting poked twice" as I put it.

So I asked the doctors to stop giving me any pain meds or anesthesia for any of these procedures. My mom gave her blessing to my decision, so the doctors granted the request.

Thereafter, instead of using the traditional approaches to pain that are used in hospitals, my mom and I would just hold hands and "breathe" together and talk about fun things like going to the beach and pretend that we were there instead of here.

Needless to say, these experiences taught me a great deal about the power of the mind and the ability to overcome the weakness of the body by taking control of the mind. Strong lessons for a 6 year old. And I have been thankful for them ever since.

When my treatments finally ended and my cancer was gone, they held a big party at the hospital for me because my case was so outrageous, and so many people on staff seemed to know us and know my story by then. The "miracle boy". That kind of thing... 

Anyway, we had this party to celebrate and after that my doctors wanted to study my body for many years to come because survival of this type of cancer was so rare; and survival with zero damage from the quantity of chemo that I had received was completely unheard of.

MIRACLE TAKE 2 ... BUT NO TREATMENT THIS TIME...

During our first follow up a few weeks later, they found my cancer had come back in another location and even stronger than before this time. This time it was all up my spine. My doctors were absolutely flabbergasted because this type of cancer apparently does not recur.

They wanted to get some images from other angles before we started treatment so they sent me home to come back the next day for another CAT scan. Naturally everyone in the prayer chain got phone calls that night and the prayers began.

We came back and had the next CAT scan but for some reason the CAT scan simply produced a fog/cloud image instead of the image of the scanned area. So they sent us home and had us come back for another the next day. 

We came back the next day and they ran the CAT scan and the tumors were literally completely gone without a trace. 

In one hand they held a CAT Scan with tumors growing all up my spine. In the other hand they held a CAT scan image with absolutely zero tumors. At this point my doctors were having a hard time continuing with the "its not a miracle, its an anomaly" line.

I was the feature kid on the Children's Miracle Network Telethon that year and during an interview with one of my doctors they asked my doctor if he would call my healing a miracle? He said "well I don't know if I would call it a miracle, but it was pretty miraculous". The words came out of his mouth before he could stop them. This has always made me crack up.

I always figured God was kindof playing a game with them and saying something to the effect of "ok so you want to call the first healing an anomaly...well try this one for size then..." :)

After missing nearly all of first grade, obviously I was way behind in school. But I had an amazing teacher who cared so much that she met with me one-on-one (completely by choice and unpaid to do so) the summer after first grade and caught me up to speed super fast so that I could move on to second grade.

Her name was Mrs. Cano. She was a Hawaiian lady and she was an amazing, caring individual who I will never forget. My school was also gracious enough to allow this and they let me move on to 2nd grade without skipping a beat.

Obviously, I still bear the physical scars from my treatments. Scars in my chest from my central lines and scars in my back from the big lung draining needle those first few days in ICU. So I can never forget. (not that I ever could forget LOL).

But more importantly, I bear the effects that the experience had on my mental, emotional, and spiritual state. I found that the mind is capable of overcoming so much more than the average person thinks is possible. I found that a person can withstand anything that they choose to withstand.

I found that 99% of our physical problems are actually merely mental weakness that we can choose to overcome. And that if you can get your mind right, your body can withstand more than you ever thought possible.

I found that God can heal anyone at any time if He chooses to (why He heals some and not others is not something I even pretend to know the answer to...and on that note, I will get to the story of my Dad soon enough).

And I found that it is often our most difficult experiences that are actually the greatest blessings, because they develop our souls, our hearts, our minds, and our bodies, enabling us to handle greater and greater stresses than we ever could before.

THE POISON OF PRIDE

However, there are some drawbacks to what I learned too. The primary drawback is that I developed pride. Pride in my "ability" to handle pain, hack hardship, believe in the unseen, and overcome seemingly anything. Or so I thought.

Pride is a dangerous thing. I walked away from this experience with somewhat of an arrogant attitude about my ability to endure and overcome anything. As a result, I unconsciously held myself in higher regard than my fellow man because I thought I'd been through more than most people, and I had persevered. 

Oh ye unwise foolish youth...Pride is blind and leads to destruction....

MY FATHER

As a child, I admired my father tremendously and always longed to be a humble man like he was. But in my heart I was still proud and I didn't know how to make myself humble. I prayed for humility. I racked my brain for decades to try to discipline myself into becoming humble.

I even looked humble from the outside. But inside I was still proud. I was even proud of my appearance of humility, as ridiculous as that is.

When my father got cancer in the spring of 2012 I firmly believed he was going to be miraculously healed from his cancer, just as I was inexplicably healed from my "incurable" cancer when I was a kid.

Part of the reason I believed this is because he was diagnosed with his cancer in the same month that my wife became pregnant with my twin sons (after my doctors had told my family 25 years previous that I would be infertile from my chemo and never able to have children). I thought maybe the twins were a sign from God to let us know He was going to heal my dad too.

I prayed for his healing, and I truly believed with all my heart that he would be healed, but he didn't make it. He fought hard and suffered much for 4+ years and ultimately died in August of 2016. On his 62nd birthday.

Naturally thoughts of things I should have told him while he was still alive swim through my head continuously now.

I am at least thankful that one of the last things he ever read on this earth was my birthday card to him for his 62nd birthday (he died mid-afternoon on his birthday).

In that birthday card, for the first time ever, I told him that I admired and looked up to him more than anyone on earth and that all of my personal ambition and desire for self-glorification were now gone from my heart and that I desired only to be a humble man of God who loves and serves people like he does.

WHAT DID HE PRAY FOR?

Considering what ensued thereafter, I often wonder what he might have possibly prayed regarding me after reading that letter during his last moments here on earth before he died.

The morning after he died my life rapidly began to change. My business had already been struggling during the previous year. But at this point, it started to completely fall apart at an accelerated rate, and I found myself completely helpless for the first time in my adult life. Pieces were falling everywhere and it wasn't humanly possible to catch them all. 

I previously had always believed myself to be firmly self-reliant and resilient to all vicissitudes, and that there was nothing I couldn't buckle down and defeat through sheer stubbornness of will. My cancer experience as a kid had ingrained this thought process in me and I had carried it through my whole life up until this point.

But now, I suddenly began to find just out how vulnerable I really was. I had no solutions and was truly at a loss for the first time ever.

VULNERABILITY FINALLY PRODUCES HUMILITY...

Over the next few years I was subjected to grace, kindness, generosity, and love from friends and family to a degree that I would have never imagined.  Grace and love that I previously been too proud to ever seek or accept. 

This experience transformed my soul more dramatically than anything else ever could have. For the first time in my life I became truly humble. Humble because prolonged humiliation - and a realization of genuine vulnerability - unavoidably brings the heart into a state of true lasting humility.

The natural outgrowth of humility seems to be love, grace, and empathy for your fellow man. A desire to serve, love, and never expect anything in return. It leaves the heart is transformed forever.

These are the exact characteristics that I always observed and admired in my father. The fruits of genuine humility. 

I can now say that I have finally become my father's humble son. And I am so thankful that my sons will now get to be raised by a truly humble father, just as I was. 

I named my clothing line Humble Son so that I never forget the torch that has been passed to me. And that there is very little in life that matters more than having a humble heart full of grace and love.