My grandfather once owned a general store in Hamilton, Alabama. His father had given him the money to start it, and for a while it did what a country store does. It fed families, kept the town supplied, and carried a lot of people on credit.
Then the recession came. His customers lost work, and the tabs stopped getting paid. He couldn't sell groceries to people who couldn't pay for them, and he couldn't keep the shelves stocked without the money they owed him. In the end he had to close.
He told me about that day only once. He locked the doors, got in his car, and drove out to a bridge where he could be alone. Then he sat there and thought. Years later, my childhood home would sit right in front of that same bridge.
I've pictured that scene more times than I can count. A young man with his father's money gone, a building full of unpaid tabs behind him, and nothing in front of him he could see clearly. Most of us know some version of that drive.
The decision
Somewhere on that back road, my grandfather made a decision that shaped the rest of his life. From then on, he would only worry about the things he could control.
He couldn't control the economy, or whether his neighbors found work, or whether the money ever came back. He could control what he did the next morning, how he treated people, and whether fear got to run his life.
It sounds simple, and in one sense it is. But I watched him live by it for decades, and I learned that simple and easy aren't the same thing.
The paper in the drawer
After he died, we went through his papers and found his Navy discharge papers. It noted that he had suffered from a nervous disorder.
I read it twice. It made no sense to me. My grandfather was the calmest, most collected man I have ever known. He faced nearly a decade of cancer without flinching. When the doctor told him it had reached his brain, he asked a few direct questions, then turned to my father and asked where they were going to eat.
That paper changed how I saw him. His calm wasn't a temperament he was born with. It was something he chose, then practiced, until it became who he was. The man with the nervous disorder became the steadiest man in the room, and that gives me more hope than any natural calm ever could.
A philosopher he never read
As far as I know, my grandfather never read Epictetus. But Epictetus opens his Handbook with almost the same words my grandfather lived by: some things are within our power, and some are not. Our judgments, choices, and actions are ours. Our bodies, property, reputation, and circumstances are not. Peace, he taught, comes from tending the first and releasing the second.
Epictetus had earned that teaching. He was born a slave, he was lame, and he was later exiled. He didn't learn the dichotomy of control in comfort. Neither did my grandfather.
But my grandfather went one step further than Epictetus could. The Stoics believed the world was ordered by the Logos, a divine reason running through all things. They trusted it, but it couldn't know them or love them back. My grandfather believed the Logos that held everything in order was God, the same Word that John says became flesh and lived among us.
That changes everything about letting go. Stoic surrender meant accepting fate. My grandfather's surrender meant trusting a Father. He could release what he couldn't control because he knew whose hands it was in.
He was a Stoic, but he was a Christian Stoic.
What he passed down
I've struggled with anxiety my whole life. I think I inherited it from him. But I inherited something else from him too, and I didn't realize it until much later.
He never sat me down and taught me philosophy. I just watched him. I watched him close the door on his losses, face his diagnosis, and spend his last three months dying in calm instead of fear. The lesson wasn't taught to me. It was burned into me.
Now I can study what he simply lived. I can read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the early Church Fathers, and the Desert monks who borrowed Stoic tools and pointed them toward Christ. In this series, I want to walk through that tradition one piece at a time, and test each piece against the life of a country man who never read a word of it but practiced it better than most who have.
If you've ever had your own version of that drive, with the doors locked behind you and no clear road ahead, this series is for you. We start where he started: with what is ours to control, and with the One who holds the rest.
