Act Like You've Been Here Before
The invitation came twice. The first time, I declined. The second time, I read the line about my wife.
I was going to say no.
That’s the part nobody expects when I tell this story. An invitation to stand inside the White House and close the week at a dinner with the President of the United States, and my first instinct was to decline. It wasn’t even the first time the door had opened. It had opened once before, and I let it close.
Then a text came in plain. “Check your email for the dinner invitation.”
Dear Virgil, Your host has successfully secured an exclusive opportunity to attend Great American State Fair Kickoff Celebration with President Donald J. Trump. He is extending an invitation to you and your wife to join the event. Please register…
I grew up between Utica, New York and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Years ago I clipped a badge to my chest and worked inside the Pentagon, back when my days ran on spreadsheets and sales calls. So I am not a stranger to the corridors where American power keeps its offices, and I’ve been around long enough to keep my expectations on a short leash. An invitation like this does not make a man. At most, it is a quiet confirmation that work he has already done got seen by someone. I didn’t need the room to tell me my labor mattered. I knew what it cost to build, because I was there for the building.
Here’s what the week actually holds. Months ago, long before any of this, TPUSA RISE asked me to take part in a showing of their film, Race War. Calling it a movie undersells it; the thing works like a documentary, walking through the present and the history of ethnic struggle in this country and refusing the easy version of either. I’ll be there with my friends Stephen Davis and Vince Ellison, and with the producer, Marcus Wada. Then TPUSA RISE, the organization many of you knew as BLEXIT, asked me to stand with them for an announcement, and I learned it would happen at the White House. The dinner landed on top of all of it.
So why was I going to say no? Because the room was never the draw. I’ve watched enough good men get a seat at a famous table and start mistaking the seat for the meal. I’ve seen invitations turn into leashes. I had no interest in crossing the country to collect a photograph I could hold up later as proof of something. Declining the first time cost me nothing, and I didn’t lose a minute of sleep over it.
Then I read one line of the invitation again. You and your wife.
That line is what got me on the plane. My wife has been the quiet engine behind nearly every word I’ve published and every decision that led to a moment like this one. She is my first reader and my most honest critic, the one who tells me when a piece is true and when I’m only performing. She was there for the lean years, the pharmaceutical sales years, the move across the country, the start of a ministry that asked more of our family than either of us said out loud. The work this invitation confirms was never only mine. It was ours. So the gift was never the dinner. The gift was getting to take her.
The voice in my head tried to coach me before I told her. Act like you’ve been here before, it said. You and I both know I haven’t, and you and I both know that when I told Tomeka, I would not be able to play it cool, not for one second, not with her. I didn’t try. Some news you don’t deliver calmly. You hand it over and watch it land.
Scripture has a way of putting words to a joy you feel before you can explain it. “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 9:9). Vain there means fleeting, a breath, here and gone. The Preacher isn’t being grim. He is being honest about how short the days are, and then he tells you what to do with them: enjoy your portion, and enjoy it with her. A dinner at the people’s house is a fine thing. A fine thing shared with the wife of your youth is a better one. The proverb tells me to “rejoice in the wife of your youth” (Proverbs 5:18), and after a long road and an empty nest, that rejoicing carries a particular weight.
I know some of you will read all of this differently. A Christian, flying to a president’s table, must be chasing relevance, cozying up to power. Believe what you want to believe. I’ll only tell you the truth: I said no to this once already, and I came close to saying it again. What finally moved me was not the name at the head of the table. It was the name printed next to mine on the invitation.
So here is what I’d hand you, you who may never get an email like mine. Watch what you are willing to cross a country for. The rooms will always call, and some of them are worth entering. But a man shows what he loves by what finally moves him, and if the only thing that can get you on a plane is your own advancement, you have ordered your loves badly. Let the people outrank the rooms. Let your best news be the kind you can’t wait to share with someone you love, not the kind you hold up for strangers to admire.
And when something good comes, something you didn’t earn and couldn’t have arranged, take it as a gift and trace it back to the Giver. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17). The open door is from Him. So is the woman I get to walk through it with. The first is a fine thing that will be over by morning. The second He gave me for the road, and I don’t intend to take her for granted on the way to a dinner whose menu I’ll have forgotten by next year.
I’m going to have a wonderful time this week. I mean that. And when I tell this story to our grandchildren one day, the part I’ll linger on won’t be the President or the house. It’ll be the look on Tomeka’s face when she walks into the room, on the arm of a man who almost stayed home, still coaching himself to act like you’ve been here before.
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Really nice. ❤️ I hope you get a pic of Tomeka’s face when she walks in. So sweet.