by John W. Crowder
If you haven’t yet read Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, put it on your list. It is the kind of book that moves quietly and then sneaks up on you. The story follows a mysterious stranger named Theo, who arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the town’s residents hang on the walls, and he begins buying them one at a time, not to keep, but to return to the people depicted in them. In exchange, he asks only for their story. Theo is, at his core, a man driven by his heart. He sees people. He slows down for them. He creates space for their pain and their history.
Which is precisely what makes a moment in chapter seven so arresting. Theo recalls a man from his past and describes him like this, “I don’t know for certain, but I think he must have been a very difficult man. I never met him, but I believe that he was very much brain and not very much heart.”
I read that line and had to stop.
We have all known people like the man Theo describes. Brilliant, perhaps. Capable, certainly. But something essential was missing — a warmth, a softness, a willingness to be moved by what was happening inside another human being. The brain was fully engaged. The heart was largely absent. And the people around him felt it.
What troubles me most about that description is not that it fits a stranger. It is that it can fit a pastor. I have known ministers — good, theologically sound, doctrinally careful people — who could parse a Greek verb with precision and preach a tight three-point sermon without a wasted word, but who struggled to sit with a grieving widow long enough for the silence to mean something. They knew the right answers. They handed them out efficiently. But somewhere between the study and the hospital room, something got lost. The heart did not make the trip.
The same can be said of a father. A man can provide every material need, attend every school event, correct every behavioral misstep with logical precision, and still leave his children quietly hungry for something they cannot name. What they are hungry for is him — not his instruction, but his presence. Not his analysis, but his tenderness. Not the right answer delivered on cue, but the kind of look across the dinner table that says, I see you, and I am glad you are mine. A father who is very much brain and not very much heart raises children who grow up knowing the rules of the house but wondering if they were ever truly known by the man who made them.
Theo stands as a kind of gentle rebuke. He is not a man without a mind. But he leads with his heart, and his heart is what makes room for other people’s stories. That is the posture the pastorate requires. It is the posture fatherhood demands. The brain matters — theology matters, wisdom matters, sound judgment matters. But if the heart is not in the room, the people who need us most will eventually stop bringing us their real lives.
John W. Crowder is the Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church in West, Texas. and he is the author of Anchor Point
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