Heaven and the Highway Padre

Heaven became an even more glorious place on June 22, 2022 when my dear brother and friend entered into it; and this is our friendship origin story and a tribute to a very great man.

“I really like your jacket,” I said the very first time I ever laid eyes on him.  The jacket that had caught my attention at the UNC Cancer Center the day we met was a black leather one with the words “Jesus is Lord” written on the back.  Little did I know, when I uttered those five words more than a decade ago, that the man under that jacket was the real prize—was someone who’d help make all that I was going through feel like it had a purpose far greater than any of the pain involved.   

In my cancer journey memoir Hear I AM, I tell the story of how my compliment that day was not understood due to hearing loss and hospital noise, so I was “chased” down in the waiting area by that black leather jacket guy who wanted to know what I had said to him; and he also wanted to be sure that I had met his beloved Jesus.  I was being prepared for transplant at the time, so my blood counts were low and my face was adorned with an N95 mask (and my friend, Hollie, tried to tackle the unmasked Jesus guy as he started getting close to me).  We would find out that day that his name was Lucas, though those who knew him through his ministry affectionately called him the “Highway Padre.”  And we’d leave the hospital that day remarkably more encouraged, and all because of the Highway Padre, whom God had so graciously brought into our story.

Lucas had spent a long season of his life in law enforcement before he went to seminary and became a pastor, one focused on evangelism and a motorcycle ministry.  And he, just like me, was there at UNC for treatment.  Though we never really discussed each other’s type of disease a lot (as we were too busy talking about God stuff), I knew that his type of cancer was rare and I gathered that his outcome, like my own, was so much better than the medical professionals around him anticipated.  Unlike me though, I never got the sense that Lucas was discouraged or fearful or desiring to be some place other than where he was.  He just seemed full of goodness, full of “real” life and kind words and true joy—full of the risen Christ and thus the fruit of His Spirit. I just couldn’t get enough of the Highway Padre’s sweet presence, and I looked for him every single time I was at the hospital.

I finished treatment in late 2011 but the Padre and I kept in touch via email.  Part of his ministry was devotionals, mostly written by him, that he would email out to a long list of friends; and thankfully, he added me to that list of his. Lucas had become a minister about halfway through his sojourn here, getting a seminary degree and serving several churches in North and South Carolina. And during his years here, he went through many, many trials, most of which I wouldn’t know about, but I do know that one of his two beloved sons died before Lucas did and so did his bride, Shari, whom he was married to for five decades. Shari had health challenges as well, and she and Lucas appeared to faithfully and joyfully care for one another.

Another woman in Lucas’s life, Linda, a friend to Lucas and Shari for more than four decades, was the person who contacted me to tell me that Lucas had crossed over. Once I’d finished weeping over the reality of Lucas no longer being down here with us, I must admit that I began to feel a twinge of jealousy as I thought about all the years of friendship that Linda had had with the lovely man I’d met under the black leather “Jesus is Lord” mantle just a little more than one decade ago. He had enriched my own life so very deeply in just a few face to face encounters and many “distance” electronic ones over the course of ten years that I could only imagine what forty plus years of inner circle contact, truly living life with him, might have been like.

Shari and I would initially meet in the parking lot at the hospital; and then I would later have the privilege of breaking bread with her and the Padre at Cracker Barrel where we met so that I could give them copies of the first memoir I published, something that I decided to do in large part because of interactions like those I’d had with Lucas, ones that were undoubtedly divinely engineered.  I made two real friends during what I call my “sick season.”  The first was Jane (J.R. in the memoir), whom I had the remarkable privilege of eulogizing back in 2014.  The Highway Padre was the only other friend I made during that season, so knowing that he too has crossed over to the eternal realm feels like the end of an era of sorts.  His friendship and Jane’s got me through some of the hardest things this life has to offer up—and there are simply not enough words to express how grateful I am that God saw fit to allow me to rub elbows with the likes of them.  And while I’m selfishly sad because this world so needs people like them, I do smile when I imagine the Padre, in my mind’s eye, making the rounds in Heaven, seeing his wife and son, meeting my dad and Jane for the first time and, most especially, hanging out with that person he just couldn’t find a way to stop talking about—Jesus the Christ, the God-man who had entirely changed the direction of Lucas’s life and then, like dominoes, changed the direction of so many other people’s lives through Lucas, people like me.      

When I decided right before the pandemic to publish a second memoir about suicide in the Church (the story of my father), the Padre, Reverend Lucas Lloyd, was so very supportive and even agreed to write an endorsement. I’m not sure that Lucas realized it, but his support spurred me on to step out again with what is a very painful part of my journey here. Though I didn’t get to spend nearly as much time with Lucas I would have liked, I always got the impression that he did not shy away from the painful parts of life. He seemed to embrace them as a most real opportunity to give glory back to our Creator, to show God’s goodness in a very concrete way by continuing to worship in the middle of an event that seems so very far from our definition of “good.” Having someone in the faith, a fellow follower of The Way, whom we admire and aspire to be more and more like is so integral to our journey down here—and Lucas was one such person for me and will continue to be so even though he resides elsewhere these days. 

C.S. Lewis said that, as we age, we become either mini-Christs or mini-devils—those are the two choices, he would say, the only two.  Well, my dear brother and friend surely chose well because he looked an awful lot like that very Christ whom Lewis was talking about!  And I pray that I choose well too and that all those other people out there that the Padre influenced do also, and I know that there are lots and lots of others whom he impacted profoundly (many of whom might well be sitting on the coolest of “hogs,” wearing jackets similar to the one that drew me to the Highway Padre). And though the news of his exit from this side of life at age 83 has seemed relatively quiet thus far, I can only imagine how not quiet (in the very best of ways of course) his entrance into the Heavenly realm was; and I can say with the greatest of confidence to anyone who’ll listen that the words “Well-done, good and faithful servant!” were spoken to my much-missed friend amidst the other beautiful noises abounding in Heaven when he entered it.

*According to Lucas’s obituary (in lieu of flowers, cards or offerings), contributions to the N.C. Baptist Foundation-Ministry Integrity in Cary, N. C., the Lucas and Sharranne Lloyd Endowment Fund, are preferred.*