Mark Hayes

Last weekend my son Hank and his sweet wife Corrie ran a half marathon in Knoxville with four of their good friends. They had trained for months for that race. Not because they thought they were going to win it. They knew better than that. Their goal was simple: finish . For them, finishing was the reward. And I love this part—they also decided they were going to run it together. Even though a couple of them probably could have picked up the pace and gone on ahead, they didn’t. They stayed...

My sweet, loving father, Owen Hayes, would say…”If a man tells you he has integrity, he probably doesn’t.” I was talking with my friend Scotty Barr the other day, and we got on the subject of integrity—where it’s gone, and why it feels so rare now. We both said the same thing almost at the same time… It wasn’t like this with our fathers. Even the most rough-around-the-edges, far-from-perfect men—guys you wouldn’t call “religious”—still had a line they wouldn’t cross. They knew right from...

When my son Isaac was little, we’d go to the YMCA to swim. The pool was split by a rope— shallow end on one side, deep end on the other. If you wanted the deep end, you had to prove it. Jump in. Swim across. Come back—no struggle. Isaac wanted the deep end. So he took the test. And he passed. They gave him a little yellow bracelet— and he wore it like a badge of honor. Because that bracelet meant something: There was evidence. Now here’s what made it real… There were times Isaac struggled in...