The triumph of Jonathan Tjarks

Reflecting on one of the most meaningful friendships of my life.

“So are y’all like, big Tim Tebow fans? Are you allowed to drink? Tell me what that’s like.”

I barely knew what to make of the question.

It seemed like a natural idea to meet up with Jonathan Tjarks. After all, we’d been working together online for a while, we were both Texas graduates, and we’d learned we lived within a few miles of each other in the Lake Highlands area of Northern Dallas proper.

What Jon was trying to ask of me, and my wife at Pluckers’ Wing Bar; was, “What was involved in our life as Christians?” Despite Jon having grown up in Dallas - one of the chief cities of the Bible Belt - the actual Christian religion was largely foreign to him at the time. Whatever the Christian life was, it was wildly disconnected from his own experiences growing up.

Superficially, the question struck me as ridiculous. Tim Tebow? We’re Colt McCoy people, bruh. Can we drink? What’s this pint in front of me for? I stumbled through those protestations and searched for some kind of answer that would be honest, helpful to Jon, and perhaps guide him toward Jesus if he was remotely interested.

As it happened, he was interested.

I’d later find out - much later - that our casual dinner was a milestone moment in his life. He was jarred by the contrast in our lifestyles and was particularly thrown for a loop by how a dork like me was married to a beautiful wife and seemed to have something figured out that eluded him.

Of course under the surface there was an awful lot I was trying to figure out at the time. Getting married at 25 and moving to Dallas away from an Austin community I’d known as home for about a decade proved very stressful. I truthfully had no idea what to do with my life, had yet to confront this important question, and I knew the lack of an answer could doom the young marriage. I was sorting all that out, but he was in a different place in his life journey.

Nothing I said that night in response to his question, or in follow-up hangouts, or in a visit he made to my small group really seemed to land.

On one of those occasions Jon asked me another question, “so like, what are the rules? What am I supposed to do if I’m a Christian?”

I started to stutter through a generic, evangelical, “it’s not about rules, it’s about relationship with Jesus and receiving grace,” but it wasn’t connecting for him and it wasn’t doing much for me either. Jon wasn’t feeling the need to receive absolution for his sins, he wanted to know how to live, and I realized that’s what I wanted too.

Mercifully the answer I found to that question was living in Christian community. Seeking that out was why my time in Dallas was slowly leading to direction rather than flailing, but I didn’t realize exactly what I had or how to communicate or impart it to Jon.

Not long after some of those meetings with Jon, in late summer of 2013, my wife and I moved away from Dallas along with other members of the church to plant a new church in Ann Arbor, MI where I live today. But me and Tjarks had bonded over a few G-chats (remember those?) and live connections. In those moments he sensed something missing in his life that seemed present in mine - even if I wasn’t fully sure of what that was either, other than “God.”

Within my first year of moving to Michigan, I got a shocking email. Jon had decided to become a Christian.

From intellectual to interpersonal

Here was the text of Jon’s email:

“I decided to become a Christian a few weeks ago -- in the sense that was what I was going to do with my life, so I guess I took Jesus into my heart? 

The point is once I did that, everything else around me made so much more sense. If you accept the basic tenets of Christianity, than a lot of things fall into place about why the world is what it is. 

It's just much easier to see the world when you induct from first principles, as opposed to deducing from trial and error. 

Once I internalized that idea, I started inducting from first principles in every aspect of my life. 

With basketball, it's fundamentally just a 5x5 on game on both sides of the floor and a transition game in between. All that really matters is how the players affect the geometry of the floor and how their skills interact in concert. I imagine it's much the same in football, just with different organizing principles.

And once you start thinking like that, it becomes really, really easy to write. If you're inducting from first principles you aren't wasting any time. That's how Scipio writes - he writes great stuff and it doesn't take him long to do it.

So it's like, I could sit here and argue first principles all day or we're all have to agree to disagree. I don't need to prove my geometry theory to anyone because I know its right.

Somethings in life, you just have to take on faith.”

“Scipio” is my colleague Paul Wadlington, who for a longtime was the main man at the Texas football blog “Barking Carnival” where me and Tjarks both got started. He’s now with me at Inside Texas. As you can surmise, he has a great knack for seeing and understanding the world and conveying it in writing.

Jon’s writing really did take off at this point, unbelievable as it may seem. It wasn’t necessarily supernatural looking but his inspiration was. He wrote an e-book called “The Pattern of Basketball and the 2014 NBA Draft” with a forward by Zach Lowe. Jon then developed a blog by the same title, which became so effective and well read that it lead to him being hired by Bill Simmons and “The Ringer” in 2016.

We had long email exchanges for years, often on heady stuff about politics or culture or theology. Some of it insightful, some of the typical sort of “don’t people realize?” nonsense you generally get from young men who are thinking through heady topics for the first time without realizing people have thought about it long before them. Well, I at least was guilty of this, as any long-term readers can probably recognize from my theoretical musings on football.

There’s a lot of stuff in there I’ll always cherish, including bits of understanding and knowledge he imparted to me, such as his “first principles, pattern of basketball” writing formulations. It took me a long time to master anything similar, Jon had a real gift for making the complex simple.

What became far sweeter though was slowly figuring out how to impart to Jon something useful for his own life.

I mostly connected with him virtually early on, recommending a few churches in Dallas to check out including my own where he enventually landed. As someone who grew up in a church with parents who took it very seriously, it was always interesting to hear his perspective on entering the Christian world as a curious and open-minded observer.

A few early exchanges:

Jon: Do Christians actually wait until getting married before having sex?

Me: Well I know at least some do, I did.

And…

Me: It’s dangerous to numb yourself with something like marijuana I think. I used to cope with anxiety about what to do with my life by using pornography and after I broke that habit, I realized there was a well of emotion and fear underneath I hadn’t been dealing with which had stunted my emotional development.

Jon: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s pretty hard to stop though…

He got involved in my former church and plugged into the community within a weekly “life group.” He slowly transformed over time. His life cleaned up in some obvious ways and he thrived having people around him to help guide and encourage his life.

Eventually he took the job with The Ringer and married his amazing wife Melissa whom I met in one of our annual dinners when I’d come to Dallas for Big 12 Media Days.

As long as I’d known him he wanted to be married and have a family, something he’d experienced only in a broken fashion as his father had battled Parkinson’s and passed away while he was young. It was a patient process for him to join the church and trying to orient his life around the Christian walk in order to get spiritually and emotionally healthy enough to be ready to marry Melissa once he found her.

I remember him calling me before the wedding - he was in a bit of a panic over whether his profession was going to be steady enough to support the marriage. He wanted to write about basketball but he wanted to be married and have a successful family much more. Fortunately, I knew a thing or two about trying to carve out a career in this field while being a stable husband and supporting a family. Of course he was actually vastly more successful and ahead of me in the career path, but I could at least offer encouragement and understanding.

Jon and Melissa had a son, Jackson, right in the midst of the pandemic. I remember pulling away from a dinner with friends to answer a call from Jon about medical care for his baby son. There weren’t any life or death choices ahead, just the challenge of trying to make decisions for your kid. I remember telling him on the phone, “Don’t shy away from making tough choices on your kid’s behalf, there’s no running from that.”

I thought maybe I’d given him some important encouragement that would help him in his new life as a parent.

Jon had always given me great advice and tried to help me as a sportswriter; he even suggested starting this Substack you’re reading today, it was a great joy to try and impart some wisdom I’d slowly accumulated on family life. Watching him grow and thrive, even from a distance, was as satisfying as almost anything I’ve experienced in life.

You’re probably thinking, “Am I dying or something?”

I was on a little vacation during spring break in Northern Michigan in 2021 with my wife and kids when Jon asked if we could chat on the phone.

He’d had COVID along with his family. They recovered, but he was still having health issues and was in the hospital.

The issues were symptoms like night sweats which badly dehydrated him and sent him to the ER - where he’d be admitted only for doctors to struggle to diagnose the underlying issues. “You say you had COVID? Must be some sort of immune system flare up…”

I wasn’t terribly concerned about it other than the lack of a solution, which I knew had to be stressful. I think Jon was a little more concerned, and he conveyed some frustration over the lack of clear answers from doctors when I said,

“Oh yeah sure, you’re probably thinking, ‘Am I dying or something?”

I was just trying to point to the elephant in the room, to lighten any tension and communicate understanding of how stressful and frustrating the situation might be. I didn’t think it was at all likely that he might be dying. He sounded normal on the phone, just worried. One of his doctors decided to check for cancer but in a slightly amusing turn of events, accidentally explained why they were checking and why he thought it was most likely to not be cancer to another patient in Jon’s hospital room rather than Tjarks himself.

“The other guy seemed pretty reassured it wouldn’t be cancer so that’s good,” Jon said.

But of course it was cancer. Stage 4 cancer of some type of sarcoma they’d learn toward the end was so rare there were zero drugs in existence designed to target it.

That was in April of 2021. And it initiated Tjarks’ battle with cancer and ultimately his spiritual battle with the human condition.

He wrote two of the bravest and most impactful articles I’ve ever read since then. First, “The Long Night of the Soul” where he detailed receiving the crushing news and the paradoxical way faith is tested yet strengthened in such a time.

https://www.theringer.com/2021/5/20/22444532/long-night-of-the-soul

Later on, as repeated chemo attempts failed to send the cancer into remission, he wrote another amazing piece tackling the big question fathers must contemplate: “What about my family and my son?” This piece is titled “Does My Son Know You?”

https://www.theringer.com/2022/3/3/22956353/fatherhood-cancer-jonathan-tjarks

You want to know why I decided to try and get dinner with Tjarks back in 2013 at Pluckers? We’d had a lot of good conversations over G-Chat early in our friendship where we talked about the problem of fatherlessness. I don’t think I even knew it was a problem he was intimately familiar with due to the tragedy in his own family. I figured I had the solution though.

The solution, as I saw it, was we need intentional community like a church can offer to fill in the gaps we have in life. The nuclear family can’t provide it all and sometimes it goes wrong or is never even established. You need other people invested in your life in a purposeful fashion.

The solution was found in the fact that Jesus hadn’t just absolved sins on the cross, he’d left behind an imprint in the form of his church to slowly tackle the issue of the human condition and to be his hands and feet on the earth. To connect people with the heavenly father.

Tjarks explains it much better in the column above.

The full circle nature of this saga was brutal to observe. Young man grows up without a father in his formative years. He finds a friend, randomly, who points him toward living in a church community which can help fill in the gaps. His life comes together, he receives help, encouragement, and wisdom from different people around him in the community. He establishes a career, finds a wife there and marries her, has a son, and a small gap in a worldwide of struggle and misery is filled. Jackson would be even better off than Jon was - he’d have a father there to help him.

Then it’s all erased.

Paradox

Early in my time at Dallas, when I was debating whether I should try to be a sportswriter or not while working as a nurse aid at the Medical Center of Plano, I had to do a corporate training on bedside manner and relating to patients.

There was a little parable told in the training that struck me in a profound way at the time and has stuck with me ever since. It tells of a little boy who’s picking up dying starfish washed up on the beach and throwing them back in the ocean so they can live.

Some older, worn down man comes up to the child and asks, “What are you doing? There’s no point, you can’t clean this all up, you can’t really make a difference.”

The boy picks up another starfish and flings it back into the ocean, then turns back to the older man and says, “Well, it made a difference for that one.”

That’s the sort of calculation you can make with any positive endeavor on behalf of your fellow man. A little encouragement is better than none, blessing one person may not save the world but it sure means a lot to them.

The rationale certainly seemed to apply for post-diagnosis Jon. There was always the off chance he might go into remission or achieve a breakthrough or an extension on life, perhaps even a miracle. But the probability kept getting smaller. In the meantime, every day there was a chance to make a small difference for him and maybe his family.

Our friendship strengthened, which was a tremendous joy to me. I soaked up as much interaction as I could get with Jon, catching him in Dallas a few times and otherwise keeping up via text or call. Toward the end, the phone calls were much more intense.

He called me once, opening with some light chit chat about the coming Texas football season, but I could hear his voice was a bit strained.

“Hey man, how’s it going?”

“Um…(voice shaking), it’s not good man.”

Jon was in an awful lot of pain. The cancer seemed to come back stronger after every initially helpful treatment. I didn’t know much about sarcoma before all of this, but apparently the cancer grows through the bones and isn’t gentle in doing so. His body was on fire as the cancer pushed against his natural body, and he’d looked up how things often end with sarcoma and urged me not to do the same as it could be horrific to see images of how the cancer breaks through bones.

He was in a state of either excruciating pain - or the periods in between where you wait and wonder when the pain will come back and whether the rest of your life will be defined by the torture.

Having just watched Season 4 of Stranger Things, it reminded me of the way the monster Vecna kills his victims. Torturing them psychologically from within their own minds and bodies before breaking apart their bodies.

I read Psalm 23 aloud to him, which I remembered being soothing to my wife when she went into labor with our first child.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

The last parts seemed a bit shaky at the moment, but what else is there in such a time but to trust? I felt like Max’s friends, playing Kate Bush in her ears to call her back from the clutches of Vecna.

From then on we’d talk every Thursday morning and sometimes in between, as he’d fill some of the lonelier and more difficult periods of his battle with a mix of prayer and casual, distracting chit chat with different friends.

“Just so you know, this has been one of the most meaningful friendships of my entire life,” I told him.

“Hey man, that’s a two-way street, you introduced me to this life…”

“Yeah…you’re welcome I guess…”

“Hey, I would have been dead already if not for you. I wouldn’t know my wife, I wouldn’t have my son…”

There was the challenge. The paradox of Jon’s life.

As the author of Ecclesiastes put it in chapter 9:11-12

I saw something else under the sun:

The race is not to the swift
    or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
    or wealth to the brilliant
    or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:

As fish are caught in a cruel net,
    or birds are taken in a snare,
so people are trapped by evil times
    that fall unexpectedly upon them.

I once told Jon over an email, way back in 2014, “The way God pulled you out combined with what I already know are your great talents makes me think that there is probably some special divine purpose for your life. I'm excited to see the path laid out for you to walk.”

So about that…

For the last year and a half I’ve watched Jon have a profound impact on millions of people as he’s written these articles, gone on different podcasts, and been real with the challenges of having faith and pursuing community while living on borrowed time.

What I ultimately learned to impart to Jon was fellowship. A chance to be healed by following Jesus with other people all trying to patch holes in our broken world together. If my own life wasn’t enough to make me believe this was worthwhile then watching how Jon grew and thrived as a man over about a decade was pretty convincing evidence of the power of the Gospel. If we can see it in bursts now maybe there’s reason to believe we’ll see it in fullness on a later day. Jon clearly believed as much.

And yet, now he’s gone. And his family will need that sort of power in their lives more than ever in order to thrive again. For Jackson to have a similar story as Jon is going to require more people chasing him down and investing in his life to help impart the sort of guidance and encouragement fathers can do best.

Of course he was going to need that anyway. I couldn’t be more grateful for what I took from my intact nuclear family and my loving parents, yet I also took a lot from walking in community with people outside of my family. I was encouraged by such people to invite Jon in and try to walk through the difficulties of life with him in Dallas. Jon did likewise for people around him, and in doing so advanced the Kingdom of God on earth and created an increased chance of his wife and son tasting it in this life.

“So like, what are the rules? What am I supposed to do if I’m a Christian?”

"Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

1st John 5: 1-5

Jonathan Tjarks found his answer and triumphed. I’ll see you on the other side, brother.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/Lets-help-our-friend-jonathan-tjarks