Soon after the video ends, and his son’s face fades from the screen, Ron Stiles takes the microphone and steps onto the stage.
His black Nike shoes are a little big. Two sizes too big. But he wears them to talks like this because they give him comfort.
The shoes are his son’s.
“I will never be able to fill them,” Ron Stiles will say later. “But I can walk in them.”
Even for Ron, a Miami County commissioner who’s done his share of public speaking, these events are never easy. Not for wife Connie, either.
They’re forced to relive the night their son Nathan, a high school senior playing the last football game of his career, collapsed on the sideline. Several hours later, he died.
They talk about the pain they’ve endured since, how instead of helping him pick out a prom tux, they chose his gravestone. How from the beginning they knew they didn’t want anyone to feel any guilt — they say Nathan would be furious if he thought anyone felt blame for his death.
They describe their boy — strong in his faith, a straight-A student and star athlete — they can no longer hug. The two also get to tell the whole story; that’s the good thing about these talks.
Not just the story that starts on the Osawatomie High School football field Oct. 28 and ends the next morning in the intensive care unit at the University of Kansas Hospital.
They can tell how Nathan lives on.
“Nathan loved Jesus,” Ron says, his voice even with a touch of country.
And the teenager wanted others to have the same relationship. That’s why Ron stands here, in the Olathe Christian Church auditorium, before 100 people, most of them strangers.
To talk about The Nathan Project.
• • •
In the last two hours of Nathan’s life, dozens of teens — football players, youth group kids and childhood friends — came to his ICU bed to say goodbye.
They spoke to him, talked of their times together.
After his death, his mom worried about those teens. Nathan wasn’t perfect by any means. But he held his virtues and morals close and would talk about them, talk about God, if others asked. He led by example.
Without him, what will happen to these kids?
She woke up that Saturday morning, a day after she last saw her son alive, and knew what they had to do.
Buy Bibles. Pass them out at his memorial service. Encourage kids to read Scripture.
Ron liked the idea. So did Natalie and other family members.
They could launch these projects in schools and churches around Miami County. Maybe farther.
We’ll call it The Nathan Project, Connie thought.
For years, her son would make fun of her for all the things she did around the house, from painting the kitchen to rearranging a room. He’d call them her “projects.”
Now she’d help create one for her son.
“What he was trying to do in his life, we are trying to do after his life,” Connie said.
• • •
A week after losing their son, Connie and Ron, along with Natalie, stood in front of 3,300 people in the Spring Hill High School gymnasium for a celebration of his life.
In front of them, on the basketball court where Nathan would have practiced in another week or two, stacks of Bibles covered long tables.
The family said they believed Nathan’s death was part of God’s plan. That something good needed to come from the tragedy.
As the school’s principal, Angelo Cocolis, said later: “If anyone can learn from this, it’s the strength of a family. The strength of this kid.”
Providing Bibles would be just the first step of the family’s project. They also would set up groups to study the Bible. They’d sell shirts and bracelets, with all proceeds buying more books. God would guide them, they said.
When the memorial service ended, 600 people left with Bibles and a commitment to one year of study.
“Anybody who was in that memorial service, there was no mistake what his testimony was,” said Doug Chisam, Osawatomie High School’s principal, who has watched many of his students grow stronger in their faith since Nathan’s death.
Having teens sign a commitment to attend Bible study took faith to a higher level for the young people, he said.
“I think it’s changed a lot of lives forever.”
Since the memorial service, school administrators in Osawatomie and Spring Hill — as well as students themselves — say they see teens showing more compassion toward each other, more of an understanding that bad things can happen.
Courtney Swope, the Spring Hill homecoming queen who was dating Nathan when he died, said some teens started going to church. Others joined youth groups.
“Everyone saw that you weren’t promised the next day, you weren’t promised a future,” she said.
• • •
Eight students were spread out in Rodney Madden’s classroom at Osawatomie High. Their Bibles from The Nathan Project, with the orange-checkered covers, lay open in front of them.
It was a little after 7 one morning last week. Some of the kids had just rolled out of bed.
They didn’t have to be here. They wanted to be here.
Since mid-February they’d been coming to these weekly Bible studies. Each class has a theme, selected Scriptures they take turns reading aloud.
Studies like this also take place in Spring Hill and at Nathan’s church, Hillsdale Presbyterian EPC. Dozens of teens and some adults attend.
On this day, it’s tough questions about the Bible.
“Who remembers Santa Claus?” said Troy Bomgardner, an assistant football coach who was on the field the night Nathan collapsed and led the two teams in prayer. Now, with assistant coach Madden, he runs The Nathan Project at Osawatomie High.
Hands went up slowly.
“How do we know he’s not real?”
Well, their parents told them long ago.
“So, how do we know God isn’t the same way, that he wasn’t made up?”
As the lesson continued, Nathan’s name never came up.
Just as Ron and Connie Stiles wanted, said Darbey Madden, a junior, who has heard the parents speak.
“They didn’t want it to be about learning about Nathan, but learning about Jesus,” Darbey said. “That’s what Nathan would have wanted.”
They come to ask questions and spend time with other teen believers.
“Sometimes you can feel like you’re the only Christian in the school,” said Daniel Dorsett, a senior. “Nathan’s boldness has inspired a lot of us here to be more bold and outgoing in our faith.”
• • •
Connie was nervous. What would she say to these kids? She didn’t know how to help them, how to reach them.
She’d never been to the Johnson County Juvenile Detention Center before. But The Nathan Project had just delivered dozens of Bibles there.
She could imagine Nathan’s voice: “Come on, Momma, suck it up. You’re going to wimp out on this? You always told me to do my best.”
Walking down the stark white halls of the detention center, she and Ron learned of the kids housed there — many even younger than Nathan and Natalie. Some have assaulted people or broken into cars and houses. Many have fallen into drugs and alcohol.
In one wing, where some youth facing harsher charges are held, the parents peeked into a cell. It was all stainless steel, the sink, bunk and side table.
There on the table near the bed was a Bible. The one with the orange-checkered cover.
It was open.
• • •
It started with an email, Ron tells the audience inside Olathe Christian Church.
“… If you would have a moment of time, I really think what you would have to say would help,” the college football player wrote Ron.
In the days after Nathan’s death, Ron says, the family got tons of email. Some from teens who knew Nathan and were moved by him in life and death. Others from strangers who said they admired the family’s strength.
This one stood out. Andrew Hudson played defensive end for Oklahoma State University and suffered a concussion a few days before Nathan’s death.
While he was doing physical therapy one day, and deciding whether he would continue playing football, a trainer handed him a story about Nathan.
“This kid reminds me a lot of you,” the trainer told Andrew.
He read about Nathan and his faith and how he died after the last game. Still, Andrew didn’t want to let football go. If he did, football would beat him.
Ron sent an encouraging reply.
They could have kept up their communication long-distance. Instead, Andrew drove to Spring Hill.
“I don’t understand why I’m here, why I came,” he said when Ron met him in the drive.
Ron tells the crowd that he did.
Andrew’s a lot like Nathan, Ron says. In little ways, like how he likes Cheerios (though he doesn’t eat them in hot water the way Nathan did) and how when Ron first met him in the drive he got out of his car sock-footed. Nathan always was slow to get his shoes on.
But also in big ways, ways that comfort Ron and Connie. Andrew is eager to bring other people to God. He doesn’t mind telling his testimony, which now includes Nathan and his family.
It also includes his decision to stop playing football. Though the Stiles family didn’t ask him to quit, they were part of the decision, Andrew said.
“When I saw how much they hurt, I didn’t want to put my family through it. Or them (the Stiles family) through it again.”
The first time he met the Stiles family, he stayed the night in their house. The next morning he went to church with them.
Andrew now throws the discus at Oklahoma State. Members of the Stiles family have gone to three of his track meets. Andrew calls them his Kansas family.
As the event inside Olathe Christian Church winds down, Ron and Connie seem exhausted. Like energy has been wrung out of them.
Yet they feel renewed. Knowing they’ve told Nathan’s story and spread the word to dozens more people. So far, The Nathan Project has purchased nearly 4,400 Bibles and given away more than half.
“I love the way you are handling it,” a woman says as she leaves the auditorium.
“We’re trying,” Connie answers.
Ron adds: “God definitely takes you through.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last of three parts
He missed most of his senior year. The prom.
This Saturday, inside the Spring Hill High School gymnasium, Nathan Stiles would have graduated.
He’s been gone for nearly seven months. Friends and family, though, say he lives on. Through memories. Through faith.
“Hey Nathan, whats up bud,” a friend wrote last week on his Facebook page. “I know you are in Heaven looking down on us. Just thinking about you. Thanks for the influence you had on all of us.”
The Nathan Project
For more information, go to www.nathanproject.com.
In his own words
When Nathan Stiles began his freshman year in 2007, one of the assignments was to write a letter to his future self, to be read when he graduated.
On Sunday, during his graduating class’ baccalaureate, sister Natalie read the letter. Ron and Connie Stiles heard it for the first time.
“There’s just one really big hope I have about the man reading this paper,” Nathan wrote to himself. “My fear is that all his morals will go straight down the drain because he just wants to impress others. I don’t ever think I would let that happen …”
Near the end of the letter, he wrote:
“It is really hard to imagine that I’m ever going to graduate and eventually read this letter … but life definitely comes way too fast.”
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