Grizzle sets legacy of servant leadership

by Carol E. Barnwell, editor of the Texas Episcopalian (from January 2006 issue)

Many people tend to take stock of their lives as they near 50. For some a sports car is an adequate response, for others that doesn’t quite fit the bill. David Grizzle took a leave of absence from Continental Airlines and boarded a military plane for Afghanistan where he served with the State Department for 14 months as Transportation and Infrastructure Coordinator.

"As I approached 50 I began to ask myself whether there was anything I should be doing differently," said Grizzle, a sr. vice president at Continental and a long-time member of St. John the Divine, Houston. When the Pentagon called to ask him to serve in Afghanistan, "it seemed to correspond with the sense of urging I had been feeling," he said.

A family decision

Grizzle’s wife and three sons helped make his personal quest a reality. Anne, a family therapist, describes their family as "base camp." "[Home] is like a refueling station for all of us to go out into the world with our jobs, our ministries. We come back to refuel, to be with each other and to cheer each other on. Our purpose as a family is to encourage one another in our callings," she said.

So, as family friend and fellow Boy Scout leader, Whitney Leavell would later put it: "David traded comfort of home for a hooch, a Boy Scout uniform for a bullet proof vest [and] the comfort of family for body guards . . . to improve the lives of people whose country has been war torn on at least three occasions."

Grizzle says his initial decision to go to Afghanistan was primarily patriotic. He views the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan as "must not fail." Another factor he admits, was the challenge of doing something different from the status quo.

But Grizzle said he could not have embraced this God given moment in his life without his faith. "Were I not utterly convinced of the redemptive purpose and power of Jesus Christ, I could not have done this," he said in a 2004 interview. "I had a deep interior sense that this was God’s plan for me at this time."

A year of new things

Following an abbreviated training from the State Department, "I had prepared myself to be killed, maimed or kidnapped," Grizzle said. "What I actually experienced caught me off guard."

He never felt at risk in Afghanistan, he said, although during his first missile attack experience, "I couldn’t decide whether to put on my pants and run to the bunker or climb under my bed." Fourteen months later, when the duck-and-cover siren went off during his last missile attack, Grizzle simply returned to the gym to finish his workout.

Throughout the year, he developed relationships with his drivers, the children on the street, a closely-knit worshipping community and many of the ministers with whom he worked. Colleagues describe Grizzle as a man of great empathy who embraced the customs and the people of Afghanistan.

Grizzle’s regular e-mail missives to family and friends were, at times, serious and poignant, often funny and always revealed the essence of the Afghani people along with a very personal side of Grizzle.

Through his letters, we all attended meetings at the ministries offices, ate raisins and cashews from crystal bowls, inspected roads aboard helicopters and cheered when Mujeep did his homework.

We observed the elections with Grizzle: The polling booth "consisted of open stalls with plastic sheeting overhead and within the enclosure were two voting stations…I saw a veritable parade of ladies in their uniform blue burqas coming in all directions, with all of themselves, even their feet, obscured and looking like a convergence of blue Lady Packmen" coming to vote. The Taliban blew up a bridge and people still forded the stream to vote, he wrote.

At his first board meeting with the minister of Civil Aviation and Tourism, Grizzle described the last man to sit at the large oval table: "He was dressed in the slept-in thrift store business casual of most middle management I had encountered." At a nod from the minister, the man began a sung prayer. "I had an immediate sense that this sung Dari prayer in Kabul was carrying me to a place I had not encountered before. I certainly was not going to be left out of the occasion for prayer, so I bowed my head and prayed silently as he sang . . . everyone seemed as comfortable as I had been with my having been there. This, my first board meeting in Afghanistan, was emblematic of the puzzling way that the familiar and the startlingly unfamiliar are married in daily experience here." (from Kabul Corporate Monk, Oct. 6, 2004).

Grizzle regularly shared "kabob" dinners with his Afghan drivers.

"They drove me to church, they invited me to dinner in the motor pool hooch and they told me how their families were doing . . . If I served an evangelistic purpose while at the Embassy, and I hope I did, the drivers would have been key beneficiaries . . .they were in the best position to see whether there was any difference in the conduct of one’s life from being a follower of Jesus," Grizzle said.

Grizzle attended worship services at the Christian Community Church of Kabul, established by J. Christie Wilson in the late 1950s. Four hundred regularly attended worship on Fridays, Catholics, Charismatics, Presbyterians-a broad group of people "all getting along quite comfortably." Grizzle recalls a fellow parishioner saying that such a church could not exist in America. With this much diversity "members would decide they couldn’t get along and they would split up," he said. "Here, there’s no place to go."

Grizzle remembers the congregation as "one of the most nourishing worship and teaching communities" he has ever experienced.

A lasting legacy

According to Lou Hughes, Grizzle’s immediate supervisor in Afghanistan, their role was to coach and serve as mentors to President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet. "David made an extraordinary contribution," said Hughes, a retired executive vice president of General Motors and former president of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense company. "He brought enormous energy and passion to the job. Many ministers would simply not make a decision without consulting him first," Hughes added.

Grizzle’s legacy is hundreds of miles of roads, a functioning national airline and airport, a realistic telecommunication strategy and a multilateral, multi-hundred million-dollar plan to build a significant energy transmission and distribution network, Hughes said.

While his time in Afghanistan was fruitful, it was not without its frustrations. Working with the US Government presented its own challenges and Grizzle’s agenda was sidetracked for several months in order to help plan the Hajj, transporting hundreds of thousands of Muslims to Mecca for a pilgrimage. This year’s event went smoother, he believes, because of the processes he helped put into place.

Larry Kellner, president of Continental Airlines, was happy to have Grizzle back home. "David is a highly intelligent businessman with a strong moral fiber. He’s hardworking and he gets the job done," he said. It was that tenacity that served him well in Afghanistan.

Was his quest a success? "I feel better and better about that the more distance I have from it," Grizzle said. He believes he provided an example of "good management practice" and instilled "an ethic of planning that did not previously exist."

Some roads get built and buildings get renovated, Grizzle told more than 250 people at a welcome home dinner in November. But interpersonal engagement of American to Afghan has "historically been where the true changing of hearts and minds occur."

The decision to serve might have been a patriotic one to begin with but it was evangelistic at its core. The desire to know someone else and allow him or her to know you is transformative and goes farther and lasts longer than even a new road out of Kandahar.

"We are a people shaped by the love of Jesus Christ," said Bishop Don Wimberly. "Our calling is to be agents of transformation in all that we do—within ourselves, at home, in our church communities and out into the world. David is an incredible example of someone whose faith provided the foundation for them to take a bold step and bring Christ’s example of servant leadership to people in a far away mission field. My hope is that we can all be inspired by David’s example to use our gifts to the best of our abilities," he said.

"Whatever your gift is, whatever it is that you imagine you can do -- give it a try," Anne Grizzle said. "I don’t always know whether I’m doing the right thing but I have to trust that God honors my desire." Sometimes the outcome is not the specific one you had on the agenda, she said, but "we offer it and trust the outcome."

Indeed.