An Index of Songs

1. We Weren’t Born to Follow by Jon Bon Jovi
2. Mexico Lindo Y Querido as performed by Mariachi Los Camperos
3. Dear Mama by 2Pacmen
4. Mojado by Ricardo Arjona
5. A Little Fall of Rain from Les Miserables
6. Just the Two of Us as performed by Will Smith
7. My Little Town by Simon and Garfunkle
8. Valleys Fill First by Caedmon’s Call
9. Freshmen by the Verve Pipe
10. In My Father’s House by Rich Mullins
11. Fools Rush In by Elvis Presley
12. Una Experienca Religiosa by Enrique Iglesias
13. How Great Thou Art as performed by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir
14. Man on a Mission by Van Halen
15. It Was a Very Good Year by Robbie Williams
16. If I Ever Lose My Faith in You by Sting
17. The Windmills of your Mind as performed by Sting
18. Let’s Get It Started by the Black Eyes Peas
19. Oh by Eric Hutchinson
20. An Unexpected Song by Sarah Brightman
21. What If I Stumble by DC Talk
22. Piensa en Mi by Valeria Lynch
23. Razzle Dazzle by Richard Gere
24. Think for Yourself by The Beatles
25. California Here I Come by Sophie Hawkins
26. Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell
27. A Maze of Grace by Avalon
28. Ride by Amanda Marshall
29. Heaven in the Real World by Steven Curtis Chapman
30. Superstar from Jesus Christ Superstar
31. Joy in the Journey by Michael Card
32. Somewhere North by Caedmon’s Call
33. What I Really Want to Say by Steven Curtis Chapman
34. I Can Only Imagine by Mercy Me
35. Harder to Breathe by Maroon 5
36. Nothing Else Matters by Metallica
37. That’s What Faith Must Be by Michael Card
38. Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkle
39. Sometimes When We Touch by Dan Hill
40. Un Dia Normal by Juanes
41. Fallin’ Apart by the All American Rejects
42. Crazy by Aerosmith
43. Somewhere in the Night by Scott Bakula
44. Losing My religion by REM
45. I Still Believe by Mariah Carey
46. Falling in Love is Hard On the Knees by Aerosmith
47. It’s my Life by Jon Bon Jovi
48. Memory by Elaine Pagen
49. The End of the World as performed by Susan Boyle
50. I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables
51. Were It Not For Grace by Larnelle Harris
52. A Brand New Day by Joshua Radin
53. It Hasn’t been Long Enough by Eric Hutchinson

53 It Hasn't Been Long Enough- An Epilogue

So that was over four years ago when all of these things occurred and a very logical question proceeds, what’s happened since or what are your thoughts? The simple truth is that I spent a while wondering in the wilderness if you will, unclear as to who or what I was, sincerely believing that I had destroyed what I was born to do. Those thoughts and days are still relatively common in my life today, days where I look into the mirror and feel like I have failed faith, life, my mother and almost all the things that matter in life. Those can be dark disheartening days but they are less common.
There have been more than several occasions where I have gone to church since then. Some of those were simply because of weddings, baptisms, etc but a good half of them have been because I, sometimes, just missed it. Invariably, the reaction I have is almost identical. I don’t know what post traumatic stress disorder is like exactly but I imagine its what I go through. I’m, generally speaking, a guy of little anxiety and low stress but when I’m there it feels like my system is shutting down. It lasts a solid ten to fifteen minutes before I am able to deal with it. It’s frankly speaking, very odd. Some who I’ve talked to about it have tried to tell me that it’s the holy spirit trying to move me but it feels more like water trying to drown me. It’s the closest thing I know to have had to a panic attack and its fairly consistent when I am inside a church. Perhaps there’s a day where God and I will get back together but in those times when it’s clear that the stress is so overwhelming, I doubt it will happen. If it ever does, it will be a while because it hasn’t been long enough.
Shannon and I had our rough patches, the worst vividly described here. We are these days very happy though and well connected. In fact, I think we would both say that 2009 was the happiest year of our married years together. I hope 2010 surpasses it. We continue to chase our dream list, in fact just a few days before the writing of this we completed a marathon together and chose it because it was on Valentine’s day. We’re deeply in love and have more grown up and realistic views and choices about sex, love, marriage and life. We’ve bought a house in Austin where she came to the University to get her Master’s in social work. I have spent over 4 years now as a juvenile probation officer and despite a couple of job offers to get me back into a world that makes more money, I’ve stayed here because I believe in what I’m doing.
We have a little girl, Kiana Lys Leon, who is now 3 years old. In order to make sure she got a better name than my dog (Puppy), we had a baby naming contest. This was won by an old friend from high school, Maydi Aguilar. Many had said that maybe I could stay out of the church but once we had a child we’d want to make sure she was raised in it. One of the best and worst things about being me is that being aware of psychological and sociological typical stuff, I often consciously ignore it. Anyway, she does go to church on a semi-regular basis but that’s because her mother is paid to at the church’s daycare. She asks us questions about the Bible and we answer them as honestly as we can but also teach her that not everyone agrees. She’s asked us question as to “who is God” and “why do people die” and it has led to many fruitful conversations.
But even that has not taken me back to church or to God. This is invariably disappointing for a good chunk of those reading and arguably for the one writing it but sometimes I think of God the way I did of Natalie. It was a relationship that was intense and overwhelming and had a lot of passion but I’m not sure it was healthy and its arguable that we’re both better off without each other.
Ironically, I still try to keep many of the tenants of my faith. I still tithe 10% of my income but now it goes to charities, keep the Sabbath to such a degree my job knows about it, still follow the Adventist dietary guidelines even though I suggested when I was a regular church goer that they were no longer applicable. I still keep the alcohol, tobacco, drug and caffeine aspects. I’ve not been perfect as I’ve been drunk once in my life on 08/08/08 because my friends kept insisting on the celebration of my 08/08/80 birthday.
I do want to clear something up in this epilogue. This wasn’t an autobiography; it was a story about a very particular frame of view. If it was autobiographical, it would have been lighter, funnier, telling more of the things that I think are amusing in life. It was a journey about a boy who wanted to become something, did so and then failed at it and may never quite forgive himself for it.
The best part of this journey has been that I’ve been able to find a large percentage of the people who made the story who I had completely been out of contact with. I tried to look for the lions share of everyone who made the story and send them what I had written about them and see their response both to it and how their memory is different from it. I’ve been amused at the things that I couldn’t remember and that I’ve gotten wrong: I’ll give you a couple of examples. Alycia, who wasn’t even at my wedding, got promoted to a bridesmaid. Josie, who wasn’t there that high schoolyear, snuck into my room in the middle of the night somehow. I said in the prologue, “Is this story true? No, it’s just what I remember” and you can see now the faultiness of the human memory. I’ve gotten some remarks from feedback that may well best encapsulate what all has gone on in here. One friend said that I was a narcissistic, self centered selfish guy who was extremely honest about it and that there was something refreshing about that. Another person said they remember as someone who had a huge ego but somehow a bigger heart. One person asked that I remove their name from the story. Another was just glad that we were able to find each other. I’ve thanked my stepfather for being my true father and apologized for the fact I stopped calling him dad. I’ve realized during the middle of this just how dumb it might have been for Shannon to stay with me and how grateful I am that she did.
The other great realization during this has been a nagging question. I am not certain as to which affects which more. Does our past affect our view of the present more or does our present affect our view of the past more? There’s no way to know but I think it may be a coin toss on any given day.
But writing all this down now is done now and for the first time ever, I’m much closer to making peace with all this. Invariably, someone will note that its not a great ending; well I’m still alive so my life’s not over would be my first answer. My second would be that life is not usually all cleaned up nicely and packaged with a bow.
Still, faith and I failed each other and that is the sad reality of my life. If you’ve come this far with me, please be so kind as to write me a few notes about what you think of it all. I don’t expect the comments themselves necessarily to be kind or in agreement but I imagine that you wouldn’t allow a friend to spill their guts to you over a conversation and then sit in silence. I have let you intimately into my mind and my life; please share what you think of it all.
I’ve got nothing left to say other than that the next entrance is a list of all the songs and the artists. In my mind, this would be read with that song playing in the background. Most of the chapters have a direct quote from the song that they share a title with and they almost all tell you something else about the emotions. I don’t expect anyone to do this, of course, but if there’s a chapter that you thought was particularly significant, try it with that one. Take care and thank you for your time.

52 A Brand New Day

When you lose your life’s purpose and what you have pursued for almost two decades, it’s tough to look at yourself in the morning. The job I had found was in sales as a yellow page salesman, probably only a notch or two above used car salesman. Perhaps at some level I had always been a salesman but this was the first time I realized. I had broken records during those school fundraisers, sold my mother’s burritos, recruited for both my high school and my college and been as avid of an evangelist as I knew how. So possibly it was inevitable that my first job after all this was going to be sales. During the nearly month wait until I started it, I found a temporary job mostly to pass the time because it didn’t really pay well. I became a valet driver which really means a valet parker where you make essentially minimum wage and then sprint back and forth hoping for a good tip. When I was in high school I had hoped to become a janitor and this was the closest to that I’d ever become and rather enjoyed it. It was winter in Arlington so it was cold but it was invigorating to at least have some activity. It may have been no more than when you feel like you’ve lost so much you’re willing to hang on to almost anything.

Eventually, I started my new job as a salesman. It was the first time I’d ever “sold” anything I didn’t believe in; not so much that I didn’t’ believe the yellow pages worked but simply that I didn’t care. It was entirely on commission but I worked as hard as I could on it and did very well. We had something called the “Rocky of the Week” and two of us tied for who got it the most, the company’s most established salesman and me. I was making tons of money by comparison to anything I’d ever made and I frankly didn’t know what to do with it. I was buying very expensive lunches most days. I bought my first car completely in cash (on an amusing side note, I actually showed up with several thousand dollars of cash at the dealership not realizing that cash typically meant a cashier’s check). Shannon had chosen to attend the University of Texas in Austin and we were waiting for later in the summer to move down there. When we finally did move down, we got our entire possessions on the smallest uhaul truck rental with room to spare. We moved into a luxury apartment that even had a backyard for puppy. With all the money I had made we bought several pieces of quality furniture in order to have more than the mattress and the chairs. For some reason the day that we started amassing more stuff it really depressed me, I was enjoying the freedom of not owning much.

I transferred within the yellow pages and my success continued in Austin. Shortly after I arrived there, I actually sold the spine of the yellow pages which paid enough commission to where I paid Shannon’s first semester and books with it with $18 left over. Easy come, easy go I guess…Still life was incredibly hollow and I wasn’t finding a replacement for all I had failed and walked away from. The first several months in Arlington and Austin were spent what can be kindly described as walking through the wilderness. It was a mind frame that I wouldn’t snap out of for a while but that goes beyond the scope of our story. Sadly, disappointingly, brokenly, I accepted that God and I were broken up that we were part of each other’s past and not likely part of each other’s future. I missed him but sometimes I missed Natalie as well and that didn’t mean that relationship was healthy.
The money was great but it was mostly piling up since neither Shannon nor I have ever been materialistic. But I had to constantly hear about Shannon’s social work classes and missed actively helping people. The best parts of me felt secluded and while I was the first to volunteer to help someone move or some small tasks, those were hollow. Eventually I started remembering my work with juvenile delinquents and headed to the Travis County Juvenile Agency and asked who they worked with. They gave me a couple of names and also mentioned that they were themselves hiring. I would apply with all three agencies and oddly enough the government one was the one that got back to me first and offered me the highest pay. As it was, it was still half of what I was making as a salesman so it was going to be a huge paycut. This was a tough decision as Shannon was going to stop working so not only would I reduce my income, hers was going to be disappearing altogether. No matter what I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with that job as a salesman, it was a place where I was only working for money. I know we all work for money but it’s a rough life if that’s the only reason. My sales figure were so impressive at the time I left that the regional director (about three notches above my actual boss) called me into his office and tried to convince me to stay saying I was exactly the kind of employee they were always looking for. I thanked him for his kindness and shook his hand but passed on the opportunity.

My frame of mind and decisions for a while after the Marshall Islands were reflective of a man who had lost all he though he ever lived for but slowly if not destructively I started to get a more even keel. I started focusing on these juvenile delinquents, these kids who thought crime was the better way and started realizing that I wasn’t that different than them; I’d just been luckier. That luck can be ascribed to better parenting, or randomly better genes but I hadn’t chosen those either. In opposition to being a pastor where people felt the need to commend you on way too many things, this was the definition of a thankless job. The community generally thinks you’re being too easy, the kids are tough to get to care; the parents think you’re being too hard and it burns through a lot of people fast. But I believed in what I was doing and kept at it.

Not too long after I started, I got a phone call from Dr. Cruz’s attorney informing me that my closest mentor had been convicted of an inappropriate relationship with a juvenile, would have to register as a sex offender and that the next day was his sentencing. He asked if there was anyway I could make up there to speak on his behalf. I immediately agreed and the attorney again elaborated that he had been found guilty, that he had done this. I acknowledged that I understood and went down there to speak on his behalf. That night I stayed at Kisha’s house and we talked about the strange twists and turns of life. When I had originally visited Dr. Cuz, he had explicitly suggested that I should apply to replace him. I had shrugged it off at the time and changed the conversation but now Kisha again asked why I hadn’t done so. I again shifted the gears of what we were talking about but reflected on the fact that my mentor and I had also failed each other. She was also going to be testifying on his behalf in order to describe how in two years of working with her in a small closed office he had never come close to being inappropriate with her. I don’t recall why but the attorney had me go first and the district attorney and Dr. Cruz’s attorney took turns questioning me. Apparently Dr. Cruz had been willing to plead guilty for a medium level of sentencing but this small county DA wanted him to plead to something that came with a 30 year sentence out of 40 possible. This was a lot to ask of a man in his mid sixties. Again, by all accounts, this had been consensual and short lived though that doesn’t mean to minimize its inappropriateness. Actually, when Kisha and I had ridden up on the elevator to the court that morning, we had coincidentally ridden up with her. She and her family made some comments about Dr. Cruz that were tough to hear.

The DA was floored when she asked me on the stand what I did for a living and heard that I worked with kids. It was the only time she looked up from her paper of questions and in a surprised tone asked how I could testify on behalf of someone who had done this a juvenile. I think the question was not prepared and one of the rules my attorney friends tell me is to never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to. I looked at the jury box and talked about the good influence that this man had been in my life and then ended with, “A man should have to pay consequences for all of his actions but he should be measured by the whole of his life not just his mistakes.” After I had said my piece, I looked at Dr. Cruz and we exchanged a knowing and heart breaking glance and that was the last time we ever saw each other.

Several people had been asked to testify on his behalf. Here was a man who had spent decades serving the church and helping lots of people and while there were plenty of people who testified on his behalf but one thing that struck me. While quite a few had at one point been employees of the church, the ones who spoke at his trial were all retired. I’ve never been more proud of Kisha, the only person who was still an active church employee who testified on his behalf. Dr. Cruz’s attorney apparently wrote down what I said and repeated it several times during his closing statement. Its impossible to know whether or not it made an impact but while Dr. Cruz did have to register as a sex offender and did get a 20 years probationary period but he only had to serve 4 years in prison. This was the maximum he might serve but he would be eligible for parole after three.

I went home that day thinking about the twists and turns of all of this. After heading to my office, I sat down and started working on some of these cases. Maybe there would be no faith element, perhaps humanity was all we had; maybe each other was where we needed to turn for measures of grace and kindness. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be so connected to those who had heaven on their minds if their feet weren’t firmly planted on earth anyways. Faith and I had failed each other; the soundtrack of quiet desperation would be played over the rest of my life. But maybe, just maybe, it would all be okay. At that moment, I was likely rolling my eyes at God and He may well have been returning the favor.

51 Were It Not For Grace

In case there was any doubt that the dream was dead, shortly after arriving back in the United States, I received a letter, actually both Shannon and I did. It was a letter from Pacific Union College letting us know that we were banished from their city set on a hill. More specifically, it was a letter letting us know that this was their notice that if we ever stepped on their campus again, they would be calling the police for criminal trespassing. They also noted that this applied to any property they own including many of the homes that several of the faculty members lived in, the businesses in town and many of the nature trails around there. In short, they wanted us to never step foot again into Angwin.

I can’t say that I blame them being this away from it. While neither then nor now do I consider myself a grave danger to society of people at large, they had to work from the fact that they had in fact given me an opportunity, perhaps a very unique one and that I had treated it with disdain. If I really didn’t care I should have not taken the opportunity to go to Majuro, it would have been far more honest. Plus, sexual sin is always more scandalous and better gossip and now I had taken part of it with two different students of theirs. However, can I say that I took it as gracefully then; of course not. I had lost my purpose in life; I had failed at what I was born to do and I had not come anywhere near replacing it. I was a broken, bitter shell of the person I was. The natural jovialness in my personality was still present but this was one of those times in life where you’re scraping the bottom with every other movement. Out of the same stubborn pride that I had made the t-shirts with, I almost framed the letters banishing me and put them up on my wall; they would have been the only decorations. I didn’t both because it would have been stupid and because at the end of the day, when I allowed myself to be completely candid, it stung rather deeply that the school that once had heavily recruited me and also had given me a full scholarship was now officially exiling me. I do think its ironic that despite that fact to this day my email is under their college domain and that every year, sometimes multiple times a year, I get letters from them requesting alumni donations. I can’t say that I’ve ever made a donation.

Shortly after a few friends realized I was back in Texas and in the area, I received a phone call from an old friend, Kisha Norris. The girl who I had once thought of as the most political person I know was calling to simultaneously share concern and frankly to gossip. Jaime Cruz, the last of my three great mentors, had also fallen. Pastor Gonzalez, the Pastor who baptized me, had left the ministry due to marriage complications. Jerry Cates, the man who had made my Adventist schooling possible, had left because he decided faith was not reasonable and perhaps even counter productive. The last great mentor in my life, Jaime Cruz, who had tried to show me truth, humility in my last two years of high school, the man who had conducted my wedding was the only one left…until he wasn’t. Kisha called to let me know that he had been arrested for having sex with one of his students. By all accounts, including the victims, the girl had offered herself to Dr. Cruz and he had gone along with it. I don’t mean to suggest by that last sentence that he was in anyway excused or to minimize the fact that a man in his sixties had taken part in sexual relations with a 17 year old. He was older, wiser and more mature in the ways of life and the world and he should have known better and done better and I don’t know why he didn’t but for some reason at the time I found a small measure of comfort in the fact that “she had started it.” Nonetheless, he was arrested for statutory rape, fired midyear and he was released on bond to serve house arrest. The thought certainly crossed my mind that if Dr. Cruz, Jerry and Pastor Gonzalez had all failed that perhaps our standard for pastors or for human was so high that it was unachievable for most if not for all.

Kisha was a little taken aback by my response that we should visit him. She said that she wouldn’t know what to say and I agreed that I would not either but that wasn’t the point. She dismissed me saying that it would be too awkward. Still despite what she was doing, that same weekend that I found I drove out to his house and visited with him. By court order and out of common sense, we didn’t talk about what had happened. He and I had not been in contact for a while so he didn’t know anything about my scandals and that certainly didn’t appear to be the time to tell him. We talked, at points about old times, at points about nothing more exciting than the weather, at points we did nothing but sit in silence. His wife was at the house but I never saw her since she understandably never came out of her bedroom. I hugged him goodbye and told him that if there was anything he needed, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

I then began a campaign among our old friends from high school who lived in the nearby area and both those who lived further away. While my memory exaggerated exactly how alone I’d been, I realized that sitting at home with nothing to do but think about your failures was tough. When I had gone through it, it would have helped to have a few friends like biblical Job’s were when he initially went through his bad circumstances. Sure the story talks about how they talked too much eventually and misunderstood the situation but what a lot of people miss in the story is that they sat with him for a week without saying anything. These were the friends that had helped me best get through my ordeal; Orlando and Julia, Joseph and Sal, Winter, Mark to name a few. Eventually some of them would get their licks in and take their verbal shots at me and that was fine but they also had sat with me in silence and done nothing other than help me cry.

I was and am open to the fact that so many people so quickly abandoned me during my crisis was due to my faulty personality, my leave-much-to-be desired character. It takes only a cursory reading of all this or a casual conversation to realize that at some level I am proud, stubborn, at points defiant, at others condescending and can come across as smug and superior. Those are all attributes that when people love me they can spin more positively, even embrace at some point but if they don’t like me, they can easily paint me as one arrogant bastard. Still, none of those attributes could be placed on Dr. Cruz. He was a man who was so buoyant he generally lifted you with him. He had been our class sponsor and a chaplain that people loved to interact with. He was more quite, not a bigger than life type but a short simple man who came across as a kind grandfather. Surely, I thought, despite what he’s now accused of, people will remember all the good he has done and extend a kind hand. I didn’t expect them to forgive, minimize or excuse what he had done but to simply extend some grace and not kick a man when he’s done. I wanted to believe even then that believers would be gracious towards a man who had given his life in service.
This turned out not to be true in the short or long haul. I called several dozen people from high school, mostly focusing on the ones that lived within an hour’s driving distance or so. I was encouraging them to go visit him while he was trapped in the prison of his home. The Cruzes knew they were going to have to move from the Adventist community that was Keene and had started packing up but had no clue so the house itself looked disheveled. Undoubtedly, the man’s thoughts and emotions were too. I called so many students several times but essentially none called or came. Leandro called (he was out of state), Kisha went but no others did. I had a lot more respect for the people who simply said that they thought what he did was so horrible that they didn’t want to support him. The ones that bothered me were the ones that would rather not visit or call than deal with the awkwardness. It reinforced exactly why my faith had failed when many of my friends, most of them regular church workers, some of them Adventist employees, made it clear that they wanted to help but just thought it would be too weird to make the phone call. What good was this belief in faith and grace if like me or Cruz those only applied until people sin? I felt like this was merely an echo of my own crisis, that as a group, the church only offered grace until people actually needed it.

Dr. Cruz, unaware of all that had gone on, encouraged me during one of our visits to apply for his job. It was a flattering request but that was beyond the time where I’d given up on my past. I was still lost in my own way and had not discovered what I would displace the gigantic place that faith had left in my life. While I tried to figure that out, I was determined to always be graceful towards people who needed it.

50 I Dreamed A Dream

Arriving back in the United States took the wind out of everything. I was certainly convinced that this was all over, the dream was dead and now I’d live through my self made hell while I waited for the real one. (On the plus side, the Adventist belief that hell was instantaneous rather than eternal was of some comfort). God and I had broken up and this was a storm our relationship had simply not weathered. All that I had taken from all of these adventures was a dog. I had brought back Puppy, paid a huge percentage of my savings in order to have the company of the first Marshallese dog ever to leave the country. A vet had come a few days before we were due to arrive, I’d been able to come up with a kennel and had her come back with me. I know she was the first dog ever to leave because government procedures had to be created for it to happen. This dog went from never having seen anything except oceans and lived through eighty five degree weather to now being in freezing temperatures. She also arrived pregnant and withing a day or two of arriving we got an abortion and had her fixed. For the first several weeks though she was unleashed that dog never left my side, perhaps because I was all that was familiar.

Anyway, I was picked up by some relatives. It was two cousins who are irreligious at best if not downright amoral at times. Ironically or appropriately enough, they were the ones who decided to take us out on our first night back. I had never watched porn or gone to a strip club or anything risqué despite the fact of what I had been involved in. That playboy was still the only thing that was mildly risqué I’d ever done and these two cousins of mine felt the need to take Shannon and I to Hooters on our first night back. They had an image of me as a pastor type and didn’t know about all that had happened so it gave them some adolescent glee to “pollute” us. Since the most common meal in the Marshall Islands was chicken and rice I’d long given up being a vegetarian. They also tried to get us to get drunk but I figured Hooters was enough for one night.

We had arrived into Arlington Tx and got an apartment there for no other reason than that was where the plane landed. We intended to return to California to settle where I had always said God lived but there was a pause in the plan. Shannon had applied to various schools throughout the country for her MSW, masters in social work and had not heard back from most of them. She figured she would do so the second semester of the Marshall Islands but since we’d been sent home a few days before the first ended, we didn’t know where to go. We had flown back into Texas because that’s where all our stuff was, spread out between Shannon’s parents and my own. We got a short term lease that would allow a dog and settled into a cold winter. We had no furniture and very little stuff. The Marshallese washing machines were so rusted that we got rid of nearly all the clothes we had taken because of the huge stains. My mother gave us a twin mattress which served as our bed. I bought two camping chairs which were our couches and my mom also gave us a piano bench which served as our tables. There were no decorations and all of our belongings at that point would have fit on the back of pick up easily. It was intensely liberating while trying to shake off so much of this emotional baggage to not have any actual baggage.

Shannon and I both started to look for jobs and both found some rather quickly. My job hired me but wouldn’t start until early January so I would have almost a month before beginning employment. Shannon’s took a little longer but she would start immediately; it was a job that would have her traveling throughout the country 3-7 days at a time. This meant that for those first couple of trips I was sitting at home with only my dog friend during the entire day. Once I started working, the evenings were pretty much the same. That dog saved my sanity I’m sure because it was the only distraction I had from realizing that my choices had in many ways left me utterly lonely even if not entirely alone.

I would take one last speaking engagement, a weekend of prayer at my mother’s church. I had given my first sermon in front of her and it appeared fitting that I would give my last there. I never told her about the second scandal, in fact I didn’t do so to many of even my closest friends. I lied to them about it and made it seem that the dismissal from the Marshall Islands had all been about Clark complaining about me. Some of the staff back in Majuro also thought this was true. (The truth was that Clark was always complaining to the principal and annoyed many people in doing so. In puerile fashion, I had custom shirts printed up that said “If anything I have said or done offends you, I apologize in advance. Please don’t call your mom, the principal or GMM” (the Guam Micronesia Mission). While this may well reflect how bitter I was, the fact that several of the staff sent me money to have a copy made for them showed how much Clark had annoyed others. With me gone, he would eventually win some of these people back. He wasn’t a bad guy really; he just had a sense of how he thought it should be done. My main problem with him was the way he would try to implement that, by immediately going to authorities rather than ever having a one on one conversation. Still, it was juvenile to have those shirts made.)

Anyway, with the scandal being virtually unknown in Texas, I took this speaking engagement. I prepared for it like few things and gave some of the most sincere and heartfelt sermons of my life. For a few minutes and moments that weekend, I remembered the dream and I poured all my memories of my affection for God into it and I think it moved people. I added stories from the Marshall Islands and talked about the various hitchhikers I picked up. I even told about how in doing good, we may even end up picking up Jesus Christ himself. The previous summer, with Melanie actually, I picked up a hitchhiker and having learned my lesson the first thing I asked was for his name. He replied “Jesus.” I pronounced it in Spanish as this is not an uncommon name in my culture but he pronounced in English, a phenomenon I’d never seen. Out of curiosity, I asked what his last name and it was Christ, Jesus Christ. He told me that he had a near death experience in which God had told him to change his name to Jesus Christ. I asked him if he now promoted Christianity and he responded that he did not because God had told him that all religions were equal. He was clearly a little off but relatively harmless and after some interesting conversation I dropped him off where he needed to go.Now in the sermon version, it was much shorter and mostly about how maybe just maybe we end up meeting Jesus Christ himself in our travels unaware. I said that with full belief while simultaneously believing that perhaps the belief was just as mentally ill as the hitchhiker had been.

I preached with all my heart, determined to make my mom proud one last time. She was and so were many of the church members that remembered that awkward kid who while he had learned to play the game was and still is probably an awkward adult. Some in the audience were moved, others impressed. I prayed with full conviction knowing that it well may be the last time. In my mind, it was like one last conversation and make out session with the woman you were divorcing. The divorce had been filed and you had waited the appropriate time and tomorrow was the day it became finalized. You both knew the connection had been strong but the relationship faulty. One hated to see it go but both knew that it was for the best.

49 The End of the World

I went back to the Marshall Islands in a dark frame of mind, bitter, angry, and broken. Out of the few staff that had continued, one commented on the difference- both physically because of the weight change and psychologically because I was more dismissive of a lot of things. I worked hard at making sure the students were still never the recipient of this but I never gave a chance to the new staff to even get their feet wet before I was criticizing them too. One of them, Samuel John, even exploded at me very shortly after we met and said I was just a “big bully.” I sat down and listened to him about what he didn’t like about me, tried to excuse, justify and explain myself but finally made progress when I simply apologized. It may be telling that I’m still friends with several people from that first year but he’s really the only one I speak to on a regular basis from the second year. Everyone else didn’t get apologies from me just a lot of incessant nagging.



Part of the problem that year was that about a half dozen of the missionaries were all from the same school, Walla Walla if I remember right. They were instantly cliquish and they were all rich white kids who I took a disliking too. One of them in particular, Clark, was constantly complaining to the new principal about things he didn’t like and she would then hassle me about it. I can’t honestly remember what it was about me that constantly offended him, but he began an email campaign criticizing everything I was doing to his parents and the Guam Micronesia Mission.



In all fairness, many of his criticisms were accurate as I was again off balance. God and I were breaking up and it felt like the end of the world if not the universe. I’ve never been divorced but it was worse than when Shannon and I appeared headed there. It was definitely far worse than all my actual break ups combined and I hadn’t handled any of those gracefully. I knew I was watching our relationship die and felt that we had both failed each other. While several years removed with the luxury of hindsight, I can acknowledge- if not fully take responsibility for- having not noticed many points of grace and for having missed opportunities. However even this far away, the pain of some people being mean and God seeming so deafeningly silent is a haunting memory. It hurt that God had come across as so mute and distant and while I don’t want to minimize the fact that I had failed Him, His church and His People, in my mind they had been kind enough to return the favor.



That second year all the ruckus I was making raised my profile. With Clark and the Walla Walla crowd consistently complaining about me to the new principal, it made for a tense campus and the simple reality was that I was the obstacle to things being better there at least for the staff. Perhaps what I was pushing them to become(being more active members of the community), was a decent goal but my approach made a bull in a pottery shop look graceful. I was fine with the kids and treated them with incredibly generosity and worked hard at their education. Sometimes this is still my tendency that I think if I do the “job description” part of my work well that my relationships with coworkers should be ignored. This is naïve and not reality because people who pay attention to the politics of their jobs are incredibly successful even if they aren’t actually good at their jobs.

Nonetheless, the complaints were getting back to PUC and the supervising organization, the Guam Micronesia Mission. It didn’t make sense to some of the local influential people because I always was polite to them. This has always been my MO; if I have high expectations for you, I will keep expecting them. If I have lower or no expectations, I am incredibly kind. I don’t necessarily believe that this is a good or a bad thing inherently but the older I get the more I’ve had to learn to consider this with the type of relationship I have with people. It’s best to have expectations and communication balanced by whatever links you have with the person.



Anyway, GMM and PUC were receiving complaints about me which made me seem exactly what I was (even if I didn’t recognize it): ungrateful for the opportunity that they had provided to myself, my wife and my career. If that wasn’t bad enough, something else was coming to light. In the first few weeks after the school year started, Melanie and I had changed emails a few times and she had told me how things were starting at PUC. For the most part, she appeared to be fitting in well and enjoying the new campus. We even talked on the phone a couple of times. The references to the threesomes between her and us were rare and almost always jokingly. In my mind, it reflected that we had achieved a generally casual approach and had managed to stay friends afterwards without any major consequences. At first our emails were every other day or so. Invariably, we both got caught up in our new respective school year and the contact became more like once a week and then every other week.



Apparently something happened as the contact got less frequent. I’m still not fully aware of what happened, but this is the way some mutual friends described it to me. This is all second hand because I wasn’t there and got very little feedback from the principal players. Apparently, I had left some emails up on a computer which spoke about what happened with Melanie and that person felt the need to address it with the appropriate authorities. Melanie also had been in the middle of some week of prayer or sermon that address sexual purity and felt guilty about her activities as she heard it. She talked to a friend who was shocked and who also knew about the entire Natalie event. She was around people who felt that she had done a great harm to herself but who were also convinced that it was mostly if not entirely my fault. Eventually someone was kind enough to arrange Natalie talking to her. Melanie and she had a long conversation. Because I had taken them to some of the same restaurants and places around Napa Valley, they decided that this was my MO of seduction. While this may make for a good story line, I must confess it’s the same places I had taken my mother and many male friend visitors. Those were just the places I liked and so I shared them with people I liked. Nonetheless, Natalie sold Melanie on that Shannon and I were some type of perverts that preyed on people and thus both Natalie and Melanie should be relatively absolved. Hearing this story at the time was infuriating because it denied the fact that they were very active participants and no one had tricked them into anything. Melanie especially knew what she was signing up for before she ever showed up our door. The one mutual friend we had who knew about it, who incidentally was related to her, was shocked to hear the about face that she was taking on just to absolve her conscience. The interim time has allowed me let some of the steam blow off and realize that we all have to find a way to deal with our mistakes. My own way herein described was perhaps as pathetic in focusing on what people had done wrong in reaction to my mistakes rather than focusing on the mistakes themselves.

A very common way among all people I’ve discovered is to find someone else to blame someone else for it. This may blame our parents for our choices decades after the fact, or the classic “I make him so mad he hits me.” All of these examples are copouts and cowardly but we all have to find a way to get through the day; it may be possible that dealing with it this way is better than living with dark shadows on us for entirely too long; I don’t know. Nonetheless, let me state it here without any equivocation or excuse, I take full responsibility for the things that I did. They were wrong and I’m sorry for any and all damage that they caused Shannon, Natalie, and Melanie. Had I known what the consequences were or had I been more mature, I would not have done them but I did and all I can offer is my most sincere apology. I wish I could share it with the other two girls but it became clear they would rather have silence and that may well be for the best. I have spent several years and I hope the rest of my life showing Shannon that I mean her good and not harm.



Still, the anger I had for God, for the other staff, at myself and Shannon was overwhelming and exhausting and when they let me know that I would be leaving the island because of all of this drama, I was somewhat annoyed but at some level also relieved. The story couldn’t end quite that simply. The new principal was an older lady, very traditional and conservative. My aggressive approach about the school being a more influential force in the community and she herself being more active had made it to where we never got along well. I believe she must have been relieved to find out that I was getting sent home. The school had a tradition of throwing a going away party for all staff at the end of the year (one was also held for any staff who had to leave early as some had for logistical reasons). The principal made it clear that the school would not be allowing one for Shannon and I. Still, the students decided to throw one anyway and did so at their own organization.


At that party, I realized how much I had thrown away but perhaps how much there was to recover. Perhaps, there was a way to still help people and make progress the way I had with many of these kids without having to throw God in the middle of it all. However, it was easy to argue with God it was a lot better as it was all inclusive and more thorough down to the very soul of them. I cried at that party, not unlike I had cried the first time I threw away being a minister but that would be the last time. A day or two later when I got on that plane back to the United States with no plan and no future, I was stoic and ready to move on. At least that’s what I was telling myself.

48 Memory

To return to Angwin was not a good thing in the big scheme of things. While it was arguably the place of many of my best accomplishment and some of my happiest times, all the recollections while I was there that summer reminded me that I had failed at what I was born to do. I was not sleeping well at all that summer all of a sudden, reliving the nightmare, remembering the Natalie episodes. I started to gain weight again and became aware then just how much of an emotional eater I can be.

I tried to use it as a quiet summer of life by focusing on how I had gotten here and whether or not I really was supposed to be a pastor. I started to remember things from my childhood, the boy pastor. I remembered the first time I had tried to speak in public and how at six years of age, when I fell apart, I ran and literally cried into my mother’s skirt. I remembered how one day in fourth grade the librarian had gone around the room and asked us all what we wanted to become; everyone announced this or that and when it came around to me, I mumbled that it was personal and I didn’t want to share. Why had I been embarrassed about wanting to be a pastor when I was only nine years old? I remembered the ironies of life: the time that for some reason in a skit in high school, Leandro had been cast as the Pharisee and I had been cast as Jesus. He was the most Christlike person I was becoming aware of how faulted I was. I became aware of the fact that, while everyone had always lectured me on the importance of having the right wife if I really wanted to be a pastor, by and large the girls I dated did not have their religion be very important to them. I remembered what I had dismissed as Freudian psychobabble that the main reason I wanted to be pastor was to make my mother proud since she was religious.

At times, I allowed myself to imagine life being perfect before Natalie at times and at other times I remembered it honestly. I remembered Shannon and I having a great time on our honeymoon but also remembered that we’d had too much fun on our honeymoon. Nothing inappropriate really nor anything worth mentioning but just silly things that made me uncomfortable with the memory of doing it as a pastor. The moments where I felt the worse was when I started remembering the people who I had disappointed, those who I’d worked so hard to help. The people who loved having me at their house to feed me and have me with them, the dean of USC who took me out suit shopping because I had tutored his son, the lady who had decided not to sue because she thought that my advice of grace was the voice of God through me. I would sit at night and just let these ideas flow through my head. Not infrequently I would do it at the rock where I once felt so clearly connected to my calling.

I let the thoughts get even more recent. I would remember the missionaries I had just spent the last year with. I recalled Autumn who had stopped taking her anti-seizure medication because since she’d been taking it she had stopped having seizures. The principal who had allowed me to come out to Majuro even after my continued screw ups, Mr. Dunbar, was a great administrator but not much of a person. He came across as rather lonely and doing so much out of obligation. He had married a woman who was so warm and giving, but who at times came across as using that kindness as the crutch with which she held herself up. They had some type of family emergency come up and would not be returning to Majuro. I felt rather abandoned by that and after I found that out, I criticized them along with everyone else, ignoring the grace they had so humanely let me have. There’s an old saying that if you take in a starving dog and feed him and house him, he will never bite you. That, they say, is the primary difference between a dog and a man.

Speaking of a dog, Shannon had continued to keep bringing a dog into the house in the Marshall Islands. There was a stray on campus that had given birth to a litter. The Marshallese had all taken the males and Shannon kept bringing in one of the female dogs to the house “to get her used to it.” I would immediately remove it but eventually she won me over. However, I had so often yelled “get the puppy out of the house” that we named the dog Puppy.

Invariably, however, the thoughts that would come back were the ones where people had been so grossly mean to me. My bitterness went back to its previous level and I ground my heels in and decided that the best kind of grace was just simply where humans extended it to one another and kept God out of it. I worked at New Horizons that summer and while I now had an option, I again took the shift that would make sure I was working on the Sabbath so that I would not have to go to church. I was polite to people I saw from the past but was dismissive and avoidant. This applied as well when I looked in the mirror.

In the middle of all this, I stayed in contact with several people who I had met on the island. One of them was Melanie, a young girl, with all kinds of insecurities and apparently a rather large crush on me. While it may sound awfully convenient to say this years later, the truth is I was so self absorbed in the Marshall Islands that I hadn’t noticed. She had become one of my favorites because she became one of the missionaries who, with a little nudging, would work harder at getting to know the culture. She was trying to get a new start from her old school and, despite all that had happened, I endorsed PUC as an option. I encouraged her to visit and facilitated the visit with the Enrollment office where I had previously worked.

In the few weeks between when it was decided she would come and until she actually arrived, we spent a fair share of time chatting on the internet. She was always one of the gossipy ones and kept prying and trying to find out what had been the big controversial thing she had heard rumors about it. This came across as something mostly out of curiosity and not any type of malice. At this point, I had spent so much time trying to avoid it that I continued but she didn’t relent. Eventually I told her and she was very amazed. The next thing she typed was surprising it wasn’t condemning or judgmental but a simple statement that she had been curious about that herself. I was taken aback and the chat turned flirtational. It was a bizarre development after what felt like a confession. However, the confession was poor because it suggested that we had engaged in this sexual experiment and then moved on, not letting her know all of the drama that occurred afterwards since to this day that’s what I’m far more embarrassed and guilty about.

We kept chatting over the internet and in the flirtation and the talk of curiosity; she asked if Shannon and I were interested in ever doing that again. It wasn’t something I’d spent time thinking about or that Shannon and I had spent time talking about, but it would be lying to say that the idea didn’t have some appeal to me. You can diagnose it however you want and I don’t have a great answer about why I hadn’t learned my lesson at that point and didn’t say “No, this was way more hassle than it was worth.” Yet my thought on it was that it wasn’t so much the act of sex itself that had been the problem but the fact that there were so many emotions involved. I had none towards Melanie other than friendship and at the time didn’t think she had any others towards me. I talked to Shannon about it and I am uncertain as to why she went along with it again. Over several conversations over a couple of weeks, all of us went back and forth on whether or not we wanted to engage in what we all said was going to be a completely casual experiment during her few day visit. Should I have known better? Of course but it would be beyond dishonest to tell you that there isn’t something both physiologically and psychologically rewarding about having sex with two women at the same time. People don’t drink or use cocaine or eat greasy food for no reason. Things that are bad for us don’t typically present themselves that way.

Eventually, I actually said it might be fun but if Melanie was unsure that she should not proceed but when she arrived, she said she thought about it and essentially took an attitude of you only live once and why not since she thought it would be interesting to try. So when she arrived for her five or six day visit, that’s what we did most nights including the first and last one there.

During the day, I took her to some of my favorite restaurants and museums and showed her campus. The week left such an impression on her that she was sold and when the fall came around, she was enrolled at PUC. A week or two after she left, we got on a plane ticket and were headed back to the Marshall Islands to mostly new staff with the realization that once the second year was done, we were also done with our connection to the church. Hope was no longer part of my motivation out there. I was only going back to finish paying penance.

47 Its My life

I have always been edge, always willing to engage in fight or a discussion. This has made me a great advocate for many causes and it has been one of my best qualities at certain times but when I’m in the wrong it quickly becomes one of my worst. I had made a boogey man out of the Adventist church and my won failures within it. As a pastor at a Hispanic church, I had gone out of my way to espouse ideas and behaviors that I thought were silly at best just to go along and get along.

In the Marshall Islands, I refused to do this. Shannon, Leandro, and I had joined the national band. A government grant had brought a director from Korea who barely spoke English and who didn’t speak Marsahllese. To his credit, he had taken kids who had barely seen any of these instruments and by practicing them 3-5 hours almost everyday of the week had really built them up. With the exception of the three of us, all of them were Marshallese teenagers. Leandro had picked up the tuba for them, I was playing the trombone and Shannon was playing the marimba. We were performing at various events throughout the community including at the capital and I even got to meet the country’s president (while it was very cool, this was not difficult to accomplish for anyone). Controversy arose when the students were going to march on Marshallese independence day which the year we were there happened to be on a Sabbath. The principal and his wife had encouraged me, if not directed me to not play in it to not offend Sabbath sensibilities. Shannon and I blatantly disregarded it and while there were no real consequences, it was a way that I was saying, this is who I am and I’m not bending to placate illogical positions since the Sabbath and celebrating a country’s birthday were not exclusive to me. There would be a few more positions like this. That year the Passion of the Christ came out and while the Adventist tradition of staying away from movie theaters had carried on there, I not only went but organized a group to go. I wasn’t sure I was going back or if I was going away from all of this but in either direction, it made me increasingly confrontational.

I held the staff to very high standards. I didn’t consider the fact that all of these 19-20 year old kids had already left home and country to go literally half way around the world to volunteer to teach kids whose education would likely not benefit them much anyway. No, I wanted them to interact with the community more and actively reprimanded them for failing to do so. They spent a huge percentage of their time after work and on the weekends watching movies in their rooms. There was a whole other country out there, a whole other people and they were failing to get to know them. By and large most of them made very few local friends. Was this something they could have improved on? Certainly. Was it my place to encourage them to do so? Perhaps. Was it fair for someone who was essentially banished out there to be reprimanding them about this as often as I was? Absolutely not.

I did so however and I do so regularly. The truth was that more than their fair share had started dating or at least sleeping together. A few of them were taking in alcohol and other substances while they were missionaries. These behaviors frankly didn’t bother me at all but their constant watching of movies while living in another country, their constant living behind the fenced in compound was shameful. I held God and faith and church responsible and I’m not sure that was entirely incorrect. While one could argue that in any given organization there are always going to be bad people and good people, its unfair to judge the organization by those people. I would contend that if almost everyone who works at a company is racist, that company is racist for all practical purposes. If the majority everyone who goes to an organization is fat, then that’s an overweight organization. They were good kids though. Jared, Farace, Melanie, Autumn, Rordy, Brian; they all meant well. In fact none of them argued with me when I was encouraging them to pursue the culture harder. They were just shy or sometimes just exhausted by taking on a really hard job and just wanted to relax. My nagging was not an effective way to get them to change. In fact when I simply invited them to come with me, while it was still a minority, a fair share of them usually accompanied me.

It’s true that I didn’t give them enough credit for having come over here and dismissed it to easily as people who were trying to pad their resume or surf for a year (shows I had some growing up to do that these didn’t seem like legitimate reasons) but it was then that I started to decide that I would cast my lot with humanity in its messiness rather than faith in its messiness. I became better friends with both the Marshallese and with other volunteers to other organizations from other countries. Interestingly enough many of the non church goers were the ones working hardest at being part of the community. This was not entirely true; I became fairly close with the Catholic priest who regularly used his church and his compound as a place to host entire community events. Shannon and I also very consciously became friends with the Asian kids in the group as well. A huge percentage of the business there were Chinese own and ran and there some tension between the Marshallese and the Chinese. It could be argued that the local culture wouldn’t have stood up but it created some very awkward race relations. Several of those students still contact us (mostly Shannon) to thank us for that and to ask how we’re doing.

But invariably, my past caught up with me. The Adventist system is fairly engrained and enmeshed (in angrier times I would say incestuous) and the rumors that had circulated around PUC came down to the Islands and I realized there was no getting away from it. My scandal had been sexual and those are always the ones that generate the most drama and the most interest. The girls in particular were always trying to hint around at what had happened. One of the missionaries who had come, Alexis Miller, knew that there had been strange things but didn’t know the details. I avoided it as well as I could trying to move on but the questions kept coming. I successfully got through the school year without actually spilling my guys both because I was trying to evade my past but because at PUC I’d gotten very good at lying, obfuscating and detracting away from it. The energy which they pursued the gossip about my life was fairly disturbing and I used it as one more point of criticism. Perhaps, it was just natural curiosity but I wondered why they didn’t use that same vigor to get to know students better.

I shared these ideas with Leandro who kept telling me I needed to focus on God, a statement I’d gotten for quite a while. The truth of the matter is that I’ve heard this my entire life but no one has ever given me a particularly good way to do it. While I realize that no relationship comes with instructions, usually they have some guidelines and I was getting exhausted by the vague ones that I’d gotten. My relationship wasn’t over at that point but it was on its dying days and the life support that was supposed to be the Marshall Islands had not worked. I had allowed to make me more cynical about all that I was broken up about.

It turned out towards the end of the year that I would suddenly not be there for the summer. I was not a US citizen at the time and due to the Bush administration having tightened some regulations, anyone who was not a US citizen and was gone from the country for more than a year would lose their residency unless they had filled out a form before they left the country. I had not done so and so I would have to head back for the summer. I looked at various places but ultimately took a job back at New Horizons working with juvenile delinquents. Back to Angwin, we went….

46 Falling in Love is Hard on The Knees

From the moment I arrived on the Marshall Islands, there was a sigh of relief. It was just good to be someplace different, someplace new. For the first time in my life, I was “white” as the Marshallese are very dark. I had a mix of friends in California of all types of races but still had tried to keep track of the fact that I was Mexican. Here the white people would see me as brown and the brown people would see me as white.

We were greeted in the school gym and were given these wreaths to wear and drank milk right from the coconut. Out every window in my small one bedroom apartment, you could see the ocean. Walking out there was a porch which I eventually installed a hammock in to just sit and watch the sea pound and feel the sea breeze. On clear nights, the moon was glorious and on moonless nights the stars sang for joy. Everyone should get the chance to live in at least two different cultures in the world and this was the fourth country I’d gotten to live in and I was grateful. Here was a place not too different from Mexico, little corner stores everywhere. There were some unique part of the cultures, taxis were more like buses where you hopped on and off anywhere for just 50 cents. It was a rock island so only four things grew on it: bananas, pandanas, coconuts and breadfruit. Everything else had to be imported so grocery shopping for us westerners was very expensive. We bought a pineapple our first time grocery shopping, also the last time since it was $12 and our salaries were $400 a piece.

The Marshallese lived in houses made up essentially of four wooden walls on a dirt floor. All of their furniture were comprised of strategically placed mats. Different ones were for different purposes, one was the table, one was the bed. The missionaries were not nearly as efficient and had regular furniture. We had a small table, a couch and a bed. The infant mortality was really high and so the biggest birthday celebration was the Cayman (Kay-man) which occurred when a child was 1 year old. It was a huge party that all friends and family were invited to. While I tried to participate in all the cultural aspects of it, I had to pass up the traditional eating of the turtle (and turtle head). Funerals lasted a week and the body was kept in the living room in an airproof casket (the humidity in the Marshall Islands is almost always 80-100%; I used to make a crack that I didn’t understand 100% humidity, shouldn’t you then be underwater?). The funeral process was such that people came by in small groups. The most important person in the group gave a small speech (in our groups when I went with my students, it was usually me), the family gave a small speech saying thank you and then everyone got in a line and deposited their gift in the glass immediately above the dead person’s face. I’d been to one person’s funeral by choice in that entire time and with everyone on the island knowing everyone else, I was doing this regularly. Looking that often into a dead person’s face both freaked me out and gave me my first real sense of my own mortality. At both the cayman and the funeral, the gift from everyone was the same: a dollar or two per person or for the really poor, a small bar of soap.

The Marshallese also had a fairly casual attitude towards sex and quite a bit of the islands practiced wife swapping or sleeping around. It wasn’t completely accepted but the mores were far more relaxed than they were in the states. The school secretary, part of the Adventist denomination, had children fairly close in age from various fathers. This was incredibly common. Far too many of the students I would teach over my time there would take out time for the first year of their kids’ lives. However, despite this attitude about it all, there was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy where no one ever talked about sex.

There was not a single doctor on the Island so it wasn’t a place you wanted to get sick. There were at any given time four interns from a college in Hawaii but again, not a place where you’d want to be ill. The jail was a place that was more like camp with only two or three people in the entire country behind bars. Many of the prisoners were released for the weekend and would have to check back in during the week because frankly there was no place to go and no one was all too worried about it.

While I was most focused on “paying penance,” I’d left open a window that maybe, just maybe, this was a place for solutions. Ideally I would serve my time here and then go back to the real world unencumbered and I’d hoped feeling absolved. But the glory of creation made me hear the echoes of the work of God resonating in the sky and the people and somewhere in the chambers of a soul I’d forgotten I had. I began to settle down, to calm down, to let some, though very little, of the anger subside. A few weeks into it, I cut my hair and regained my identity. For the first time in weeks, I began to again pray, sometimes on the rocks overlooking the ocean, sometimes on my roof while absorbing the sunrise and the sunset, sometimes on my knees in our one bedroom apartment. Often…on my knees…by myself, apologizing and begging forgiveness, hoping against hope, dreaming my own life would have its own sunrise. But just as quickly and if not more powerfully, I’d led cynicism sink in. I’d remember the people who worked so hard at hurting me again failing to notice that most of those efforts had gone on without consequence. I would also remember that it felt like God had not been around through most of that and that the theology majors and the pastor types had gone with him, all too good to be around sinners. And then I would stand up and walk away from those knees and that prayer.

Shannon and I also started dealing with our choices and their repercussions. We had done plenty of this at PUC but the environment was toxic for our healing and there was the distraction I had made of Natalie. We had long conversations about what had happened and often these would grow angry and there would be plenty of yelling, some so passionate that any bystander might have guessed we were inches from blows and they might have been right. As often as not, I would cowardly say some mean complaint and make her be the one who had allowed me to sink into this and storm out of the place and find someone else to talk to, something else to do. We would pick it up again. This is not to say that we didn’t have good days, most of them in fact were. It was simply that the bad days came with conviction. Eventually, we discussed all that had happened and at the end we forgave each other but while it has been years obviously we haven’t forgotten. To say that it doesn’t affect our relationship to this day would be naïve, but its stopped overwhelming our relationship; now it’s an old injury that acts up on cold days and is irrelevant most days.

We asked some pointed questions of each other. Many people had said that they could never imagine Shannon being a pastor’s wife, one of them even less than subtly suggesting that perhaps Shannon had sabotaged all this. She was honest with the fact that she didn’t think she was completely suited for it and that her own belief system had never been quite as steadfast as mine. She added that she wasn’t sure I was suited for it. She stated that she wasn’t so sure that I was a good speaker because I was passionate about God but just because I had a flare for being a performer. We talked about never having kids because our relationship had owned so much drama. She asked if I preferred her or Natalie and if that would have been true even if I had the choice from the starting gate if you will. We even talked about those uncomfortable sex details and came to grips with the fact that neither of us now, perhaps ever, agreed with how big of a deal people made of sex in their lives. (Certainly, the Marshallese style of constantly having it and not ever discussing it was not healthy and perhaps the population there and everywhere would be better served with some conversations about the consequences and biological possibility.) And slowly, intellectually, emotionally, perhaps in our own detached spiritual way, we fell in love again. It was more guarded, more hurt but it was more candid as well, more grown up.

I was teaching religion and Spanish and she was teaching English. I was teaching religion with all the conviction I’d always shared God’s word with, perhaps with more so, overbalancing my doubts. I was preaching at the church on occasion, exalting God’s grace and his endless effort to communicate with us even going as far as to shave my head once in the middle of a sermon to illustrate what the prophet Ezekiel did. But I was tired and I was broken and I wasn’t falling in love with God again nearly as easily, if hardly at all. I’d failed Him and in my perspective, He’d returned the favor. All my questions about the universe, the Bible, the church were now the focus instead of the obstacle to the focus. It was like when you break up with someone. They had the same quirks that they did when you loved them, but now their quirks were the reason you broke up with them; and then became the reason you couldn’t stand them. They hadn’t changed and perhaps neither had you, but the relationship has changed and the perspective you had on each other had because of it. Like I had been with Shannon, I was back and forth on whether or not it was best that this relationship continue and at that point the pendulum could have gone either way.

45 I Still Believe

One of the truths of life that most people come to realize is that life has consequences, sometimes not immediate and sometimes unperceived, but always existent in one form or another. The damage that I had inflicted on my marriage and on Shannon resulted in me losing balance and all the drama you’ve read about, but the truth is that I continued to damage both her and Natalie after that suspension. It wasn’t intentional harm; it was just dealing with my own confused emotions and pain but it was still wrong. We all continued to try to figure out what to do but while working from our tenderness we were still both hurting, and once Natalie found someone else, she decided that everything was entirely my fault. It is a pattern far too often in our relationships that when we find a replacement for someone who has hurt us, then we remember ourselves as meritorious and others as being the cause of the failure. Natalie would paint me to some of our mutual friends as manipulative and herself as just some victim. This was a hard sell to anyone as she consistently was the one who came to my house and called me just as often as I called her. Neither I nor these friends denied that there was plenty of faults on my side but Natalie’s ears were deaf to the fact that blame went both directions. There were times where she’d leave me multiple voicemails in one night thinking I was avoiding her when I simply hadn’t gotten any of them. She had always been a girl of intense emotions and once I was the recipient of her anger, it came with conviction. There was a time where her first therapist, a non school one, had decided that I should be brought in to do a therapy session. During that session, I was as honest as I could be about the fact that I did have feelings for her and perhaps always would but that I needed to be faithful to my wife. She tried to point out to me that this was about me worrying about my career, that she and I had a “deeper connection.” I didn’t acknowledge that but responded that I’d made a choice at that point and that my main problem was when I hadn’t been making choices. Shortly after that was when she met David and our conversations ceased very quickly.
Natalie held on to her anger and would try over the next few months to affect negative change in my life. At New Horizons, where she had worked before I did as a substitute, was the first of what I should have read as a warning sign. In one of those odd things, she was scheduled to substitute for me on a day I was supposed to leave early. She had not shown up and so I had to call her from work and she said she wasn’t coming in. I was able to find another sub but had to explain the management that she had not been able to come in. While I did my best, as perhaps I am doing here, to minimize any wrong doing on her part, it was hard to do without explaining all the history between us (which I did not do). She showed up the following business day with her mother and tried to make the case that they should fire me. My manager let her know at that meeting that she would no longer be needed as a sub. She then talked to me about the event afterward and said that she couldn’t understand why someone in the twenties would a) be bringing their mother with them to explain things and b) let their mother do all the talking. My manager very pointedly said “that girl has issues that I can’t figure out.”
Still that wasn’t the last time that we would continue to clash. Apparently, after Natalie had completed all of her degree requirements, she felt the need to let the school know that we had violated the agreement of not keeping in touch. As I’ve heard it told, there was a frenzy of activity among school officials about whether or not to let Shannon, Natalie, and I march. Natalie wanted to be allowed to march and have us not do so, making the argument she should be exempt because she had been forthcoming after the fact. The school didn’t buy that because the explicit understanding was that if we kept in contact, then we all could likely be expelled and they were wise enough to see that it was too convenient for her to come forth with no personal risk. I was completely unaware of it while it was all happening. Truth be told, I actually didn’t want to march; I’d lost any desire for the pomp and circumstance plus it would be a reminder that someone else was giving the Class President speech. I was marching because I was the first in my family to graduate from college and my mother had flown in to see it. However, when she saw me, she was less than pleased with my longer hair. Anyway, we graduated and despite all that had gone wrong, when they announced my name, I was still the student they spent the longest time on. The school had a habit of announcing your name and certain of your accomplishment. Because I had graduated with two degrees, multiple honor societies, with honors and suma cum laude, they had to give credit where it was due. Ironically, the person who had to do that was Ileana Douglas who had told me I should be expelled. It well may have been imagined but I was certain there was disdain in her voice and in all frankness, it was not imagined that there was some satisfaction in hearing her having to spend the time reciting accolades.

I missed again a great point of grace when several of the senior class officers and a few students who knew of all that had gone wrong stood up to clap when my name and accomplishments were announced, partly due to the fact that I was in a hurry to get off the stage. But the point of grace that I didn’t miss was that when Natalie’s name was announced, Shannon stood up and cheered more loudly than she did for anyone else in all of the graduations we’ve attended before or since. When I asked her why she had done it, she said that she really was happy that we’d all gotten here and that she hoped Natalie well.

My mother stayed a few days after graduation as we showed her around Napa Valley and around San Francisco and then she flew back home. The day she left everything started unraveling again. Dr. Paulson let me know that the school would be recommending to the Marshall Islands that I not be allowed to go. The mission trip where I was going to be allowed to speak at let me know that I would no longer be. The director, Steve Case, was incredibly generous about it but said that he had to defer to his staff. The invitation to speak at my old church in South Bay was rescinded. The emotions of rejection and anger and everything I’d started to work towards again all came flaring up again. All the progress I had made up until that point was erased and I was further back than I’d ever been.

I made the mistake of calling Natalie and left a message saying that I’d like to talk to her and settle this so we could both move on. A few hours later, I had a voicemail from her boyfriend David saying that she was pursuing a restraining order and that there was court set up a few days hence. In between that time and court, she apparently tried to get various faculty members and a few of our friends who had been involved in the situation to come to court but none of them would. In court, she claimed that the letter that I had made apologizing and that the phone call I had made a few days before asking to talk were threatening. In California, there are two different kinds of restraining orders; there is one that last three years and another that lasts for a lifetime. She further elaborated that I was so dangerous that I needed to be ordered to be kept away from her, her boyfriend, and all of her family for the rest of their lives. The judge ended up being a level headed fellow and asked the right question; could she produce any of these so called threatening letters? He appeared skeptical when she responded that she was so scared she had thrown them all away. When asked about the threatening voicemail, she said that they had erased it so as not to hear it again. Anyway, no restraining order was issued for any length of time with the judge telling me that with a record of a hearing at court, obviously I would be wise to never speak to Natalie or her family again unless I actually wanted a restraining order. I’ve felt horrible about all that happened and wished that I could offer an apology to Natalie but she’d made it clear she was happy to move on without one. That court session was the last time I saw her and it is an incredibly painful memory that someone who had been a friend and a lover had this kind of ending.

The summer continued to be a time of confusion but eventually the Marshall Islands decided they would allow me to come with or without the school’s blessing and because I had no job prospects and had raised several thousand dollars for this project, I thought we should continue with this plan. Truth was all the uncertainty and perplexity made me appreciate the opportunity to take some time away. Shannon and I could probably use the time to heal without jobs that were going to turn into careers and I was still open to the fact that maybe I should try to rebuild both my faith in my God and in my religion. This was becoming less likely in my view as I had at some level passed the buck on my failures on faith but I still missed God. The soundtrack concept had already begun and I heard a song then that I applied to God. It was Mariah Carey’s, “I still believe.” Like a teenage girl, I’d listen to it with angst in my heart and tears in my eyes:

I know it’s crazy, but you still can touch my heart
And after all this time you think that I wouldn’t feel the same
But time melts into nothing, and nothing's changed

I still believe
Someday you and me
Will find ourselves
In love again

Each day of my life, I’m filled with all the joy I could find
You know that I, I'm not the desperate type
If there’s one spark of hope left in my grasp,
I'm holding it with both hands
It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance

Maybe the Marshall Islands would have that second chance.

44 Losing My Religion

Though normalcy was never established, a new pattern emerged and things started to get into a new groove, awkward and painful that it was. I restarted my 1000 days of running and life began to settle.

However, my frustration with the theology department both students and professors, with pastors and religious people kept eating away at me. These were God’s representatives and frankly the vast majority of them were being fairly mean and smug about their superiority. How hollow this all felt had helped me give up on my belief systems. Truth was that I was finding more peace from day to day without thinking about that. Since life wasn’t suddenly easier and at least temporarily better without it, I assumed and decided that the lack of religion might well be the better way.

The college had a policy that if students had fulfilled their chapel requirements throughout their academic career that they were excused from it the last part of their senior year. I had done so, of course, and being excused from it was one of the best and worst things that ever happened to me.

And in the midst of this, an event occurred which still strikes me as how funny life is. I was driving out near the school and there was someone hitchhiking. I picked up the guy and he looked remarkably familiar; we glanced at each other both did a double take and then I said, “hold on, before anything else, what is your name man?” It was Jeff and it was the same environmental engineer I had picked up years before. We chitchatted and caught up like we were old friends; this time instead of being so smug about ministering to him, I was happier to listen. He had recently had his sleeping bag ruined and by coincidence I had a sleeping bag in my trunk and after I drove him to exactly where he had to go, I gave him the sleeping bag and spend the rest of the drive very intrigued by the coincidences of life.

Shannon and I were making progress with each other, remembering that there was a long standing connection both historically and emotionally. I started to realize that I had made some big mistakes, the hurt and anger were still deep and began to thaw but it was years away from being made right. I focused on the few friends from college that I still have, the ones who had been my friends through it all and had not suddenly decided they were too good to be friends with such a deep sinner as me. Friends who are not your friends when its not convenient were never actually your friends.

My mind was still a quagmire, trying to reconcile why, WHY had I thrown away a dream 15 years in the making that had been achieved. But I spent as much time distracting myself from that thought as I could. I started bringing my laptop to almost all my classes and was using it to play computer games in the back of the class. I started playing pool more and going out with friends to eat at Denny’s until 2 o’clock the morning. I kept focusing on the play, almost any distraction would do.

The other thing that happened then was that I was writing my senior Honors thesis. It was about God asking Abraham to kill Isaac. I looked at tons of different angles, the Christian one, the Muslim one, the Jewish one, Freud’s, Jung’s and various others. Then I presented my own: it may well have been projecting but my position was essentially that this story might be best interpreted as Abraham imagining something that God wanted wanted. The request appeared so unreasonable that I chose to think that it was Abraham who was unreasonable rather than God. The position was more complex and more elegant than this and I found that people in general were rather receptive to it but theology types were really bothered by it.

As my fatter, longer haired self started to get more at ease with life, I started to feel incredibly guilty about what I had done to Natalie. The conversations between us had stopped abruptly and not cleanly. I wrote a letter to her apologizing at length about all of the events that had occurred. The initial events were wrong enough but the handling it afterwards were just as bad with me even having taken back a piece of jewelry I had given her and given it Shannon. I believe she even saw Shannon wearing it once, Shannon’s own way of dealing with it. None of it from any of our angles was healthy. She never responded to the letter but I had hoped that it would be received well.

In the midst of all this, as the school year rounded out, an old friend called. Leandro Bizama, from high school, called to check on me. We had been in contact with each other throughout the crisis and he had been supportive and very kind and now he had an idea. He knew that my mind and approach was still in a dark place but he thought that maybe, just maybe there was still something there worth salvaging. He was going to be going to the Marshall Islands for two years as a missionary; specifically a high school teacher and the school needed another religion teacher and another English teacher, mine and Shannon’s degrees. I blew him off and told him it was a ridiculously stupid idea and that I was quite done with all this. Apparently over the next couple of weeks, he talked to Shannon a few times and sold her on the idea and she slowly and methodically started working on trying to get me to do it. Some of the people I talked to really liked the idea, they figured if I could succeed out there plus be a way for a couple of years, I would have re-earned my wings. Back in high school, our academy had put on a Jewish Seder. We had tried to replicate it as best as we could with the food and customs although we obviously violated one gigantic concept as we had the tables set up in the shape of a cross. Still, I did it all in earnest including taking in the bitter herbs in their entirety (most people passed them up after barely trying them). Not too long after the event, I completely lost my lunch all over the lobby. Leandro and Shannon cleaned it up for me and then each of them kind of sat with me and patted my back and tried to help me feel better. This attempt to get me to go to the Marshall Islands felt remarkably similar.

Eventually, they prevailed on me but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I said to myself and to several people at the time that I had failed God, my faith and the church and that I was going to the Marshall Islands to pay penance and then I was done. They pointed out the obvious fact that we weren’t Catholic and didn’t pay penance and I retorted that it sure felt like plenty of the people over the last few months. This was not the best frame of mind to go with but I always work best with a goal in my mind and set my mind to raising money for this project. I raised a couple of thousand dollars which was far more than more people ever raised for these projects. I’m not anything if not hardworking and not enthusiastic.

With that in my mind, I felt a little more at ease and so I started to look forward to being a missionary. I also took a speaking invitation to go do an evangelistic series down in Mexico shortly after graduation, a sermon late in the summer at the South Bay Adventist Church. But it was a mistake because I was now heading to graduate as a theology major, taking sermon invitations, and heading to be a missionary with faith being merely a functionary attribute, something that for the first time I gave more lip service to than I felt. Still I was not just abiding my time to graduate and move away from this place and to paying penance.

43 Somewhere in the Night

The next few weeks and months were a complete nightmare or at least that’s how I overdramatized them to myself. Feeling like I had failed at everything in my life and not ready to face up to it, I started to lose my sense of identity. For the first and only time in my life, I grew out my hair and started shaving less regularly. I started to gain weight; having thrown away 600 plus days of running, I was running two or three times a week if at all. I also got into emotional eating, enjoying oreos and too many things just to get through the day or night. My sleep schedule was sporadic at best and inexplicably I would wake up in tears or frightened from a nightmare I could not remember. My days of waking up in a good more were suddenly suspended.

The practices for A Midsummer Night’s Dream were the highlight of my life at that point. I don’t know whether it was ironic or appropriate that pretending to be someone else was when I felt the most at ease in my life. I had always been part of dramatic endeavors throughout high school and college but they were mostly an amusement. I started putting together these dinner parties that were murder mysteries that were fun but were also pretending to follow a character. I was pretending every chance I could get because pretending was now therapy.

Speaking of therapy, I went to it but and while it started well, it became one of the most dishonest things in my life. I had grown unreasonably mistrustful of almost everything and believed that the therapist was somehow going to report what we did in therapy to the school since he was employed by them. I therefore feared being forthright and also thought that perhaps if I could paint myself as better to him that maybe there would be a path back to all that had faded so fast. He never did either and merely reported whether or not I had shown up to our weekly appointments.

Shannon would not move back in for a while and during that time I was still regularly in contact with Natalie. There were times we even met late at night to see each other; we would pretend like it was to talk in person but there was rarely any talking. This was due to many factors but one of them was that I wasn’t sure how much I blamed her for my problems. She was proposing that we wait this out and that we then start a life with each other; she had a ten point plan that sounded incredibly attractive. I thought about it constantly and I didn’t pursue it as much because of the history I had with Shannon as the fact that it would almost certainly make sure that my career in the ministry wouldn’t be resurrected. A number of people were concerned with this; it bothered Shannon to no end that at times it seemed more were concerned with that than with the fixing of our marriage. There were days if you’d asked which one of those two I would pick if it excluded the other I wouldn’t have had a good answer. There were plenty of days I might have said both but just as many where I would have said neither.

I continued to try to connect with God, trying to listen for a direction, for some validation, for some hope or some measure of grace. While in retrospect I imagine there were things that I could have interpreted as such, at the time, I actively missed them. Joseph Charles, one of the theology majors, would come by and take me running, probably being responsible for about 80% of my runs during that time. Sal Garcia, another theology major would come by and just talk, carefully if not consciously avoiding anything heavy. Myron Widmer, one of the theology professors, said that he didn’t know what happened nor was it any of his business but that I should know there was a friend there. Julia and Orlando regularly checked on me. But where I focused was that by and large, lots of the psychology majors and professors were the people who were most prominently there. Professors like Dr. Fulton and Dr. Schneider were consistently there to lend an ear. Students like Winter, Christi, Rose were always lending smiles and were the few friends who kept coming over as if nothing had happened. Perhaps because I was uncomfortable with how I had failed my faith, the vast majority of people I was talking to at the time were people whose faith was not a significant part of their life.

But I was severely off balance and therefore rigorously not focusing on kindness. The gossip around campus was heavy with it almost all being focused on me. Shannon was amused once when while waiting for me in a campus lobby, a couple of students passed by and said hey wasn’t that guy the theology major who was suspended for having threesomes while sitting on a couch across from her. The academic dean scheduled a meeting with me to encourage me to not march because I was an embarrassment to the school and making sure to point out that the discipline committee had gotten it wrong and should have expelled me. The chair of the honor department, now a college president, was working hard at trying to convince the honors committee that I should not be allowed to graduate with honors. The professor of the theology senior seminar, now the chair, was bothered by how angry I was coming across in class and spoke to Greg King about how maybe it would be best if I took this class independent study to be less of a bad influence on the rest of the theology majors. What I missed then was that none of those things had happened! I was incredibly angry because there were people who had wanted harsher things but I overlooked the fact that none of those things prevailed.

That anger kept taking me to darker places where I was sometimes yelling at Natalie, other times at Shannon, other times at God, and not nearly often enough at myself. I am not sure which was the cause and which was the effect but in a vicious cycle, the theology department, both faculty and students, withdrew themselves from me and most of my friends became people who had little to no use for religion. I kept complaining to anyone who would hear about how we talked about grace until people actually needed it, not cluing in on just how much I had received. Dr. Paulson, the dean of the school, gave me the sagest advice that I would receive then but I would see it as nonsense at the time. She let me know that I was talking way too much and that maybe I should realize that through this time silence was a better route. She said “less is more” but I interpreted it only as one more person who was just trying to get me to sit down and shut up.

I got a new job then through somewhere that Natalie recommended me. It was a group home working with juvenile delinquents trying to straighten them out for the real world. The place was called appropriately enough New Horizons. The job they offered me was 8 hours on Friday evens and 15 hours on all day Saturday. This effectively meant that I was working the entire time I was conscious on the Sabbath thus ending my church attendance. This was a mixed bag because it allowed me to get some distance from it but it also let me think that I was fine if not actually better without church and God. I started to realize or at least imagine that I was far more like those juvenile delinquents than I was like the people at PUC. I was a minority, raised in poverty who had never been part of the main crowd; I was not like those privileged middle class kids who I’d been attending school with for so long. I decided to become a victim of my own life and interpret these events as not that big of a deal. It was just these conservative, republican up tight puritans who just had such a narrow world view who couldn’t handle it. When we have a hard time living with what we did, its amazing how many of us want to blame anyone but ourselves.

Natalie also needed an escape pod. She had always had an obsession with the biblical character David, making comments about his story and loving pieces of art dedicated to him. She started hanging out with a guy who she eventually began to date who was named David of all things. When the relationship was still relatively new and she and I were still meeting and not talking, she confided many things about him to me. She was disappointed if not angry that I wasn’t more jealous but at that point I was so emotionally exhausted I could have barely managed it if I’d tried. This, thankfully, led her to draw closer to him and away from me. He, never having met me, only had a limited perspective but as our conversations started to dwindle away she seemed to be painting a picture that I was a manipulative jerk and he was reinforcing it in his pursuit of her in a cycle that reinforced their connection.

There was even a time where I was talking with Natalie on the phone where I couldn’t figure out why she was vehemently denying some less than flattering things she’d said about him until I realized he was listening in. While we haven’t had contact since then, I understand she eventually married him and they are doing well together.

As I felt more and more alone during this time, my prayers eventually all but ceased and my care about these things then started to fade. God, his department and his church had failed me when I needed them most and those people who were most disconnected from those ideas had been there the most.