In the midst of all this, I got a reprieve away from pastoring in the form of a summer abroad. I was required by the honors program to spend some classes studying somewhere else; that particular summer the program had arranged for it to be in England and the class I was studying was entitled Christianity.
The group I was studying with was now the third honors groups I had been a part of with since I had taken a year out and most people did the abroad class between their sophomore and junior year. I knew almost no one or what perspective it was but in my very shy way I would be arguing with them in class in no time at all. We would argue about many things that summer, people were more discussion centered than in almost any class I had ever been in. One of the more memorable moments was when in an argument about various religions all being windows into God, one fellow theology major, Godfrey Miranda, eloquently stated “they may be windows but Jesus Christ is the door.” It’s always great when one can be that witty in defense of truth.
Interestingly enough, the whole adventure was a very different approach to religion than I had ever quite encountered. I was well aware that there were plenty of the students back at PUC who regularly skipped church and that perhaps a few of the staff did as well but I was not prepared for how different this summer would be than the rest of my Christian experience both by those within the program and those within the country of England.
The whole thing began with the teachers and I not having coordinated very well on how I would get to Newbold itself since I had a flight that arrived after all public transportation left. This ended up with me arriving at 1:00 in the morning and making friends with a crew that was working on some repairs. They were going to get off work at 7:00 AM and after hanging out and chatting and trading jokes and stories for a few hours (I was waiting till the subway system was going to get going again), they offered to give me a ride to the college, about a 30-40 mile drive. They were incredibly generous both in that and in sharing their tea and cookies with a complete stranger. What was incredibly fascinating was both how hostile they were both to religion and to Christians. The fact that I was attending a class on Christianity alone was almost enough to get the relationship to be a nonstarter. But after a few jokes and a clear understanding that the conversation was over if I brought up religion, we were able to connect. I would soon learn from making friends with a few British people that the attitude towards religion at large was skeptical at best and most commonly rather dismissive.
The Honors class as a whole ended up fitting well into that atmosphere. Because of weekend activities planned out by a few of us or by the class itself, it became such that essentially no one went to church on the weekend even when they were there. This didn’t just include the students but also the staff. They were happy sleeping in. Because of weekend trips and partly due to being absorbed into that culture, while I did attend church, that summer in England was probably the least consistently I did so.
Some of them were willing to argue about religion and discuss it and deal with the baggage that some of their parents had handed them but most were happy to shrug it off. I did have some intense discussions with people; one of them, Juliette, was adamantly against religion. A few years later she more readily accepted when a job offer came open at PUC. Another girl Christi would also argue with me though she mostly thought Christianity was more restrictive than reasonable. Eventually, she married someone who wanted to be a missionary and she also became more receptive to church teaching. Intriguingly enough, my ability to try to shrug off some of the minors in order to pursue a higher good was well what they may have been doing later in life. It was something that I couldn't decide whether or not I was disappionted with them in years later.
Another person who I argued with frequently then was Stephanie. This was not so much about me but more about her. She had dated this guy on and off since high school. The relationship seemed full of drama and, at least to me, dread but she kept going back to him or he to her, I’m not sure. We would argue and I never quite wrapped my mind around why she was so committed to this person when she was so great and there were so many more out there. She made an argument then that I didn’t understand till years later that connections with that much history and that much sentiment had a power that wasn’t easily undone and should not be easily thrown away. She would eventually marry the guy and they are still married to this day.
But these were not the only things that messed with the reality that I’d so comfortably inhabited at that point. People would go out drinking and come back to the dorm fairly buzzed if not outright drunk. There was a small group of people who were doing quite a bit of sexual experimentation in various states of undress in the dorm. I still cannot recall to this day why during one of those sessions they actually opened the door when I knocked for one of them (I didn’t know what was going on when I knocked). And when I say a small group people were in experimentation I mean they were experimenting as a small group (4 or 5 at a time). Shannon would spend some time there during that summer with me (originally she wasn’t going to but we got a last minute ticket because I couldn’t live with the fact that I would be in a foreign country without my wife). While Shannon was there, part of that group even offered to have sex with Shannon and I jointly. I assumed she was kidding and laughed it off but had to politely decline when it was awkwardly obvious that they were sincere.
There was also an incredibly awkward scenario where many of us suspected that one of the teachers was very inappropriately hitting on one of the younger members of our group. Whether or not she recognized this wasn’t clear but she was having a hard time in life and it was questionable whether or not he was taking advantage of that.
This is not to say that I was completely innocent during this time: I engaged in one awkwardly risque but relatively innocent game of truth and dare during that time; I had a beer at a pub with some British folk (to this day, I don’t typically drink but I always drink whatever people buy for me, especially in foreign countries believing the greater sin to be that of rudeness rather than that of imbibing). What bothered me was the level they had taken it to, it was not something I had been that close to with people within the Adventist sphere. These were the honors students, bright, capable kids messing with reality. The awareness that people have a lot of growing up to do when they are 19-21 never sank in with me at that age since that’s hard for it to personally apply when you’re married at 20 and a paid pastor by 21. It wasn’t that I was more grown up than anyone else but I had learned to pretend like I was.
Those conversations with Juliette, Christi and Stephanie and those sexual experiments kept going through my head. It was about being honest with yourself about your own humanity and perhaps exploring it. They were intelligent people but I dismissed their arguments as excuses to have your own way. Ignore things and they will go away, fit into the mold and you will, change for the better purpose. I was almost twenty two years old and was convinced that this had worked for me so far.
I even sat one day in the middle of campus thinking of all of this would mean. I had made out once with a girl named Beth when broken up with Shannon. I hadn’t really had many feelings for her and I felt incredibly guilty about having used her. Natalie and I had made out once while I was dating Shannon after Shannon had already come to PUC (I’d confessed to the whole thing to Shannon the day after it happened and we painfully worked it out). While it not happening may have eased the pain, I had been willing to let an abortion happen. I was starting to see that perhaps my mother’s hiding of my father and his painful attempts to be part of my life which I had dismissed were so long were more of a damage than I realized. My questions about my faith and my role in agreeing with some simple but sometimes silly church were literally making me collapse onto the floor and exhale in a bathroom. But I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t be honest about those things because I had now achieved the dream I’d pursued since I was six. I was a pastor and it was time to be an adult. Whatever issues I had were best left underground; whatever I needed to deny myself was best denied. One thing and one thing only mattered and I was there, becoming a pastor and proclaiming the return of Jesus. The idea that being completely human and completely faithful was possible did not enter into my imagination. No one was force feeding me anything but I had a vision of who and what I was supposed to be and nothing else mattered.
I left back from England ready to finish the summer off as a pastor and to head into my senior year of college. I had already achieved my dream of being a pastor in a sense and now I was going to head back to finish off two degrees, psychology and theology with Honors. What could possibly go wrong?
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
35 Harder to Breathe
I transitioned into my junior year of college and had to participate in a theology department right of passage: an externship (why it was called that I do not understand). The pressure as one of the few Spanish speaking theology majors was to do the externship with one of the local Spanish churches. I actually ended up with two churches, the St. Helena Spanish Church and the Napa one because these churches shared a pastor.
The vast majority of the externs were assigned to one of the local churches that had a full time assigned preacher and several elders. They got to learn a lot but often got to speak once or maybe twice during their entire year there. Because the pastor at my church alternated between the two, I got to speak between these churches almost every other weekend (I was at the opposite church that he was at typically). The churches were radically different; St. Helena was an older very traditional church dwindling in members and content to just have a place to worship week after week while the Napa church had far more youth and energy, a spirit of evangelism and vitality. I suspect that part of the reason that these churches were so different was actually fairly simple to explain. The St. Helena church was by and large composed of people who were associated with PUC, people who worked in the Adventist system and were inundated and were really looking mostly to worship in the language their heart spoke, Spanish. The Napa congregation lived in the real world, among people of various faiths if any at all and did not live in a town like Angwin where everything shut down for the Sabbath. Their faith was more alive the same reason healthy people are, because it had to exercise more, had to be fed with a better diet to sustain challenges of the real world.
The year at South Bay had changed many of my perspectives but I possessed the same fault then that I do now: since I had a position now even if I had previously believed the opposite, it was always right. Too infrequently in my life, have I had the grace to realize that perhaps different perspectives are both valid and necessary. No, in my view, there had to be a better way and a better truth. This isn’t to say that I didn’t try to validate the beliefs of my parishioners. Invoking my mother’s conservativeness, I tried to be what a good conservative pastor ought to be. I tried to dress the part (even to the point of taking off my wedding band when I was around church members since conservative Adventists have a problem with jewelry ), speak the part (my sermons still had some edge to them but it was edge about social justice and getting up and doing something, not about some theological premises I disagreed with) and at some level be the part. I hoped to convert Shannon into this cooking, cleaning Hispanic domestic woman like my mother had been. I over embellished (but truly believed) that her meals and her keeping the house in order were both spectacular and a great source of joy in her life. She was 20 years old at the time and still trying to figure out this marriage and this pastor’s wife thing and in her low key low maintenance way going along with the flow because she’s never been the type to fight battles that aren’t worth fighting (that’s my specialty).
Anyway, trying to pretend to be someone else in order to placate your parishioners and to make your mother proud may work for many but someone who has a persona and personality as strong as mine, it was wearing me down. I can’t tell you that I realized it at the time and it may well not have been until I was writing this that I became aware of it or rewrote it into history but it was chipping away at me. There is a principle in psychology that says that if your actions contradict your thoughts, you are far more likely to change your thoughts than your actions. I guess I was hoping that I could fake it until I make it but what had worked at least a few other times was not working.
On the days I’m most honest it wasn’t simply the fact that I’d gotten past some of the conservative Adventist cultural values. I’d gotten past many of the Hispanic ones themselves. Shannon both then and now was very interested in learning more about my Mexican culture, improving her Spanish and being tuned to this part of me but it didn’t happen. The student organization of Latinos kept trying to recruit me to be a bigger part of their organization but I never petered out. My rationale was that these guys were almost exclusively children of immigrants, not actual immigrants like myself. I had up until then refused to become a US citizen and did for several years after that wanting to maintain my “Mexican identity” but the truth was that I was not from the US because I had not integrated myself well into it but I was also not from Mexico because I’d left.
This was all well and good when I was the pastor’s assistant, the student doing the extern program but then something happened midyear. The pastor I was working under, Pastor Dena, was hired as a conference official. The churches decided in the interim of finding a new pastor, they would “hire” me. They began to pay me a modest student salary and suddenly I was now “the pastor.” Interestingly enough, several of the church members around that time went from calling me Iram to calling me pastor, a notable few refusing to going back to calling me Iram even after I asked them to. The title I’d craved my entire life was actually incredibly intimidating to carry. Hispanic culture has a tradition on turning to titles and positions for authority rather than experience. The fact that I was now the pastor made people ask for my opinion and follow it more precisely than they ever had.
I was trying to pretend to be a conservative, traditional Hispanic Adventist minister and I was missing on key points but not admitting it to anyone including myself. I was struggling with a sense of idenity. The frustrations of the classroom and this were really weighing me down but like an athlete who is tearing down a muscle, I would not allow my mind to allow the fact that there was an injury developing which by use was getting worse.
This isn’t to say that there weren’t great moments during that time. People asked me to be part of their weddings, to help out with funerals, to dedicate children. I again took the approach that I had in South Bay of visiting people in their homes and their jobs and finding out about them. The stories of their immigrating into this foreign land from all over Latin America and finding a way to succeed in this country. I echoed their stories but they were better connected to where they had left than I had perhaps ever been. They were receptive to me and like the South Bay church, they liked me in their own way. They welcomed me into their homes and gave me advice on life and marriage and listened to my views on the Bible. Many took notes during my sermons and several asked for copies on tape or cd because they said that was the message they needed that day (I’m flattered that some of the sermons I wrote the are still used to teach students at PUC to preach)
One of the church board members at that time allegedly started having an affair. She was single and he was one of the church deacons and relatively recently married. This came up during a meeting of the disciplinary board and more than a few of the board members wanted to have their names removed from church membership, excommunicated if you will. This doesn’t have that often but it does occur. I fought it with every ounce of my vigor and argued that perhaps it was appropriate to remove them from church leadership but that we were not going to make this a spectacle. It was a relief to have that view prevail and showed me that grace had really become my method of operation when push came to shove. The people I had the most problem with were those who came across as legalistic. It really tore my mind then because I still wanted to be all things to all people and wanted every church member to like me. I would pace my living room floor at home and tell Shannon that I would find a way to both work with them and make progress with them. The belief that all people could be improved on by the grace of God and with some help from a good pastor made me try to work very hard with people but I was not recognizing that someone else wanting them to change would not be enough impetus.
Nonetheless, pretending to be someone else at my church, arguing with the theology majors, not having enough outlets for my energy, trying to change people who felt no need for change was wearing me out. It got to where for the last couple of months of my junior year and the beginning of the summer, almost every single Sabbath, I went into the men’s bathroom, locked myself in a stall, collapsed onto the floor and just started breathing deeply in and out to get my composure. The longer I did that the harder each week got.
The vast majority of the externs were assigned to one of the local churches that had a full time assigned preacher and several elders. They got to learn a lot but often got to speak once or maybe twice during their entire year there. Because the pastor at my church alternated between the two, I got to speak between these churches almost every other weekend (I was at the opposite church that he was at typically). The churches were radically different; St. Helena was an older very traditional church dwindling in members and content to just have a place to worship week after week while the Napa church had far more youth and energy, a spirit of evangelism and vitality. I suspect that part of the reason that these churches were so different was actually fairly simple to explain. The St. Helena church was by and large composed of people who were associated with PUC, people who worked in the Adventist system and were inundated and were really looking mostly to worship in the language their heart spoke, Spanish. The Napa congregation lived in the real world, among people of various faiths if any at all and did not live in a town like Angwin where everything shut down for the Sabbath. Their faith was more alive the same reason healthy people are, because it had to exercise more, had to be fed with a better diet to sustain challenges of the real world.
The year at South Bay had changed many of my perspectives but I possessed the same fault then that I do now: since I had a position now even if I had previously believed the opposite, it was always right. Too infrequently in my life, have I had the grace to realize that perhaps different perspectives are both valid and necessary. No, in my view, there had to be a better way and a better truth. This isn’t to say that I didn’t try to validate the beliefs of my parishioners. Invoking my mother’s conservativeness, I tried to be what a good conservative pastor ought to be. I tried to dress the part (even to the point of taking off my wedding band when I was around church members since conservative Adventists have a problem with jewelry ), speak the part (my sermons still had some edge to them but it was edge about social justice and getting up and doing something, not about some theological premises I disagreed with) and at some level be the part. I hoped to convert Shannon into this cooking, cleaning Hispanic domestic woman like my mother had been. I over embellished (but truly believed) that her meals and her keeping the house in order were both spectacular and a great source of joy in her life. She was 20 years old at the time and still trying to figure out this marriage and this pastor’s wife thing and in her low key low maintenance way going along with the flow because she’s never been the type to fight battles that aren’t worth fighting (that’s my specialty).
Anyway, trying to pretend to be someone else in order to placate your parishioners and to make your mother proud may work for many but someone who has a persona and personality as strong as mine, it was wearing me down. I can’t tell you that I realized it at the time and it may well not have been until I was writing this that I became aware of it or rewrote it into history but it was chipping away at me. There is a principle in psychology that says that if your actions contradict your thoughts, you are far more likely to change your thoughts than your actions. I guess I was hoping that I could fake it until I make it but what had worked at least a few other times was not working.
On the days I’m most honest it wasn’t simply the fact that I’d gotten past some of the conservative Adventist cultural values. I’d gotten past many of the Hispanic ones themselves. Shannon both then and now was very interested in learning more about my Mexican culture, improving her Spanish and being tuned to this part of me but it didn’t happen. The student organization of Latinos kept trying to recruit me to be a bigger part of their organization but I never petered out. My rationale was that these guys were almost exclusively children of immigrants, not actual immigrants like myself. I had up until then refused to become a US citizen and did for several years after that wanting to maintain my “Mexican identity” but the truth was that I was not from the US because I had not integrated myself well into it but I was also not from Mexico because I’d left.
This was all well and good when I was the pastor’s assistant, the student doing the extern program but then something happened midyear. The pastor I was working under, Pastor Dena, was hired as a conference official. The churches decided in the interim of finding a new pastor, they would “hire” me. They began to pay me a modest student salary and suddenly I was now “the pastor.” Interestingly enough, several of the church members around that time went from calling me Iram to calling me pastor, a notable few refusing to going back to calling me Iram even after I asked them to. The title I’d craved my entire life was actually incredibly intimidating to carry. Hispanic culture has a tradition on turning to titles and positions for authority rather than experience. The fact that I was now the pastor made people ask for my opinion and follow it more precisely than they ever had.
I was trying to pretend to be a conservative, traditional Hispanic Adventist minister and I was missing on key points but not admitting it to anyone including myself. I was struggling with a sense of idenity. The frustrations of the classroom and this were really weighing me down but like an athlete who is tearing down a muscle, I would not allow my mind to allow the fact that there was an injury developing which by use was getting worse.
This isn’t to say that there weren’t great moments during that time. People asked me to be part of their weddings, to help out with funerals, to dedicate children. I again took the approach that I had in South Bay of visiting people in their homes and their jobs and finding out about them. The stories of their immigrating into this foreign land from all over Latin America and finding a way to succeed in this country. I echoed their stories but they were better connected to where they had left than I had perhaps ever been. They were receptive to me and like the South Bay church, they liked me in their own way. They welcomed me into their homes and gave me advice on life and marriage and listened to my views on the Bible. Many took notes during my sermons and several asked for copies on tape or cd because they said that was the message they needed that day (I’m flattered that some of the sermons I wrote the are still used to teach students at PUC to preach)
One of the church board members at that time allegedly started having an affair. She was single and he was one of the church deacons and relatively recently married. This came up during a meeting of the disciplinary board and more than a few of the board members wanted to have their names removed from church membership, excommunicated if you will. This doesn’t have that often but it does occur. I fought it with every ounce of my vigor and argued that perhaps it was appropriate to remove them from church leadership but that we were not going to make this a spectacle. It was a relief to have that view prevail and showed me that grace had really become my method of operation when push came to shove. The people I had the most problem with were those who came across as legalistic. It really tore my mind then because I still wanted to be all things to all people and wanted every church member to like me. I would pace my living room floor at home and tell Shannon that I would find a way to both work with them and make progress with them. The belief that all people could be improved on by the grace of God and with some help from a good pastor made me try to work very hard with people but I was not recognizing that someone else wanting them to change would not be enough impetus.
Nonetheless, pretending to be someone else at my church, arguing with the theology majors, not having enough outlets for my energy, trying to change people who felt no need for change was wearing me out. It got to where for the last couple of months of my junior year and the beginning of the summer, almost every single Sabbath, I went into the men’s bathroom, locked myself in a stall, collapsed onto the floor and just started breathing deeply in and out to get my composure. The longer I did that the harder each week got.
34 I Can Only Imagine
After our marriage Shannon and I were at South Bay Jr. Academy for a little while longer. They held the second of three receptions for us (another one at PUC) and it was a great privilege. I believed wholeheartedly that I had now picked up the second and better half of my ministry team. We were going to chance the world and make it better while getting God’s people ready for His second coming.
In no time at all we were back at PUC for our junior year. Having been given old couches and old furniture, we moved into a one bedroom apartment. I had actually once again been clueless as to the fact that I’d been away for a year and tried to run for religious vice president while in LA. to only again have been summarily defeated. After one of the happiest years in my life, it was back to the grind of studying Hebrew and theology and psychology. As that year started I had another very shaking moment, finding out within a few weeks of my own marriage that the pastor who baptized me was having marital problems and that largely due to that he was no longer a minister. He contacted me a few years later after I had both been and stopped being a minister when he by chance crashed into my mother. He was apparently fairly heartbroken that I had not lived up to my promise and after we got off the phone wept in front of my mother.
There was a definite realization that year that I did not like school at all. I liked debating and I liked learning but the classroom concept of sitting there and getting lectured had grown old. I also was now part of a different class but because of the way I’d created my schedule I had as many classes with the senior class as I did with my own. I was back in the Honors program though with a different class than I had begun. Natalie had been the girl that I had argued with my freshmen year at first, then it had moved to Sophia. This year I argued with someone who had been with me in the beginning but now was a year ahead of me, Laura Aagaard. She was brilliant and clever and seemed to be able to think about the big questions and shrug them off unemotionally, realizing that sometimes the asking was as important if not more so than the answers; she said as much to me once and I wish I’d let that sink in more. She actually listened and then while half-rolling her eyes at the silliness I was arguing answered it with sharpness that could cut a diamond.
But the arguments I was getting very emotional from were with the theology majors. There were still brilliant people like Julia who seemed open to other perspectives but they were in the minority. The two I remember most vividly frustrating me were David Moore and Jason Decena. David frustrated me because he seemed to think that there was only one way things could exists, that our experiences had to be in a singular road, a narrow path. He was conservative and stubborn and wrong in my mind (we actually argued 10 minutes once about whether or not when you get into the presence of God that you immediately fall on your face). It took me years later that he was better than most of the people I’ve known since then or before if for no other reason than that he had passion and conviction. (I still have a lot to learn today but I’ve never been able to stomach people who don’t stand for something.) My main frustration was that he didn’t seem to give room that different experiences could be legitimate. It took a few years of growing up before I realized that by listening to me, by engaging in these sometimes trivial conversations he was considering them and his side of the conversation was far more humble than mine was.
Jason was the complete opposite; he was polite and listened and smiled and made jokes. One time we were discussing something that I can’t remember but was of critical important and I made some points on the chalkboard. After I had done so, he gets up and he gets the chalk and says that its always distracting to be in class because when people write on chalkboard, their butt jiggles and then he demonstrated. (If you’re reading this, I’m sorry you learned this because it means that you will be focused on the wrong thing at least the next time you watch someone write on a board). Then he smiled his 1000 megawatt smile and said something about how it was good that I was thinking about these things. Being right to him was secondary to showing that people could get along, that Jesus came first and we’d figure out the details later. Both David and Jason were musicians and could praise God with music and purer emotion than perhaps I ever did.
But I simply couldn’t stop arguing because I thought that there was truth and finding the right way mattered. Then and now I simply didn’t do a good enough job of living with the reality that ideas are secondary to the way they affect people. Everyone of these theology majors and professors had their own views which they believed wholeheartedly but they seemed to present it with their whole heart and while that’s where mine were coming from my arguments then and now came across as so harshly that it well might not have mattered if they were right. My arguments too often emerge as condescending and while the condescension is not intentional, it was because I was right and they were wrong. When people pointed out that I had even had complete 180’s about certain things and now was arguing the opposite of what I used to, it didn’t give me the kind of humility that type of awareness should.
One of my professors, Myron Widmer, a man with an incredibly kind demeanor and approach to him said to me then “You pick the hills you’re willing to die on and everything else is flexible and there are very few hills you should be willing to die on.” He encouraged me to try to connect better with the department on a human level and so I attempted to do so. Every time there was a test, I would hold a study session in my house initially for just the theology department but then for the psychology one as well. Shannon and I started having people over almost every Friday night for socializing after vespers and almost every Sunday morning for brunch. I helped create a theology department intramurals team, the Saints (we played almost every single sport and won less games than I can count on one hand over the course of the years). But as is my tendency I kept people at arms length, typically only very consciously having people over once. I told myself that it was so that I could be a more gracious host and have more people over but I had begun/continued my pattern of knowing everyone but letting almost no one in.
I almost became human at that time but it was ideas that ate me, arguing over them, academia encouraging my mind but I was failing to shape in any good way as a person. Part of this was that I would focus on ideas and the other part probably just as big was the fact that I was trying to be this model of a pastor. I am not sure where I got the image of what a pastor and his wife were supposed to be like but I was trying very hard to become that. Shannon was both young and low key enough to go along with it. I was happy trying to do it, seeing it at as a way to stay in shape if you will. It wasn’t that much different than my running. After the three months had ended, I had decided to take the streak to a 1000 consecutive days of running and I was doing it. I joined the cross country team and I was getting faster and becoming a better runner. I really imagined that if I put myself in the cookie cutter mold of a pastor that anything I had extra and all of the questions would get trimmed off. I was trying to “let go and let God” and a thousand other mantras. Let me be clear that during the beginning of my junior year it was fine. I was loving it in fact thinking that I was headed there, not even recognizing the frustrations as such but mostly as merely inconveniences but that can only hold for so long. And in retrospect, it was only a matter of time before it all came falling apart.
In no time at all we were back at PUC for our junior year. Having been given old couches and old furniture, we moved into a one bedroom apartment. I had actually once again been clueless as to the fact that I’d been away for a year and tried to run for religious vice president while in LA. to only again have been summarily defeated. After one of the happiest years in my life, it was back to the grind of studying Hebrew and theology and psychology. As that year started I had another very shaking moment, finding out within a few weeks of my own marriage that the pastor who baptized me was having marital problems and that largely due to that he was no longer a minister. He contacted me a few years later after I had both been and stopped being a minister when he by chance crashed into my mother. He was apparently fairly heartbroken that I had not lived up to my promise and after we got off the phone wept in front of my mother.
There was a definite realization that year that I did not like school at all. I liked debating and I liked learning but the classroom concept of sitting there and getting lectured had grown old. I also was now part of a different class but because of the way I’d created my schedule I had as many classes with the senior class as I did with my own. I was back in the Honors program though with a different class than I had begun. Natalie had been the girl that I had argued with my freshmen year at first, then it had moved to Sophia. This year I argued with someone who had been with me in the beginning but now was a year ahead of me, Laura Aagaard. She was brilliant and clever and seemed to be able to think about the big questions and shrug them off unemotionally, realizing that sometimes the asking was as important if not more so than the answers; she said as much to me once and I wish I’d let that sink in more. She actually listened and then while half-rolling her eyes at the silliness I was arguing answered it with sharpness that could cut a diamond.
But the arguments I was getting very emotional from were with the theology majors. There were still brilliant people like Julia who seemed open to other perspectives but they were in the minority. The two I remember most vividly frustrating me were David Moore and Jason Decena. David frustrated me because he seemed to think that there was only one way things could exists, that our experiences had to be in a singular road, a narrow path. He was conservative and stubborn and wrong in my mind (we actually argued 10 minutes once about whether or not when you get into the presence of God that you immediately fall on your face). It took me years later that he was better than most of the people I’ve known since then or before if for no other reason than that he had passion and conviction. (I still have a lot to learn today but I’ve never been able to stomach people who don’t stand for something.) My main frustration was that he didn’t seem to give room that different experiences could be legitimate. It took a few years of growing up before I realized that by listening to me, by engaging in these sometimes trivial conversations he was considering them and his side of the conversation was far more humble than mine was.
Jason was the complete opposite; he was polite and listened and smiled and made jokes. One time we were discussing something that I can’t remember but was of critical important and I made some points on the chalkboard. After I had done so, he gets up and he gets the chalk and says that its always distracting to be in class because when people write on chalkboard, their butt jiggles and then he demonstrated. (If you’re reading this, I’m sorry you learned this because it means that you will be focused on the wrong thing at least the next time you watch someone write on a board). Then he smiled his 1000 megawatt smile and said something about how it was good that I was thinking about these things. Being right to him was secondary to showing that people could get along, that Jesus came first and we’d figure out the details later. Both David and Jason were musicians and could praise God with music and purer emotion than perhaps I ever did.
But I simply couldn’t stop arguing because I thought that there was truth and finding the right way mattered. Then and now I simply didn’t do a good enough job of living with the reality that ideas are secondary to the way they affect people. Everyone of these theology majors and professors had their own views which they believed wholeheartedly but they seemed to present it with their whole heart and while that’s where mine were coming from my arguments then and now came across as so harshly that it well might not have mattered if they were right. My arguments too often emerge as condescending and while the condescension is not intentional, it was because I was right and they were wrong. When people pointed out that I had even had complete 180’s about certain things and now was arguing the opposite of what I used to, it didn’t give me the kind of humility that type of awareness should.
One of my professors, Myron Widmer, a man with an incredibly kind demeanor and approach to him said to me then “You pick the hills you’re willing to die on and everything else is flexible and there are very few hills you should be willing to die on.” He encouraged me to try to connect better with the department on a human level and so I attempted to do so. Every time there was a test, I would hold a study session in my house initially for just the theology department but then for the psychology one as well. Shannon and I started having people over almost every Friday night for socializing after vespers and almost every Sunday morning for brunch. I helped create a theology department intramurals team, the Saints (we played almost every single sport and won less games than I can count on one hand over the course of the years). But as is my tendency I kept people at arms length, typically only very consciously having people over once. I told myself that it was so that I could be a more gracious host and have more people over but I had begun/continued my pattern of knowing everyone but letting almost no one in.
I almost became human at that time but it was ideas that ate me, arguing over them, academia encouraging my mind but I was failing to shape in any good way as a person. Part of this was that I would focus on ideas and the other part probably just as big was the fact that I was trying to be this model of a pastor. I am not sure where I got the image of what a pastor and his wife were supposed to be like but I was trying very hard to become that. Shannon was both young and low key enough to go along with it. I was happy trying to do it, seeing it at as a way to stay in shape if you will. It wasn’t that much different than my running. After the three months had ended, I had decided to take the streak to a 1000 consecutive days of running and I was doing it. I joined the cross country team and I was getting faster and becoming a better runner. I really imagined that if I put myself in the cookie cutter mold of a pastor that anything I had extra and all of the questions would get trimmed off. I was trying to “let go and let God” and a thousand other mantras. Let me be clear that during the beginning of my junior year it was fine. I was loving it in fact thinking that I was headed there, not even recognizing the frustrations as such but mostly as merely inconveniences but that can only hold for so long. And in retrospect, it was only a matter of time before it all came falling apart.
33 What I Really Want To Say
That put a dark spot on Shannon’s and my relationship as we prepared for the wedding but by carefully avoiding talking about it, I eventually tried to live daily life by pretending it hadn’t happened. Sometimes the darkness of the thoughts overwhelmed me but eventually if you pretend enough that reality is okay, you start living like it is. We got busy into planning the wedding. Gil and Ellen were asked to be the best man and the maid of honor and it was incredibly exciting to realize that this was going to happen. Always having been a compulsive planner, I planned almost all of the wedding details, a task that I guess typically falls to the girls. The women of the church made fun of me a bit but helped me out with it quite a lot. The men of the church mocked me endlessly but did not help at all.
We were high school sweethearts and so were going to go back to the town where we met, Weslaco, to get married. I had gotten to be quite chunk by then a full 185 lbs at 5’8 and age 20. Someone showed me a picture of myself where I didn’t recognize me because I was simply too fat. Showing again my obsession with goal setting but really my vanity, I decided to get back to my high school weight (158) before my wedding because all my friends from high school would make fun of me. I don’t remember where I got the idea but I decided that I would eat fresh fruit for breakfast, vegetables for lunch and a handful of nuts for dinner for the 3 months before the wedding. Not only that but I would run every single day for the 3 months before from April 8th to July 8th. I accomplished both goals and at the wedding I actually had lost almost 40 lbs to be at 147 and the thinnest I had ever been at my wedding. (Ironically, Shannon had gotten on birth control a couple of weeks before the wedding and it had made her gain weight so I was at my thinnest and she at her heaviest when the wedding did arrive).
We flew out there several weekends before to meet with photographers and bakers and flower shops. She was still living north of me in Napa Valley but we met at DFW to connect to the Valley. While we were sitting in the airport, we were watching tv during the layover and a commercial came on: “tickets to china 1238 dollars, kungpao chicken in Beijing 14 yuan, (to a visual of a guy on the Great Wall at sunrise) accomplishing #11 off your life to do list, priceless. There’s some things money can’t buy, for everything else there’s Mastercard.” On a whim, we decided to make a life to do list (these are located below just because I wanted to share them). This was actually put on the back of our wedding program so that all of our guests could see it. They thought we were ambitious and we were but that’s the way I always wanted to approach life.
Eventually the day came: July 8th, 2001 at 10:00 AM. While the memory of it is quite a blur, I still think it was the single happiest hours of my life. There were people there from every stage in my life: high school, family, college, the South Bay Church. We kept the cheesy traditions of not seeing the bride in her dress before she walked in; she had something borrowed, something blue, and something old and something new. We exchanged wedding bands and I cried when we did because this girl was the center of the universe and that day no one else mattered. We didn’t have the traditional bows (those will also be replicated in the next chapter) Dr. Cruz, my high school pastor, mentor and friend married us. Steve read a verse, Leandro and Kisha sang, our old school cook catered the meal, Adrian Pena’s family provided the sound system. It was not too different from being back in high school at one of the schools banquets.
(That day also had its share of controversies because of being Adventists. While we did not say with this ring I thee wed, the fact that we exchanged wedding rings offended some people and they let me know so at the wedding. There was mariachi at the wedding and this led to some spontaneous dancing; this also offended some people and one family, the Glasses, can be accurately be described as having fled the place when that occurred. I crashed into the elders who had told me not to become one of those California Adventists and at some level I was a little disappointed in myself that I had..)
Still, there was no day that I didn’t love life more. I was getting the girl who I loved with all of my heart to commit to spending the rest of her life with me and to do so publicly. I was in a crowd having an intensely private and public moment; it matched up in everyway with the way that I’m wired. I wish I had more adequate words to describe my emotions for that girl but what I really wanted to say was what the sun would say to the sky for giving it a place to come alive.
The vows
Shannon, these are my promises to you: that I will love you freely, as the sky loves the bid, as the sunset loves the early evening. That I will love you grandly, with my tender fine emotions, with my loving words and all my actions. That I will love you purely, with my honor, and my knowing, with all the best intentions of my being. Shannon, I love you, and you are my closest friend. Do you accept my promise to share my life and all that I am with you?
Iram, these are my promises to you: that I will you joyfully, with my body, with my laughter, with my foolishness and playing. That I will love you truly, with my finest kindness, my obedience and trust, and my deepest care. That I will love you always, now from this day forward. Iram, I love you, and you are my closest friend. Do you accept my promise to share my life and all that I am with you.
The Dream List
This was the back of our wedding program. I have crossed the things we have done in our 8 years of marriage at this point
On this, Sunday July 8, 2001 Shannon and Iram dream together of their future married life. Since we know that if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time, we wanted to plan our lives, at least envision them, before we were too far along and had realized life had led us instead of us it. This list does not represent either importance or a chronological sequence but like a child daydreaming, they are a stream of consciousness from the center of our joint imagination. They represent love, the freedom of will and expression, and all the things that make life worth living. We trust you will find these interesting, perhaps even amusing but we hope they inspire you to also dream of everything our lives, all of our lives, could be.
Identities to be
Happily Married Lovers Lover of Simple Pleasures Humble Philanthropists
Good Parents Forever Dreamers Co-Authors
Spoiling Grandparents Eternally Young God-fearing Ministers
Passionate Missionaries Inspiring Teachers Healthy Humans
Encouraging Mentors Dependable Friends
Things to do
Write A Book Ice-Skate Sky Dive
Wear Kilts Water-Ski Ride a Roller Coaster
Attend a Broadway Musical Windsurf Grow a Garden
Attend an Opera Ride Horses on the Beach Run a Marathon
Attend a Ballet Learn to Dance Salsa Take a Cruise
Skinny Dip
Places to Go
Hawaii Japanese Tea Garden Washington DC
Taj Mahal Sistine Chapel Ruins of Athens
Stonehenge Eiffel Tower Mayan Ruins
Great Wall of China Pyramids of Giza Grand Canyon
Great Barrier Reef New York Aztec Ruins
Carnival Yosemite Incan Ruins
We were high school sweethearts and so were going to go back to the town where we met, Weslaco, to get married. I had gotten to be quite chunk by then a full 185 lbs at 5’8 and age 20. Someone showed me a picture of myself where I didn’t recognize me because I was simply too fat. Showing again my obsession with goal setting but really my vanity, I decided to get back to my high school weight (158) before my wedding because all my friends from high school would make fun of me. I don’t remember where I got the idea but I decided that I would eat fresh fruit for breakfast, vegetables for lunch and a handful of nuts for dinner for the 3 months before the wedding. Not only that but I would run every single day for the 3 months before from April 8th to July 8th. I accomplished both goals and at the wedding I actually had lost almost 40 lbs to be at 147 and the thinnest I had ever been at my wedding. (Ironically, Shannon had gotten on birth control a couple of weeks before the wedding and it had made her gain weight so I was at my thinnest and she at her heaviest when the wedding did arrive).
We flew out there several weekends before to meet with photographers and bakers and flower shops. She was still living north of me in Napa Valley but we met at DFW to connect to the Valley. While we were sitting in the airport, we were watching tv during the layover and a commercial came on: “tickets to china 1238 dollars, kungpao chicken in Beijing 14 yuan, (to a visual of a guy on the Great Wall at sunrise) accomplishing #11 off your life to do list, priceless. There’s some things money can’t buy, for everything else there’s Mastercard.” On a whim, we decided to make a life to do list (these are located below just because I wanted to share them). This was actually put on the back of our wedding program so that all of our guests could see it. They thought we were ambitious and we were but that’s the way I always wanted to approach life.
Eventually the day came: July 8th, 2001 at 10:00 AM. While the memory of it is quite a blur, I still think it was the single happiest hours of my life. There were people there from every stage in my life: high school, family, college, the South Bay Church. We kept the cheesy traditions of not seeing the bride in her dress before she walked in; she had something borrowed, something blue, and something old and something new. We exchanged wedding bands and I cried when we did because this girl was the center of the universe and that day no one else mattered. We didn’t have the traditional bows (those will also be replicated in the next chapter) Dr. Cruz, my high school pastor, mentor and friend married us. Steve read a verse, Leandro and Kisha sang, our old school cook catered the meal, Adrian Pena’s family provided the sound system. It was not too different from being back in high school at one of the schools banquets.
(That day also had its share of controversies because of being Adventists. While we did not say with this ring I thee wed, the fact that we exchanged wedding rings offended some people and they let me know so at the wedding. There was mariachi at the wedding and this led to some spontaneous dancing; this also offended some people and one family, the Glasses, can be accurately be described as having fled the place when that occurred. I crashed into the elders who had told me not to become one of those California Adventists and at some level I was a little disappointed in myself that I had..)
Still, there was no day that I didn’t love life more. I was getting the girl who I loved with all of my heart to commit to spending the rest of her life with me and to do so publicly. I was in a crowd having an intensely private and public moment; it matched up in everyway with the way that I’m wired. I wish I had more adequate words to describe my emotions for that girl but what I really wanted to say was what the sun would say to the sky for giving it a place to come alive.
The vows
Shannon, these are my promises to you: that I will love you freely, as the sky loves the bid, as the sunset loves the early evening. That I will love you grandly, with my tender fine emotions, with my loving words and all my actions. That I will love you purely, with my honor, and my knowing, with all the best intentions of my being. Shannon, I love you, and you are my closest friend. Do you accept my promise to share my life and all that I am with you?
Iram, these are my promises to you: that I will you joyfully, with my body, with my laughter, with my foolishness and playing. That I will love you truly, with my finest kindness, my obedience and trust, and my deepest care. That I will love you always, now from this day forward. Iram, I love you, and you are my closest friend. Do you accept my promise to share my life and all that I am with you.
The Dream List
This was the back of our wedding program. I have crossed the things we have done in our 8 years of marriage at this point
On this, Sunday July 8, 2001 Shannon and Iram dream together of their future married life. Since we know that if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time, we wanted to plan our lives, at least envision them, before we were too far along and had realized life had led us instead of us it. This list does not represent either importance or a chronological sequence but like a child daydreaming, they are a stream of consciousness from the center of our joint imagination. They represent love, the freedom of will and expression, and all the things that make life worth living. We trust you will find these interesting, perhaps even amusing but we hope they inspire you to also dream of everything our lives, all of our lives, could be.
Identities to be
Happily Married Lovers Lover of Simple Pleasures Humble Philanthropists
Good Parents Forever Dreamers Co-Authors
Spoiling Grandparents Eternally Young God-fearing Ministers
Passionate Missionaries Inspiring Teachers Healthy Humans
Encouraging Mentors Dependable Friends
Things to do
Write A Book Ice-Skate Sky Dive
Wear Kilts Water-Ski Ride a Roller Coaster
Attend a Broadway Musical Windsurf Grow a Garden
Attend an Opera Ride Horses on the Beach Run a Marathon
Attend a Ballet Learn to Dance Salsa Take a Cruise
Skinny Dip
Places to Go
Hawaii Japanese Tea Garden Washington DC
Taj Mahal Sistine Chapel Ruins of Athens
Stonehenge Eiffel Tower Mayan Ruins
Great Wall of China Pyramids of Giza Grand Canyon
Great Barrier Reef New York Aztec Ruins
Carnival Yosemite Incan Ruins
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
32 Somewhere North
The one thing that was particularly tough that year was that Shannon and I were once again apart. She was only a few hours north but I still missed her immensely. It was far less dramatic by that point as I was able to call her almost at will with a cell phone (this was still in the relatively early days of cell phone and they were more expensive). I quickly went over the minutes the first two or four months running up my bill by quite a bit.
Nonetheless, very shortly after arriving at South Bay, I decided that Shannon really was the one. She was coming to visit about once a month and usually she came on the days that I spoke she sang the special music. Almost always she got “talked into” doing the praise team. She has a great singing voice and I think that it was her way of supporting my ministry. Ultimately though, it was about how we clicked; how she seemed to be able to roll her eyes at my ego and realize that it was a smaller part of me than almost anyone realize. It was the fact that she laughed at me and cleaned up after me. In the years since we’ve been married, one person dryly observed that I couldn’t possibly be as bad of a person as I come across because someone as nice as Shannon had stayed with me so long.
She had her own way of clicking with people. She was only 18 years old then so when she came she connected better with the teenagers and the kids than she did with the adults but she smiled politely at the adults and they interpreted that to be a kind sweet girl. I had decided to propose and went back and forth on where and how to do it. Whether or not I would use an engagement ring was up in the air as Adventists have a problem with jewelry (some have even established a counter culture tradition of using an engagement watch since a watch is okay because it serves a purpose; my argument that engagements and wedding bands serve a purpose rarely convinced anyone. It was adornment and we should stay away from it). I finally decided to get one and then it was time to figure out where; I had originally wanted to propose in church but Steve Moran talked me out of that, which I was very angry with. While not proposing in church, I decided to go ahead with the engagement ring.
I was still a relatively poor kid, only making $400 a month but I kept the rule of two months salary to buy her ring (I’ve offered to upgrade it a few times since then but she’s passed on the opportunity). It was a ring that has a slight bend to it and that’s why it appealed to me because I just felt the slight bend was the way our life and relationship had been, always a little different. I was a broke kid with nothing to my name but I could give her mine.
I finally decided to do it up at a beach north of PUC with several of her friends, trying to tie to when I had asked her to be my girlfriend several years past on the beach. Jon Jenson had gone to the South Pacific and had brought me back a beautiful small shell (both sides) which I had lined with blue velvet. I spent the weekend at PUC hanging out with her and her friends the Ludwigs. Sunday they “spontaneously decided” that they wanted to go to the beach. I begrudgingly went along with it and by one of those great coincidences almost immediately upon walking to the beach Shannon found this hideous brown shell. The only reason she had noticed it was because it was the only time before or since then that she had found a shell with both sides of it attached. I told her that I would find her a better one and while her friends distracted her, I put the ring in the velvet lined shell, put it down in the sand and then went and got her. We were walking down the beach holding hands when I “noticed” this shell, got down on one knee to look at it and then looked up and proposed. Like I had in high school, I had this grand speech prepared about the road we’d been on together for over years and the memories and promise of it, living dreams together until death separated us but again I choked and all I could manage was the old fashion, “Shannon, will you marry me?”. Stunned, she sat there with no response and the silence turned uncomfortable for me. Eventually she said yes and we were engaged. I was wearing a shirt that I never wear anymore but I haven’t gotten rid of it because I proposed wearing it. The friends that were with us were mostly friends of Shannon. It was a pair of sisters, the Ludwigs, quirky yet charming girls who had a good commitment to faith. They had a very relaxed attitude about life letting events happen on their own time. My own commitment to making everything happen right now was consistently a personality conflict with them. However, they were good people and good friends to both Shannon and I.
I wish I could tell you that I did it all right, that this 20 year old and his 18 year old fiancée waited to do everything till their nuptials. But the truth is that far too early we started engaging in what may be coyly described as marital relations but because we weren’t doing it with preparation or with foresight, we were doing what society so blithely calls safe sex. Because of no use of birth control whatsoever, Shannon got pregnant and called to tell me that. How I handled it can be legitimately called shamefully. Over the next two weeks we had many conversations about it. I even called to talk to Warren Ashworth, one of, if not the theology department’s most conservative voice to talk to him about it. I made up a scenario about it being someone else. Eventually, in it all, Shannon and I decided that starting parenthood at this stage, possibly risking expulsion, and perhaps most importantly in my convoluted head facing being sanctioned out of the theology department and facing the end of my life hood dream of being a pastor was too high of a price to pay to have a kid. We decided to have an abortion; we scheduled it pretty darn fast because in my tortured mind life didn’t begin until the fetus starts pumping out its own heartbeat since the Bible said that life is in the blood.
I don’t remember whether or not Shannon told the Ludwigs or whether because of the high stress mode she was in they figured it out but eventually they found out. They tried to talk Shannon out of it and were unsuccessful. Their next attempt was to try to shame me out of it but my pride let me believe that there would be far greater shame in admitting it than in living with it. In a desperate attempt to stop what they saw as murder, they decided to talk to one of the theology teachers to have him try to talk to me. Appropriately enough, they chose Warren Ashworth. He almost instantaneously called me and also talked to me. He said he appreciated that I had sought his advice even if it had been under a rouse. He tried to talk me out of it and tried to talk Shannon out of it but eventually gave us enough room to make our own decision.To his credit, he always kept this to himself.
In the end, when Shannon went to get the procedure done, she had already gone through a miscarriage and there was no fetus there any longer. I’ve always assumed the stress of dealing with my idiotness was a contributor to this. The fact that the procedure was no longer necessary was of very little comfort to me because I’d been willing to have it done to protect my precious career. (Several years later, a friend of mine had an abortion. Because she was really struggling financially, she asked me to pay for it. I wish she had just asked me to help her pay her rent or her bills and had not told me what it was for. I struggled for days and finally did help her pay for it. I think paying for it was tough enough but it reopened up the scars from this time. For weeks if not months I had nightmares about myself killing a child).
Sophia was actually the friend who took Shannon that day to the clinic and I never re-established my friendship with her. She was incredibly angry at me for not continuing to talk to her after she had been there at such a crucial time but the truth was that I couldn’t face her because I couldn’t face myself about this. Almost as bad, I was so angry at the Ludwigs for having outed me to Warren Ashworth that I essentially banished them from the wedding when they more than likely would have been bridesmaids. I made the situation so ugly that it essentially ended the friendship between Shannon and I and that family. It wasn’t that I didn’t blame myself but I condemned myself heavily for this and when looking at them I couldn’t tune it out.
I can count on one hand the number of people I have told this story until now and I don’t know how many people or who I owe my sincerest apologies for that point in my life but I offer it now.
Nonetheless, very shortly after arriving at South Bay, I decided that Shannon really was the one. She was coming to visit about once a month and usually she came on the days that I spoke she sang the special music. Almost always she got “talked into” doing the praise team. She has a great singing voice and I think that it was her way of supporting my ministry. Ultimately though, it was about how we clicked; how she seemed to be able to roll her eyes at my ego and realize that it was a smaller part of me than almost anyone realize. It was the fact that she laughed at me and cleaned up after me. In the years since we’ve been married, one person dryly observed that I couldn’t possibly be as bad of a person as I come across because someone as nice as Shannon had stayed with me so long.
She had her own way of clicking with people. She was only 18 years old then so when she came she connected better with the teenagers and the kids than she did with the adults but she smiled politely at the adults and they interpreted that to be a kind sweet girl. I had decided to propose and went back and forth on where and how to do it. Whether or not I would use an engagement ring was up in the air as Adventists have a problem with jewelry (some have even established a counter culture tradition of using an engagement watch since a watch is okay because it serves a purpose; my argument that engagements and wedding bands serve a purpose rarely convinced anyone. It was adornment and we should stay away from it). I finally decided to get one and then it was time to figure out where; I had originally wanted to propose in church but Steve Moran talked me out of that, which I was very angry with. While not proposing in church, I decided to go ahead with the engagement ring.
I was still a relatively poor kid, only making $400 a month but I kept the rule of two months salary to buy her ring (I’ve offered to upgrade it a few times since then but she’s passed on the opportunity). It was a ring that has a slight bend to it and that’s why it appealed to me because I just felt the slight bend was the way our life and relationship had been, always a little different. I was a broke kid with nothing to my name but I could give her mine.
I finally decided to do it up at a beach north of PUC with several of her friends, trying to tie to when I had asked her to be my girlfriend several years past on the beach. Jon Jenson had gone to the South Pacific and had brought me back a beautiful small shell (both sides) which I had lined with blue velvet. I spent the weekend at PUC hanging out with her and her friends the Ludwigs. Sunday they “spontaneously decided” that they wanted to go to the beach. I begrudgingly went along with it and by one of those great coincidences almost immediately upon walking to the beach Shannon found this hideous brown shell. The only reason she had noticed it was because it was the only time before or since then that she had found a shell with both sides of it attached. I told her that I would find her a better one and while her friends distracted her, I put the ring in the velvet lined shell, put it down in the sand and then went and got her. We were walking down the beach holding hands when I “noticed” this shell, got down on one knee to look at it and then looked up and proposed. Like I had in high school, I had this grand speech prepared about the road we’d been on together for over years and the memories and promise of it, living dreams together until death separated us but again I choked and all I could manage was the old fashion, “Shannon, will you marry me?”. Stunned, she sat there with no response and the silence turned uncomfortable for me. Eventually she said yes and we were engaged. I was wearing a shirt that I never wear anymore but I haven’t gotten rid of it because I proposed wearing it. The friends that were with us were mostly friends of Shannon. It was a pair of sisters, the Ludwigs, quirky yet charming girls who had a good commitment to faith. They had a very relaxed attitude about life letting events happen on their own time. My own commitment to making everything happen right now was consistently a personality conflict with them. However, they were good people and good friends to both Shannon and I.
I wish I could tell you that I did it all right, that this 20 year old and his 18 year old fiancée waited to do everything till their nuptials. But the truth is that far too early we started engaging in what may be coyly described as marital relations but because we weren’t doing it with preparation or with foresight, we were doing what society so blithely calls safe sex. Because of no use of birth control whatsoever, Shannon got pregnant and called to tell me that. How I handled it can be legitimately called shamefully. Over the next two weeks we had many conversations about it. I even called to talk to Warren Ashworth, one of, if not the theology department’s most conservative voice to talk to him about it. I made up a scenario about it being someone else. Eventually, in it all, Shannon and I decided that starting parenthood at this stage, possibly risking expulsion, and perhaps most importantly in my convoluted head facing being sanctioned out of the theology department and facing the end of my life hood dream of being a pastor was too high of a price to pay to have a kid. We decided to have an abortion; we scheduled it pretty darn fast because in my tortured mind life didn’t begin until the fetus starts pumping out its own heartbeat since the Bible said that life is in the blood.
I don’t remember whether or not Shannon told the Ludwigs or whether because of the high stress mode she was in they figured it out but eventually they found out. They tried to talk Shannon out of it and were unsuccessful. Their next attempt was to try to shame me out of it but my pride let me believe that there would be far greater shame in admitting it than in living with it. In a desperate attempt to stop what they saw as murder, they decided to talk to one of the theology teachers to have him try to talk to me. Appropriately enough, they chose Warren Ashworth. He almost instantaneously called me and also talked to me. He said he appreciated that I had sought his advice even if it had been under a rouse. He tried to talk me out of it and tried to talk Shannon out of it but eventually gave us enough room to make our own decision.To his credit, he always kept this to himself.
In the end, when Shannon went to get the procedure done, she had already gone through a miscarriage and there was no fetus there any longer. I’ve always assumed the stress of dealing with my idiotness was a contributor to this. The fact that the procedure was no longer necessary was of very little comfort to me because I’d been willing to have it done to protect my precious career. (Several years later, a friend of mine had an abortion. Because she was really struggling financially, she asked me to pay for it. I wish she had just asked me to help her pay her rent or her bills and had not told me what it was for. I struggled for days and finally did help her pay for it. I think paying for it was tough enough but it reopened up the scars from this time. For weeks if not months I had nightmares about myself killing a child).
Sophia was actually the friend who took Shannon that day to the clinic and I never re-established my friendship with her. She was incredibly angry at me for not continuing to talk to her after she had been there at such a crucial time but the truth was that I couldn’t face her because I couldn’t face myself about this. Almost as bad, I was so angry at the Ludwigs for having outed me to Warren Ashworth that I essentially banished them from the wedding when they more than likely would have been bridesmaids. I made the situation so ugly that it essentially ended the friendship between Shannon and I and that family. It wasn’t that I didn’t blame myself but I condemned myself heavily for this and when looking at them I couldn’t tune it out.
I can count on one hand the number of people I have told this story until now and I don’t know how many people or who I owe my sincerest apologies for that point in my life but I offer it now.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
31 Joy in the Journey
At this point in many people’s career at PUC, they embark on a mission trip, a trip where they generally go overseas and serve as teachers or missionaries of some sort for a year in the middle of their college career. I was seeing many of my friend and acquaintances heading off to exotic locations in various places in Asia, Australia, the South Pacific, Europe, Africa and apparently every point in the world. I had always wanted to make this part of my plan, to have the experience, to put it on the resume and to align my college graduation with Shannon since she was a year behind me. However, when it came to decide, I had really grown closer and closer to Shannon and I didn’t want to be too far away from her and an opportunity present itself I had to embrace: to be the assistant pastor at South Bay Adventist Church, the church that Steve Moran attended and that I knew several people from. It was in Southern California, only a few hours drive from Shannon and PUC.
They flew me down to preach a sermon and a few days later offered me the position and I was headed towards one of the happiest years of my life. The people at South Bay were so incredibly reasonable, with only a small percentage spending too much time majoring on minors. The best part was that though there were a wide variety of opinions in the church they really came across to me as a community. Sure, there was the typical church gossip and some people who were intensely caddy and angry but as a group, they were a positive group whose vibe to me reflected what Jesus was all about. With how little they cared about things like jewelry and dress and the fact that they regularly had things like drums in the worship service (a great controversy within the Adventist tradition), it certainly did not reflect the church I grew up in. But this was where I was comfortable and where I saw God the most clearly.
The pastor, Jon Jenson, was a man who concerned himself with keeping that positive energy going at the church. He was there during critical times for his members, consistently showing up at things like hospitals and court dates and emergencies. He was happy and tried to communicate that liveliness into very hopeful and cheerful sermons and praise services, always trying to keep the name of God lifted high. At times he tried to keep it so high that it could be interpreted as fluffy. He also spent so much time working on the church services and things like powerpoint presentations that sometimes he missed connecting with people but overall the church liked him.
He was not particularly geared for evangelism though he was open to it.There were a couple of people who we gave Bible studies while I was there to. One of them I ended up doing a solo job on because they mostly spoke Spanish. I went there week after week (they were the parents of one of the church members) but never did get them to come to church regularly or to get baptized. The other couple had sick child and we spent much time studying with them and visiting them in the hospital. They were a part of the congregation for a while but eventually faded out as well. The only people who were baptized that year were teenagers who had grown up in the church who I helped study with but no one from outside of the wall.
I was allowed to speak about once a month at the church and it’s the church where I ever felt most comfortable speaking. They didn’t have a set pulpit and it was more of an auditorium than a standard church. I would tell stories and walk out into the audience and often brought humor at my self expense (One church member, Carl Voigt, said that I was the preacher he was most afraid of because when I walked out he said he couldn’t get away with falling asleep) . Jon and I had very different styles, his sermons were more self improvement types with references to popular culture with Bible verses spread throughout a powerpoint presentation. Mine were more trying to find new ways to tell very old Biblical stories with all non Biblical references connection to my life or people’s lives in the audience. He tried to get me to put it all in power point presentation or reference the modern culture more and I did add some powerpoint but overall I was more comfortable just talking.
The church also had a very active youth group led by Steve Moran. I lived in his house and he helped both my faith and my perspective on it grow. I thought he was wrong on a thousand things but we argued them and while I think he made more progress on me than I did on him, we both listened in our own way (though it’s arguable we were only listening until given a chance to make our own point). He had a group discussion every Friday night called teen rap where a dozen to twenty teenagers gathered around and discussed various Biblical or ethical discussions. He was teaching teenagers to think for themselves and showing that faith and reason could dance with each other even if it was sometimes an awkward dance. (To his credit, he had made this a very successful enterprise; the adults tried a similar Bible study the year I was there and it collapsed almost more quickly than it was put together). Ironically or appropriately enough, the people most likely to skip it on any given week were his own children. I believe that now many of those kids from teen rap are still church members but his are not. I lived in their home for a year and Steve and Pat were great parents to both Paul and Rebecca but somehow they were not able to pass on their faith to them. It’s odd how we sometimes connect least with those we care about most.
However, the biggest lesson I learned that year was from the adults at that church. One of the things that Jon was fairly neglectful of was visiting his congregation on any kind of regular basis. He was happy to interact with them at church and church social events like weddings, potlucks, and beach events but there were rare times where he saw them one on one. Being both a psychology and a theology major, this is where I saw my opening as a place to learn.
One by one, I started visiting all of the different church members in their homes or jobs. Fascinating would be a very adequate description of what I found in all of these people. There were people like Carl who had come from Australia to be the chair of the business department at the University of Southern California; Quiet Ncube, a South Africa refuge who was now an oncologist at UCLA’s hospital; Forrest and Penny, a quiet couple who had been married 50 years or so; the Sunicos and the Chows, people who were incredibly helpful to the church but were also working quietly at raising very quality kids. There were louder personalities like Susan Vlach, Stephen Stokes who had enough mischievousness to question much but enough wisdom to play the game very well. There were people like Patty Kelly whose sincere enthusiasm for life spilled well into her faith. Susan, Steve and Carl all had quiet but strong presences in their spouses who sometimes were clearly the ones running the show in the background. But all of these people were bound by a belief which they celebrated in a building once a week. Faith was real with all of these people and they let time and money and social lives revolve around this connection that Jesus was authentic and that He was returning to save his people very soon. I may never have listened to people more in my life than I did that year as I kept hearing what people had to say. Their journey through life, through faith, to God, to each other was nothing less than miraculous and I was proud to witness the miracles that were their lives.
I was 20 years old then and my faith had peaked; I was completely in love with God and the best thing in life was being in His service with His people. I hadn’t resolved the questions from psychology or from people like Sophia but the reality was that it was like loving my mother or my friends or my girlfriend. It’s naïve to assume that they don’t have faults but the positive emotions you have for them outweigh all those faults. We look away or don’t notice because we’re generally so happy when we’re with them. There is no time in my life I miss more.
They flew me down to preach a sermon and a few days later offered me the position and I was headed towards one of the happiest years of my life. The people at South Bay were so incredibly reasonable, with only a small percentage spending too much time majoring on minors. The best part was that though there were a wide variety of opinions in the church they really came across to me as a community. Sure, there was the typical church gossip and some people who were intensely caddy and angry but as a group, they were a positive group whose vibe to me reflected what Jesus was all about. With how little they cared about things like jewelry and dress and the fact that they regularly had things like drums in the worship service (a great controversy within the Adventist tradition), it certainly did not reflect the church I grew up in. But this was where I was comfortable and where I saw God the most clearly.
The pastor, Jon Jenson, was a man who concerned himself with keeping that positive energy going at the church. He was there during critical times for his members, consistently showing up at things like hospitals and court dates and emergencies. He was happy and tried to communicate that liveliness into very hopeful and cheerful sermons and praise services, always trying to keep the name of God lifted high. At times he tried to keep it so high that it could be interpreted as fluffy. He also spent so much time working on the church services and things like powerpoint presentations that sometimes he missed connecting with people but overall the church liked him.
He was not particularly geared for evangelism though he was open to it.There were a couple of people who we gave Bible studies while I was there to. One of them I ended up doing a solo job on because they mostly spoke Spanish. I went there week after week (they were the parents of one of the church members) but never did get them to come to church regularly or to get baptized. The other couple had sick child and we spent much time studying with them and visiting them in the hospital. They were a part of the congregation for a while but eventually faded out as well. The only people who were baptized that year were teenagers who had grown up in the church who I helped study with but no one from outside of the wall.
I was allowed to speak about once a month at the church and it’s the church where I ever felt most comfortable speaking. They didn’t have a set pulpit and it was more of an auditorium than a standard church. I would tell stories and walk out into the audience and often brought humor at my self expense (One church member, Carl Voigt, said that I was the preacher he was most afraid of because when I walked out he said he couldn’t get away with falling asleep) . Jon and I had very different styles, his sermons were more self improvement types with references to popular culture with Bible verses spread throughout a powerpoint presentation. Mine were more trying to find new ways to tell very old Biblical stories with all non Biblical references connection to my life or people’s lives in the audience. He tried to get me to put it all in power point presentation or reference the modern culture more and I did add some powerpoint but overall I was more comfortable just talking.
The church also had a very active youth group led by Steve Moran. I lived in his house and he helped both my faith and my perspective on it grow. I thought he was wrong on a thousand things but we argued them and while I think he made more progress on me than I did on him, we both listened in our own way (though it’s arguable we were only listening until given a chance to make our own point). He had a group discussion every Friday night called teen rap where a dozen to twenty teenagers gathered around and discussed various Biblical or ethical discussions. He was teaching teenagers to think for themselves and showing that faith and reason could dance with each other even if it was sometimes an awkward dance. (To his credit, he had made this a very successful enterprise; the adults tried a similar Bible study the year I was there and it collapsed almost more quickly than it was put together). Ironically or appropriately enough, the people most likely to skip it on any given week were his own children. I believe that now many of those kids from teen rap are still church members but his are not. I lived in their home for a year and Steve and Pat were great parents to both Paul and Rebecca but somehow they were not able to pass on their faith to them. It’s odd how we sometimes connect least with those we care about most.
However, the biggest lesson I learned that year was from the adults at that church. One of the things that Jon was fairly neglectful of was visiting his congregation on any kind of regular basis. He was happy to interact with them at church and church social events like weddings, potlucks, and beach events but there were rare times where he saw them one on one. Being both a psychology and a theology major, this is where I saw my opening as a place to learn.
One by one, I started visiting all of the different church members in their homes or jobs. Fascinating would be a very adequate description of what I found in all of these people. There were people like Carl who had come from Australia to be the chair of the business department at the University of Southern California; Quiet Ncube, a South Africa refuge who was now an oncologist at UCLA’s hospital; Forrest and Penny, a quiet couple who had been married 50 years or so; the Sunicos and the Chows, people who were incredibly helpful to the church but were also working quietly at raising very quality kids. There were louder personalities like Susan Vlach, Stephen Stokes who had enough mischievousness to question much but enough wisdom to play the game very well. There were people like Patty Kelly whose sincere enthusiasm for life spilled well into her faith. Susan, Steve and Carl all had quiet but strong presences in their spouses who sometimes were clearly the ones running the show in the background. But all of these people were bound by a belief which they celebrated in a building once a week. Faith was real with all of these people and they let time and money and social lives revolve around this connection that Jesus was authentic and that He was returning to save his people very soon. I may never have listened to people more in my life than I did that year as I kept hearing what people had to say. Their journey through life, through faith, to God, to each other was nothing less than miraculous and I was proud to witness the miracles that were their lives.
I was 20 years old then and my faith had peaked; I was completely in love with God and the best thing in life was being in His service with His people. I hadn’t resolved the questions from psychology or from people like Sophia but the reality was that it was like loving my mother or my friends or my girlfriend. It’s naïve to assume that they don’t have faults but the positive emotions you have for them outweigh all those faults. We look away or don’t notice because we’re generally so happy when we’re with them. There is no time in my life I miss more.
Monday, January 4, 2010
30 Superstar
The views of having made God too human and of saying that an atheist could be closer to the heart of God came around to bite me fairly quickly. I made friends with a girl then, Sophia Stevens. She was also in the honors program and was not only incredibly smart but also very eloquent and very strong willed. She had intenseness to her emotions; her cold glare could freeze you instantly while her infectious laughter could warm you up for days.
We had a couple of conversations and in no time at all she stated that I didn’t know “her Jesus” and that the one I had was far less attractive. That was a real chagrin to hear because I thought at that point I had a great picture of Jesus, both practical and full of grace. Her vision of Jesus was that he was completely human and completely practical; he was a man who had been deified not the other way around. He was perhaps the best human being that had ever lived and he had been idealized into what Christianity had made of him not unlike we had turned Nicholas of Myra into Santa Claus.
One thing that she introduced me to was that her vision of Jesus was very similar to the one presented in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. I watched it with her and was very bothered by many of the ideas, the complete humanizing of Jesus. The story is supposedly told more from Judas perspective and the relationship Jesus has with Mary Magdalene is questionable at best. It haunted me though and made me think a lot. I watched it twice with her and eventually bought the 1973 version for myself. This new perspective and someone like Sophia vocalizing it really stuck with me and I began to process it constantly. To her credit, Sophia and I actually spent much time in conversation with me learning more from her than she did from me. This was probably caused by the fact that she’d heard almost everything I knew and presented but not vice versa. She was an active listener and a persuasive speaker.
As this was all troubling my mind, I tried to have this conversation with several people from the theology department, both professors and students. Most were not willing to discuss it for very long with one theology student poignantly saying that people who did that kind of damage to Jesus’ reputation were going to hell. What was most intriguing to me was that while a huge percentage of them had a very strong opinion about this movie/musical not one, not one of them had seen it nor would they consider watching it with me. This was a phenomenon I couldn’t wrap my mind around because of the obvious inconsistency of it but more specifically because the Adventist movement has all kinds of odd reputations of its own whether they are confused with another denomination or simply a misunderstand or complete myths. If your own religion is the subject of questionable unearned reputations, I thought one would be more likely to give things the benefit of the doubt to take it in for itself or at least to not judge it without exposure.
(While this was the rule, I can’t say there weren’t exceptions… There was Julia, the smartest of the theology freshmen that year, a premed student with a strong head on her shoulder who was never afraid of thinking for herself. There was also Orlando, a guy who was always willing to talk and air things out, he and I a clear headed conversation about it. The two of them eventually would get married and I would be the best man at their wedding and it was exactly this attribute that made me glad to be their friend. They are the only two people who would watch it with me. Julia would eventually take over Lighthouse for me as well and is now a doctor. Orlando is now a professional musician of sorts. It bothers me to no end that the more open minded theology majors are the ones who most consistently did not go on to be professional pastors.)
Sophia’s earnest sincerity and the departments’ efficient dismissal of such a simple subject put me in a bit of an ecumenical mood. I started attended services of other denominations and of other religions. Julia, Shannon, and Orlando accompanied me on a few of them and I learned a lot. Don’t get me wrong; I still believed Sophia and these other churches were completely inaccurate, they were misinterpreting or just having things be conveniently left out but I was open to learning from them. This was the time that I even started seeing the holes in our own theological system; we were simply wrong on the clean/unclean meats based on Acts 15’s letter to the Gentiles. We were wrong to say that the Bible condemned drinking and the whole jewelry thing was suspect unless we were also ready to throw out braided hair. The realization that my church had any positions wrong was both frightening and comforting at the same time. It helped create that grown up realization that God and his followers aren’t always in complete sync.
In the midst of all this thinking, Shannon and I were flying to my parent’s house on the morning of Christmas eve. Where truth lied between the reality of God and the perception of him was something I couldn’t seem to shake from my mind. We flew into DFW but in the time that our layover was supposed to occur, a storm shut down the airport. We kept waiting for it to reopen but it just kept closing and finally we were given numbers of hotels we could call.
The next day, December 25th, we were back at the airport; cheesily, I hoped that this meant I would be home for Christmas. The sun was out but many things were still frozen over. We actually got onto a plane and into the air but the control tower said the airport in Odessa was closed and we were being diverted back to DFW. There were more calls and suspense but in the end it was decided that the airport would be closed again today.
This random lady comes up to us as we’re trying to get a hold of my mom on a payphone and declares “God told me to take you to Odessa.” Now perhaps this lady had been around the same terminal we had been in or even on the same flight we had tried to catch but I honestly had no recollection of her. Being 19 years old and wanting to get to my mother’s love and her cooking on this holiday, I readily accepted the offer (our luggage was still somewhere in the mess of checked in stuff so we were going to do this sans bags). She had also picked up another lady who God had directed her to take to Odessa. While I did ask, I honestly can’t remember either of their names.
The lady who God was giving taxi directions to was headed to see some family who she had finally reconciled with after years of bickering and this was her first Christmas with them. The lady who she had picked up was visiting her father who was dying of cancer and had only a few days left if not a couple of weeks at most. When they asked for my story, I didn’t have a particularly good one since I was just going home for the holidays but our driver said there must be some mysterious reason that God knew for providing me with a ride home. She simply did seem to want nothing more than company and to follow God’s will because she refused to let us pitch in for gas.
The driver just kept staring that this was clearly God’s will and He was providing for all of us. It was a bad storm and we continued to see accidents along the way including the worst one I’ve ever seen: an 18 wheeler that looked like it had rolled over on itself over the side of a bridge. Intriguingly enough, we had the radio on to keep track of the roads and in eerily coincidental timing the roads kept closing 10 to 15 minutes after we had gotten off them. Somewhere along the road, she asked me to pray and somehow it came out at that point that I was studying to be a minister. She instantly declared this was God’s way of encouraging me along that path.
What usually is a six hour drive took almost twelve but in the end I was home for Christmas for about 10 minutes with an unexpected ride. I’ve tried for years to dismiss this as just a mental health issue or a series of strange coincidence convinced the God who runs the universe has more important things to deal with than me getting home on time. I sure hope so.
We had a couple of conversations and in no time at all she stated that I didn’t know “her Jesus” and that the one I had was far less attractive. That was a real chagrin to hear because I thought at that point I had a great picture of Jesus, both practical and full of grace. Her vision of Jesus was that he was completely human and completely practical; he was a man who had been deified not the other way around. He was perhaps the best human being that had ever lived and he had been idealized into what Christianity had made of him not unlike we had turned Nicholas of Myra into Santa Claus.
One thing that she introduced me to was that her vision of Jesus was very similar to the one presented in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. I watched it with her and was very bothered by many of the ideas, the complete humanizing of Jesus. The story is supposedly told more from Judas perspective and the relationship Jesus has with Mary Magdalene is questionable at best. It haunted me though and made me think a lot. I watched it twice with her and eventually bought the 1973 version for myself. This new perspective and someone like Sophia vocalizing it really stuck with me and I began to process it constantly. To her credit, Sophia and I actually spent much time in conversation with me learning more from her than she did from me. This was probably caused by the fact that she’d heard almost everything I knew and presented but not vice versa. She was an active listener and a persuasive speaker.
As this was all troubling my mind, I tried to have this conversation with several people from the theology department, both professors and students. Most were not willing to discuss it for very long with one theology student poignantly saying that people who did that kind of damage to Jesus’ reputation were going to hell. What was most intriguing to me was that while a huge percentage of them had a very strong opinion about this movie/musical not one, not one of them had seen it nor would they consider watching it with me. This was a phenomenon I couldn’t wrap my mind around because of the obvious inconsistency of it but more specifically because the Adventist movement has all kinds of odd reputations of its own whether they are confused with another denomination or simply a misunderstand or complete myths. If your own religion is the subject of questionable unearned reputations, I thought one would be more likely to give things the benefit of the doubt to take it in for itself or at least to not judge it without exposure.
(While this was the rule, I can’t say there weren’t exceptions… There was Julia, the smartest of the theology freshmen that year, a premed student with a strong head on her shoulder who was never afraid of thinking for herself. There was also Orlando, a guy who was always willing to talk and air things out, he and I a clear headed conversation about it. The two of them eventually would get married and I would be the best man at their wedding and it was exactly this attribute that made me glad to be their friend. They are the only two people who would watch it with me. Julia would eventually take over Lighthouse for me as well and is now a doctor. Orlando is now a professional musician of sorts. It bothers me to no end that the more open minded theology majors are the ones who most consistently did not go on to be professional pastors.)
Sophia’s earnest sincerity and the departments’ efficient dismissal of such a simple subject put me in a bit of an ecumenical mood. I started attended services of other denominations and of other religions. Julia, Shannon, and Orlando accompanied me on a few of them and I learned a lot. Don’t get me wrong; I still believed Sophia and these other churches were completely inaccurate, they were misinterpreting or just having things be conveniently left out but I was open to learning from them. This was the time that I even started seeing the holes in our own theological system; we were simply wrong on the clean/unclean meats based on Acts 15’s letter to the Gentiles. We were wrong to say that the Bible condemned drinking and the whole jewelry thing was suspect unless we were also ready to throw out braided hair. The realization that my church had any positions wrong was both frightening and comforting at the same time. It helped create that grown up realization that God and his followers aren’t always in complete sync.
In the midst of all this thinking, Shannon and I were flying to my parent’s house on the morning of Christmas eve. Where truth lied between the reality of God and the perception of him was something I couldn’t seem to shake from my mind. We flew into DFW but in the time that our layover was supposed to occur, a storm shut down the airport. We kept waiting for it to reopen but it just kept closing and finally we were given numbers of hotels we could call.
The next day, December 25th, we were back at the airport; cheesily, I hoped that this meant I would be home for Christmas. The sun was out but many things were still frozen over. We actually got onto a plane and into the air but the control tower said the airport in Odessa was closed and we were being diverted back to DFW. There were more calls and suspense but in the end it was decided that the airport would be closed again today.
This random lady comes up to us as we’re trying to get a hold of my mom on a payphone and declares “God told me to take you to Odessa.” Now perhaps this lady had been around the same terminal we had been in or even on the same flight we had tried to catch but I honestly had no recollection of her. Being 19 years old and wanting to get to my mother’s love and her cooking on this holiday, I readily accepted the offer (our luggage was still somewhere in the mess of checked in stuff so we were going to do this sans bags). She had also picked up another lady who God had directed her to take to Odessa. While I did ask, I honestly can’t remember either of their names.
The lady who God was giving taxi directions to was headed to see some family who she had finally reconciled with after years of bickering and this was her first Christmas with them. The lady who she had picked up was visiting her father who was dying of cancer and had only a few days left if not a couple of weeks at most. When they asked for my story, I didn’t have a particularly good one since I was just going home for the holidays but our driver said there must be some mysterious reason that God knew for providing me with a ride home. She simply did seem to want nothing more than company and to follow God’s will because she refused to let us pitch in for gas.
The driver just kept staring that this was clearly God’s will and He was providing for all of us. It was a bad storm and we continued to see accidents along the way including the worst one I’ve ever seen: an 18 wheeler that looked like it had rolled over on itself over the side of a bridge. Intriguingly enough, we had the radio on to keep track of the roads and in eerily coincidental timing the roads kept closing 10 to 15 minutes after we had gotten off them. Somewhere along the road, she asked me to pray and somehow it came out at that point that I was studying to be a minister. She instantly declared this was God’s way of encouraging me along that path.
What usually is a six hour drive took almost twelve but in the end I was home for Christmas for about 10 minutes with an unexpected ride. I’ve tried for years to dismiss this as just a mental health issue or a series of strange coincidence convinced the God who runs the universe has more important things to deal with than me getting home on time. I sure hope so.
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