The last post was a summary of my heart and mind; now a quick update on the outward appearance. I finished high school pretty well academically, although I was very emotionally dependent on my friends and their acceptance. It continues to be hard for me to try to judge their hearts, so I will confine myself to saying that I, at least, fit in by being very tolerant as far as lifestyle, theology, and personal freedom went. Of my four closest friends at that time (and as far as I know two have been regular readers here, maybe three), one was hitting the bottle pretty hard as his military career came and went, and we who were close to him didn’t make a lot of value judgments about that; we mostly played damage control and gave him a shoulder to lean on (and often, space on the floor to sleep). Confront him about sin? What are you saying, that we should restrict his Christian liberty? He still talked the talk, often better than we did, and that was good enough for us.
In the meantime, the stuff of our conversation was personal destiny, self-fulfilling false prophecies, and the occult, although we would never have called it that. I fancied myself some sort of prophet, and played it with a feigned Byronic reluctance for my high and lonely destiny. Some of us sought visions, I made myself a Tarot deck (arguing that I wasn’t calling on spiritual forces, I was simply exploring what I could learn about myself through universal symbolism), and I worked hard on a fantasy book or ten, which was really a badly mixed and rewarmed version of my favorite fantasy and science fiction (complete with racism, hagiology, magic swords, giant robots, and a Byronic figure who ended up destroying the world a la Kevin Landwaster from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever).
I really believed that God had brought me and my friends together, and we were going to change the church, and maybe the world. How? I don’t know, maybe by spreading our inclusivist vision and encouraging people to read Teilhard de Chardin. Don’t bother me with details, son. Delusions of grandeur, simple as that. Somebody as unbalanced as I was needed his bubble burst, and Siloam Springs was the place to do that.
My grades weren’t perfect, entirely because I didn’t care, and hence I didn’t get scholarships that I tried for. My ACT and SAT scores were pretty good for the time, and it was mostly on their strength that I got the scholarships that I did, but one Christian college (recommended by a friend) offered me the free ride, except for room and board, and I took it, since my parents weren’t going to pay for college. (I wrote this off to misguided Gothardism, and our church/school at the time did suck us into that particular theological black hole, but looking back I think Dad knew that I was milking the situation and he wanted me to take responsiblity for myself. He was married and supporting his family, within a year of the age at which I was going to college and expecting Mom and Dad to send along the spending money as well.) John Brown University wasn’t known for much at the time except for a massive population of missionaries’ kids and a fledgling broadcast program that had just bought all new equipment. I was happy about that part, as this was equipment I was familiar with, thanks to friends at home, and I signed up to be a broadcast major, no minor yet, at JBU.
People make a lot out of the whole “you may have skated through high school, but college will be demanding and you won’t cut it there,” but the fact was, I could have skated through college too. The profs liked me and tried hard to save me from my impending breakdown. Within a semester I had switched to an English major (because I saw in the English department a slightly more grown-up version of the attitude I had when I graduated from high school, especially the budding postmodernism) and latched on like a Lachrymose Leech to an engaged couple who were running the drama ministry there. I think the Lord put them in my path, because if it had just been me and the English department, I would have drowned, I suspect. As it was, this couple actually had some idea about objective standards of morality, and the man in particular kept trying hard to pull me back to a Biblical sense of right and wrong. I attended his father’s little Missionary Baptist Church in Oklahoma, pitched in when I could for the drama ministry and to try to help them in little ways (mostly I think I was a hindrance and a drain on them), and kept my head above water through my first romantic relationship and its utter failure in a month’s time.
Going out with a girl at college was itself a compromise of earlier stands I had taken. I wasn’t really in the market, but this girl had a few things going for her: first, she wasn’t in my circle of friends, so there was an air of mystery both ways; second, she had more experience of the world than I did, which I respected a great deal; third, she was attractive; and fourth, she was easily swept off her feet (metaphorically, not literally) by art. This last one is a conjecture but it is the only way I can explain what happened, since I really wasn’t her type. I had gotten a lot of acclaim at school for a dramatic piece I had written, describing Herod the Great’s paranoid mindset in the Christmas narrative (although my actor friend is the one who really made the part sing, he could have done a dramatic reading of The Cat in the Hat and made people cry), and after that made the rounds and after a couple of fumbling dates (let me just point out that eating a big seafood dinner and then swinging on a swingset are not compatible with the average digestive system), we were an item. It lasted about a month before spring break, and I had met her parents and was ready for her to meet mine, when she decided not to do that. I got a card from her saying that she loved me, and by the time we got back to school, she decided that she didn’t after all, and that was that.
I didn’t have what it took to withstand rejection on this level. I had mistaken my hormones and my desperate need to be loved for love itself, and I had invested every ounce of my hopes and dreams in this relationship; to see it bounce like this was more than I could take. I stopped going to class, I stopped doing anything but the bare minimum I needed to survive. I told people I had mono (I didn’t). I failed my specialty class, 19th-century English Literature. I lost my scholarship (I had been on probation already). I didn’t even sign up for classes the next fall. I returned home in disgrace, blaming my friends, my school, my parents, and the God Whose sovereignty I believed in when it suited me, for my failure.
I am going to gloss over the next six years, because it was more of the same. I moved in and out from my parents, eventually getting a decent job and my own apartment. In the meantime I had a couple of very bad relationships—bad both because I had no business getting mixed up with these people, and bad because these people had no business getting mixed up with me. I lived with two heterosexual women and a gay man with HIV for a while (I’ve never been anything but straight, just to make sure that is said), and struggled a bit with what to do, given that I still thought on some level that homosexuality was wrong (but I couldn’t tell you why, I just knew that God had this “unreasonable” aversion to it). I was dating one of the women at the time, but she got mad when she found out that I was sneaking off to church on Sunday mornings while she slept in. Eventually she got sick of my lack of ambition and gave me the bum’s rush. I told people I was Christian and then lived like the prodigal son (on a budget, but with the same sinful appetites). My emotional problems got worse. When another roommate was worried about the effect I and my girlfriend at the time were having on his son (and let me make this clear, I was the supposed Christian, he was more or less a self-proclaimed pagan at the time) and asked to separate, I was just about at the lowest point. Thanks to a couple of friends who were trying to save me from myself, I got my own apartment in the city and tried to go it alone. But this pig had to head for the mud again, and soon I was in so deep that there was no hope.
Then the chain of computer stores for which I worked hired a girl to work in the Illinois store, and the first rays of light in a long time shot into my life.
(For those of you who have endured my testimony before, let it be known that from this point on it will be quite different from what you have heard before.)
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