Talk about misery. I sat in a stranger’s three-car garage with a heat gun in one hand and a razor knife in the other laboriously scraping the creamy, grayish epoxy coating off of a cool, smooth concrete slab. What in the world was I doing scraping a coat of paint off of a garage floor?
The one thing the job did not require was a brain. Heat the epoxy coating with the heat gun, let it loosen, and then try to scrape the paint off. Heat, scrape, and peal. Move. Heat, scrape, and peal. A few inches at a time. A three-car garage floor! That's what my body was doing, but my mind was elsewhere. Inside my head I was ruminating. What am I doing with my life?
Before I move on, I need to add some background. At age nineteen I was still too imperceptive to understand my life context. All I had known was the experience of a white, middle-class kid of a medium-sized family who grew up in a highly religious home in the suburbs of Western New York. In fact, highly religious would be an understatement - fanatically religious might be a more accurate description. Google defines a fanatic as a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal. I know the word has a negative connotation, but it’s accurate.
Church was life. Life was church. Church met Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening and plenty of church activities to fill the week's remaining voids. I guess this is what you might expect when your dad was a pastor of a large, highly performing fundamentalist Baptist church. I was too young even at nineteen to understand that that was the culture of my childhood. Without hesitation our family’s single purpose and objective in life was to be a “good Bible-believing Christian family” and by sheer power of expectation I knew that my goal in life was to be the same - a good Bible-believing Christian. And this was accomplished through action. Do. Do. Do.
Performance was the key that unlocked status in the group. Our family, being the Pastor’s family, went to church services, church school, church meetings, and church functions. We associated with church people, we prayed for people who were not church people to become church people, and we planned our vacations so that we could go to a church on Sunday. We talked church language. We went to church on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve and on the Super Bowl. In the summer during a week we went to church every day twice a day for five days for a “Bible Conference”. Church was life. Life was church.
Back to sitting in the garage scraping the paint off the floor. At that point in my life I had finished my freshman year at Roberts Wesleyan College as an accounting major. I was working that summer for a shady painting crew (why did I have to drive to someone’s house to get paid in cash?) which explains why I was scraping epoxy paint off of a garage floor. But life was still a bit of a mystery. At least my part in it was still a mystery.
I seemed to have some direction in life, but the fact that I was studying accounting does not explain how I became an accounting major. Let me tell you why so that you might understand my religious mindset as a middle adolescent.
One evening around age sixteen, while reading my Bible (a pious activity we fundamentalist Christians referred to as your "quiet time”), I prayed that God would show me what he wanted to me to do with my life. I’m sure I had prayed that prayer several times before, but nonetheless. I’m not sure what I expected, perhaps an audible voice, or vision, or a “still, small voice,” as we like to say. It didn’t matter. What was important was that I was praying for God’s will for my life. That definitely made me a good Christian. Having prayed I got on with my daily quiet time, working through my workbook companion’s assigned section for the night, and it just so happened that as I read my King James Version one of the Bible verses I read contained the word “accounting”. The word popped right off the page (the only use of this form of the word is in Hebrews 11:19 in the KJV). So I made the connection. Instantly. I had asked God to make it clear what his will was for my life and here was this word staring me in the face.
I, naively, took it as a sign from God’s word that I should go to college to be an accountant. I was taught, or so I came to believe as a result of my religious education, that there was this thing, called “God’s will for my life,” that I had to go, seek and find. I had no idea what accountants did, nor did I really care, all I knew was that I prayed for God to show me what he wanted me to do and there it was. It didn’t matter to me that in the context of the verse the word “accounting” had nothing to do with the actual profession of handling assets, liabilities, and equity. Granted, the Bible knows nothing of what our modern world knows of when it says “accounting.” That didn’t cross my mind. I asked, and there it was. Accounting.
The concept of looking to the Bible for answers to life’s questions is how I was trained as a young Christian. Did I take it too literally? We were taught by our spiritual leaders that the Bible is God’s “manual for life,” that it has every answer we need for life. So there I was, I needed an answer, and I believed I only needed to look into the Bible for that answer. And so, as I prayed and read my Bible, there was God’s answer to my seeking staring me in the face. How could it be otherwise? I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted “God’s will for my life.”
I think it’s also important to understand that at the age of nineteen, a few years following my accounting experience, I had become fairly apathetic toward spiritual things. Some in Christian circles refer to this as “backsliding.” But there are varying degrees of backsliding. I wasn’t an aggressive backslider, but a backslider nonetheless. In my Christian subculture this state of affairs typically meant that there was no obvious internal “fire” (i.e. enthusiasm) or external fervor for “the things of God” as we Christians liked to say. My “personal relationship” with God was growing “cold.” How did I know? It was obvious. My Christian performance was down as seen by the fact that I was listening to rock music, going to questionable movies with friends, not reading my Bible on a daily basis, not attending church with a fervent desire, not praying daily, and involving myself with friends who were choosing worldly pleasures among other things. My decision making was not fully concerned with what “God wanted for my life” even though I continued as an accounting major in college.
So while scraping the garage floor a friend of mine, Jeremy, began talking about a Bible study that he was going to attend. I believe it was a Thursday or a Friday.
See, that’s what good Christians did on Friday nights. They went to Bible studies. Church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday evening had to be reinforced by a Bible study on a Friday evening. While the worldly, unsaved and backslidden young adults were out at the clubs and bars, good Christians were out hitting up the local Bible study and a cup of caffeinated java! The “world” wanted to get us down in the sorrow of alcohol, but God wanted us up with the joy of the holy caffeine spirit! I suppose that’s why the drug of choice for the world is a depressant and the drug of choice for God’s people is a stimulant.
Back to the story. I decided at that moment I needed to go to the Bible study and reconnect with God.
That night I attended the Bible study and thus began my “reinvention” as a Christian young man “on fire for the Lord.” I began to attend Bible study on purpose. I began to go to church with a desire to be there. I quickly began to be highly active in the life of my childhood church. Things were different in my life now. I had a direction. I was going to be a good Christian. I was going to do God’s will for my life.
One evening that summer during the Summer Bible Conference there was a preacher who preached on a parable of Jesus which talks about one son who says he wouldn’t do what his father asked, but then ends up doing it, and the other son who says he would do what his father asked, but then doesn’t do it. Jesus then asks the question about “Who did the father’s will?” Obviously, the one who said he wouldn’t, but did anyway. This sermon convicted me (as I was looking for anything I could take) and caused a stir in my soul. I had said I would do my Father’s will, but wasn’t really doing it. In Jesus’ mind, I was the bad son. I didn’t want to be the bad son anymore.
Alas, I would have to take you back to another experience I had when I was a young boy to help you understand why this sermon so affected me.
When I was probably eight or nine years old my family and I traveled by car to a youth camp in the smoky mountains of Dayton, Tennessee. My father was one of two guest preachers who would preach all week long to the teenagers who were at summer camp that week. One preacher would preach in the morning, and the other in the evening. I must have come under some strong conviction from the preaching that week for one evening after the chapel service and all the evening activities were done I went back to the guest house where we were staying and had a very raw, powerful emotional and religious experience. What little I remember was that I was crying and that I told my parents that I would do whatever God wanted me to do with my life even if that meant that I was to be a missionary to Africa. Of course, as a kid, Africa was the most fear-provoking place a person could go with all the snakes, lions, and poisonous creatures, not to mention the people there were pure pagans! Would God “call me” to be a missionary to Africa? If God did, I was willing to go as an eight or nine year old kid as a result of this very powerful religious experience.
So as you can see, life as I know it has been shaped by some very powerful religious beliefs, ideals, and visions. Now that I was approaching twenty years old I thought that I needed to do what God had called me to do. But I didn’t know what that was. Here’s where it gets tricky.
If you had spent any significant amount of time with my Christian culture you would quickly pick up on this sort of sacred/secular divide within the life of the community. Things that were sacred were better than things that were secular. Things that were sacred were godly, things that were secular were worldly. For instance, if we had a sporting event such as a softball game at church we needed to make it a sacred event, not simply a secular event. How does one go about making a softball game a sacred event, you ask? Well, if at the end of the game (or at some point) you gather together the team, sit down, say a prayer, read from the Bible and have a “charge” you’ve instantly taken a “secular” softball game and made it sacred event by attaching what we called a “devotion” or “charge” at the end of it (or wherever you choose to have it). The end effect is that our Christian culture told people that a softball game for the sake of a softball game was not good enough as Christians. We needed to have a religious element to make it sacred, and therefore God would approve. This sort of sacred/secular divide is wrong-headed in my opinion, but that’s a different discussion.
A similar sacred/secular dynamic was at play with regards to people choosing their vocations within my Christian subculture. It was OK to choose to be an engineer or hairdresser (as long as you were a good Christian), but if you really wanted to serve God with your life, the best way was to dedicate your life to be a pastor, missionary, or some other form of “full-time Christian minister” where you were attached to a church or missions organization. The mentality was that a pastor was “more sacred” than an accountant (which was more of a secular profession).
Here I was, a kid who had this religious fervency and wanted to do God’s will, who was looking to be a very good Christian and who was willing to do what God wanted him to do. And so as a result of my sacred/secular understanding of life I thought that God had “called me to preach.” I had had no discussion with any one person about what it meant to serve God, I simply assumed in order to serve God I was to be a pastor.
The same evening when I had heard the sermon on Jesus’ parable about the two sons doing the father's will I decided I needed to make a decision about the direction of my life. After church that early August evening I was driving home with my dad. It was just the two of us. While we were about half way home I had a sort of “burning” in my stomach that was telling me that I needed to tell my dad that God was calling me to be a pastor. So I did. Willy nilly. Out of the blue. I said, “Dad, I think God is calling me to preach.” My dad was silent for a moment (shocked?) and then we began talking a bit. No fireworks, no cosmic trumpets, or angels rejoicing, just a plain old car ride and a dad who was probably a bit taken back.
As I look back on the event, I believe what was really going on was that I had this sense that I needed to do something else besides be an accountant. I had a religious enthusiasm. I wanted to be a good Christian. But I didn’t know what to do, and since I had this sacred/secular way of thinking I automatically gravitated toward the pastor. Did I want the prestige and power that the pastor often demanded? There was no possible way I could be an accountant and serve God fully! Or was it that I didn’t want to be an accountant anyway?
So what now? It was August. School started in less than a month. On the advice of my father he suggested a few colleges, and the one that I landed on was Pensacola Christian College. It was affordable and my dad volunteered that if I went there he would pay 100% of the tuition (rather than the normal 50% as was the prior agreement). In addition I knew a couple other kids my age from Rochester who went there, including my friend Jeremy who I worked with over the summer. So I did what I needed to do. I applied to PCC and purchased a whole new wardrobe. I drove down to Florida with Jeremy in his black and gold early 90’s Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. I’ll never forget that ride and I’ll never scrape a garage floor again. Fingers crossed.