Sometime in the last couple of months, I let an anniversary slip by without acknowledging it.
November 9, 1999.
The journey to this date started a long time before... (very long time readers of our blog may recognize part of this story from a post in 2004 - have I really been blogging that long? Yes I have. - but this is a much more personal and detailed account.)
In the summer of 1981 I was 12, about to go into 8th grade. I was a tall, painfully skinny, kid who only had one real passion - the Apple 2e computers our school had acquired. Specifically, the games I could play on the Apple 2e computers our schools had acquired. (I don't remember if we had our Atari at home at this time or not, but even if we did, the computers were cooler.)
I don't remember how the subject came up, but I do remember at some point, my Mom telling me about a church camp nearby that she went to when she was my age and do I want to go?
School was closed for the summer and summers in our tiny town in Nebraska were painfully boring; besides, I was very shy and quiet and didn't have any real friends, so there was nothing else for me to do so I said why not.
So here I am, a 12 year old kid who has never been away from family except for an occasional, very very rare sleep over. I'm at a church camp where the sole topic of discussion and all the music is centered on Jesus.
The first night we were there, we had a church service in what they called the tabernacle. It was really this screened in slab of concrete with a roof over it and white-washed benches facing a make-shift podium. We sang a little and there was a sermon and what we called an "alter call". I went forward, I knelt, I prayed a prayer. They told me I was a Christian now.
The next day I met a girl. She was my first girlfriend. I never kissed her. When I got home after that week I met another girl. She was my second girlfriend even though I technically still had the first. I did kiss her. A lot.
Now that I was a Christian, the most important thing in my life was girls.
Don't get me wrong. I was a different person when I left camp. My mom said I "came out of my shell" and "wished she could shut me up". In retrospect, I now believe that answering the alter call was not the moment I became a true Christian, but rather the time a seed was planted. If you think of the moment of becoming a Christian as a "birth", that was the moment of conception. Still all well and good, but I was not who I was told I was.
How do I know? Because of the life I lived the next 20 years. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The rest of high school was a bizzare combination of computers, video games, church camps, church events and girls. Lots of girls. In fact, every church camp was an occasion to meet new girls and have a new girlfriend. I put on the appearance of a Christian, at least the appearance of the Christians around me. I wore the right clothes, listened to the right music, carried around a big ol' Bible. I attended confirmation class at the Methodist church and was baptized and confirmed at the same time. (Normally, infants are baptized in the Methodist church, and I had to be baptized before I was confirmed.)
But inside I wasn't what I wanted everyone to believe I was. As more girls went through my life, I became obsessed with one thing, sex. This is a G rated blog, so I won't elaborate on it more than to say that even before "it" actually "happened", in fact maybe more so before "it" "happened", "it" consumed my thoughts and actions.
By the time I went to college, I had pretty much given up trying to look like a Christian, unless it was socially convenient. If someone asked me if I was a Christian I would say "yes", but by looking at my actions and behavior, they would never have guessed.
A few years later I was married, with children. It would be a long long time before any thoughts of church or Christianity would cross my mind again. For all practical purposes, I was an atheist.
---End of Part One---
