The God stuff...

Sometimes people query high schoolers about what college they plan on attending and what major they'll choose. Some will have a very precise answer and others none at all. Most will drift in and around the topic for a while, often right in to college itself, the experience of being at college the catalyst for change and new direction.

I was one of those folks who bopped around a bit. I though about ROTC. I thought about just getting out there with a band and playing music. I wanted, for some reason, to go to Drake University in Des Moines and study English but there was going to be no help as I was a child of the suburbs caught between parents who couldn't help with the costs and the powers that be in the world of grants who said they were too rich. For a while my dad had this idea that I was supposed to study nursing because apparently nurse anesthetists make good money. I ended up at a local community college and solved most of the larger questions by partying the first year away. I suppose that's what can happen when your life is spinning full of dreams with no place to go.

Those who saw me from the outside probably saw me as the drifting child, but not all who wander are lost. I was the inquisitive kid on the block, the one who asked adults hard questions and was often told to shut up because they couldn't answer. So for most of the time I drifted along on the surface of the world, my silence pregnant and evertyhing else enigmatic. One day the tide took me to northern Minnesota and Bemidji State University where I ended up writing press releases, took a strange wierd pentecostal type acid trip of a summer at KJNP radio in North Pole, Alaska (that's King Jesus North Pole to you all) where I did a drive time show without ever once mentioning my name on the air because the guy who ran the joint only wanted people to know who he was and the rest of us were cogs. And yes there really is a town called North Pole just a little bit away from Fairbanks, which itself is kind of surreal, and letters to Santa often get sent to the North Pole Post Office so kids can think they got a real letter back (sort of like what happens when you're not a campaign contributor and write your congressman). Whew!

Whatever I was doing, even if it was rather unholy at any given moment, I did like the God stuff. For some reason even though the faith of my childhood was often stern I was not ultimately put off by it. I guess I just put those voices in the same compartment with the rest of the adults who were yelling at me, telling me to sit still, pay attention and blah, blah, blah. When I was old enough I left and drifted around those tides as well, not lost, just curious and explored the Catholic church for a while, bumped into a cult group called The Way, hung out with Quakers for a bit, dropped in on the Assembly of God in college because glossalalia was the drug of choice for kids in InterVarsity, and ended up mooring myself as a Baptist. Wherever I traveled the God stuff stuck and it became like a sail on a life raft at least sending me somewhere. It got me to seminary anyways.

And seminary was okay althought the same adults who were yelling at me as a child sometimes reappeared as seminarians. I loved the classes, they expanded my mind, set me free in certain ways, challenged my capacities, forced me to pour over old things in new ways. Some of the seminarians, though, were even then rapidly shedding their humanity and getting into the whole stereotypical prissy mode. There's nothing wrong with being righteous but everything wrong with being a dork about it. Maybe it was just what they thought they had to do to survive but I decided to fit in just enough to get by and no more. I had no choice because I knew what a bar stool looked like from above and below and everything that went along with it and although I had dropped that whole thing years before I got to seminary it did make me human and I never forgot that even though I can't for sure always recall where I was or what I did when I was "out there" in the world.

And still the God stuff stuck. It became my life. It became part of my dreams, the stitching that held what seemed like wandering but was really a quilt of many pieces. I don't go anywhere without God any more, even when I'm upset at God and the world and the way things seem to have to be. If I lost everything, my job, my titles, whatever, God would somehow be around and as i write this it suddenly has dawned on me that in all my life, with those who love me and hate me and don't care about me or some mixture of them all God has been the one truest friend. Even if all was fake, like a child who has invisible people to play with when everyone else is gone, I'd still believe for the love of it.