Chapter 01: The Call

I was running down the street to a friend’s house, carrying my shoes in my hands. I did my best to avoid the sharp rocks and broken pavement. Yet, by the end of the day my feet had little cuts and were reddened with minor burns from the hot Texas concrete. There wasn’t anything wrong with my shoes. I was trying out my theory that I could run faster if I wasn’t wearing shoes. The goal wasn’t to get into a special running program — I was only five years old. I wanted to run faster for the sole purpose of getting more things done in the day. As it turns out, I did run faster without shoes, but the blisters and cuts were hardly worth the optimization.

Everything was an experiment to me. I would sleep on the bed, then sleep on the floor. I would try writing with my left hand, then the other hand. One day I took apart a disposable camera and removed the flash unit. I would hold a 9-volt battery up to the terminals and listen to the whine as it charged up. Then I’d connect the wires to a penny, and it would blow a hole clear through the metal. I didn’t stop at pennies, though. I saw a cricket running across the floor and unfortunately for it, I needed something else to zap. After charging up the unit I touched the wires to the cricket, and it flew about four feet into the air. I’m sorry to say the cricket didn’t survive.

I spent a minute scanning the room, looking for more things to test this on. Then I saw my hand. What would happen if I zapped my finger with it? No doubt it would hurt pretty bad, but would the damage be irreparable? I felt like the whole world was going to stop unless I figured out what would happen. Now, there was never a goal of hurting the cricket, and I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. I just wanted to find a way to get the answer to the question: “what would happen if…?” I never did zap myself, in case you’re wondering. Now I’ll never know what would happen if you discharged a camera flash unit with your finger. That’s what YouTube is for, right?

That same insatiable curiosity drove me to read an entire encyclopedia. I read about the electric chair, which correlated to zapping things with a flash charge unit. That led me to reading about electricity in general. Then, I kept reading until I finished the whole encyclopedia. Did you know that Einstein invented teleportation? Well I found out about that BEFORE the internet was a thing. Best of all, books gave me a way to learn about fascinating things without getting my fingers fried off. Unfortunately, the more I read books the less I could relate to the other kids my age. As you can imagine, that made me unpopular with the kids at school, and they would go out of their way to make fun of me.

Kids bullied me all the time, but I remember one time in particular. I was hanging out alone at the school playground when the pastor’s kid came up to me and started making threats. I don’t even remember what I did to cause it, or what he was saying, but I know he wanted to get me. Since I wasn’t allowed to fight, I tried to talk him out of it, then I tried to run, but it was a small playground. Out of places to run, I picked up a stick and pointed it at him and said “Bang! Bang!” like it was a gun. Knowing he had me trapped, he walked toward me singing a taunt. “🎵

sticks and stones may break my bones, but wooden guns will never hurt me

🎶.” His quick wit and humor both amused and terrified me, but he was still on a mission, and I was out of options.

I didn’t know what to do, so decided to try to climb a tree to get away. I turned around and jumped at the tree, but he caught me by the underwear and pulled it up through the back of my pants. He might have been planning to give me a wedgie all along, or perhaps underwear was the only thing he could get a hold of. All I know is that he was carrying me around the playground by my underwear like some sort of toy. After a few minutes he either bored or tired and started talking to his friend Michael about what to do with me. They carried me to a tree and held me up against it. Then Michael hooked my underwear over a nail on the tree and they left me hanging there.

They finally walked away to do more interesting things. Reaching behind my back, I ripped my own underwear and fell to the ground. I laid there a few minutes catching my breath. Was his point was to make me respect him, or to make me feel like he was better than I was? I didn’t feel like he was

superhuman

— instead I felt like I was

less than human

. I stood up, wiped dirt out of my face, and started walking anywhere but there. That tree became a place that I would avoid as a sort of holy ground. Meanwhile, the pastor’s son became someone I would avoid because he made me feel bad.

This story about the bullies doesn’t have a warm conclusion. The bully never got what was coming to him, and I never learned a big life lesson. I’m not sharing this story because it’s happy, but rather because I want to make a connection with you. Everyone has had a bully in their life. For some people their bully was very real and left physical scars. Other people either had very petty bullies or they had thick skin, but we can all relate to bullying. Being a Christian didn’t protect me from bullies. Being a Christian didn’t keep the pastor’s kid from being a bully. In fact, later in life I would find that as a Christian, I had a guarantee that I would have my share of bullies.

John 15:1919 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

I admit that I could be a little tough to get along with, but not because I was trying to be a jerk. I spent a lot of time in my head, which people tend to have a hard time relating to. Today when I ask my wife what she wants to eat, she thinks about what she wants to eat. When she asks me what I want to eat, I have a more complex thought process. Why is she asking? Is she wanting to know what I want to eat, or is this a trick where I’m supposed to ask her what she wants to eat? What if I’m not hungry? Will she eat anyway, or is she asking because she’s hungry and doesn’t want to cook? What would I cook if I were going to cook for her and not for me? Is this even about food, or is this a way for her to spend time with me?

Some of our babysitters hated me for this type of thinking. Not only was I very analytical, but I was a stickler for the rules. So much so that when a babysitter made a rule, I would break it to make sure that they punished me. If they didn’t punish me for breaking the rules, then I would report them to my parents as unjust babysitters. Everyone loved that (I’m being sarcastic). Sometimes if a babysitter didn’t do what I thought they should do I would sit in the corner for an hour or more. What people mistook for moody or sullen was sometimes me trying to unravel a situation in my mind. Was I disappointed? Yes, but it wasn’t disappointment that drove me to sit in the corner. It was my way of attempting to untangle the mess in my head and find my way out of the confusion.

One babysitter in particular was pretty adamant that there was a problem. My parents had to leave town for a week, and they left each of us four kids with different babysitters. Most of us got along well with our temporary families, according to my mom’s retelling of the story. The only thing I remember about the story was staring into the air conditioner vent for hours. Yet, when Mom picked me up the family told her that I had talked about killing myself. “What?” My mom thought with a mixture of fear and disbelief. “He’s only four!”

My mom took me to some doctors, and she also made sure to watch me a little closer for signs of depression. I was a happy kid with few worries, and I didn’t show any further issues that warranted concern. My parents and I had open lines of communication, too. If there was any problem, I knew that I could tell them. As a family we all decided that the babysitter may have been embellishing on a story. It was common for people to misunderstand us kids and more common for people to misinterpret what I said. We put the story to bed as a misunderstanding. Much later in life we would find that something more sinister was hiding in the shadows.

My family was always going on family vacations. It was a little difficult for my dad to peel away from work and scrape together enough time and money, but he did. Those vacations were not only fun as a family, but they helped me unfold my deep love for nature. Early one summer we took a family vacation to Robber’s Cave in Oklahoma. Right outside the cabin was a mountainside covered in tall pines, which kept the air cool and fresh. In the morning, I would get up early and go for a walk through the trees. I liked to sit down and listen to nature doing its thing. The wind hushing through the trees sounded like God was taking a big long happy sigh. Everything was peaceful and still, yet it made my whole body bristle with the feeling of being alive.

Another time, our family of six drove to Colorado and camped in one big tent. The cozy campfire was one of the few times as I kid I got to play with fire without getting in trouble. In the day my dad went fishing and let me tag along. I was walking along the lake with him when he yanked me into the air with no warning. As I was dangling from his hand I glared at him for being so mean, but then I looked down. I was floating above a little pool of the lake that jutted into our path. Had he not have picked me up, I would be waist-deep in water. How many times in my life did my dad do things to protect me without me noticing?

We went to Colorado more than once, and we would stop in a hotel along the way. Everyone would unload their suitcase and shuffle them into our hotel or motel and tuck in for the night. During one of those hotel stops, my dad called us all together in one room. He told us that it was Sunday and even though we weren’t at home, we still had to go to church. We were to honor Sunday and keep it holy, regardless of our environment. He played his guitar, and we sang, then Mom read the bible to us, and he did a mini-sermon. I don’t remember what we sang or what he read, but I did know one thing. If going to church could get you to heaven, our family would be one of the first ones through the pearly gates.

As a deacon in the church, my dad was always up there either serving, or fixing something, or attending a meeting. Sometimes I got to go, and I either worked alongside him or learned by listening to the other elders. People loved to talk to me about the Bible and teach me what they knew. I loved the attention and the simplicity of the subject. Understanding the difference between right and wrong has always been very simple. It only got confusing later in life as people started making exceptions for their own actions. Being a rule follower, I loved it when the elders would ask me trivia about Bible rules. Especially since I always got the answers right.

I understood what basic stories were in the Bible, what it wanted us to do, and the difference between right and wrong. By the age of six, it was pretty obvious that the next step was to accept Jesus Christ into my life and ask him to lead me, so I did. I didn’t feel any different the next day, but I did get my first exposure to public speaking. As I was being baptized, the pastor handed me the mic and asked me to share my story. I said that the Bible says to get baptized, so I’m getting baptized. For some reason everyone cheered, and I couldn’t figure out what I said that made them react that way. Now I was Christian, wet, and cold, but other than that I didn’t feel much different than before.

The church we went to at that time was under construction. Early Sunday morning, my family would be one of the first in as my Dad helped prepare for worship. The bare concrete floor was coated in a thin film of grainy dust. I don’t know what it was, but one day I wiped it away with my hands and got little splinters in my fingers. People would start filing in and set out a bunch of metal folding chairs for us to listen to the sermon. The chairs were always freezing when you first sat down, and I learned you had to sit down long enough to warm them up. The real problem for me wasn’t the cold, though. It was my bony butt. I would shift my weight onto my left butt-cheek until it started hurting, and then switch to my right. I would sit through the sermon trying to manage the pain in my butt and occasionally trying to understand the words that the pastor was saying.

Sometimes we would invite pastors from out of state to speak at our church. On one of those Sundays we had someone come in from North Carolina. He shared information about his church, preached a sermon of which I remember very little, and then closed in prayer. Before he stepped down from the stage, he called our family to the front of the church to pray over us. He waited as we walked up and assembled in front of the stage. After we were all there, he placed his hands on my dad and prayed over him. Then he prayed for my mom. In the same way, he prayed some sort of blessing or prophecy over every person in my family one at a time.

I remember thinking he would skip me. I’d gotten used to other kids skipping me, so why would the Church be any different? I flinched in surprise as he put his massive hand on my head. I remember feeling my whole body start filling up with “warm”. As his hand rested on my scalp he told me that God would use me to help many people. While I don’t remember everything he said verbatim, the general gist was helping others. My mom said that the prophecy was that I would help people and my dad says the word was that I would lead people.

What a contrast from how I saw myself. Not long before this I was nailed to a tree by my underwear, and somehow God was going to make me help to lots of people. How could God would use someone as useless as me — someone who couldn’t even stand up for himself to stand up for others? The weird thing is that I believed it. This was awesome news to me. Somehow God was going to transform me from captain wedgie to helper-of-people.

When I went through the formalities of becoming a Christian, I felt obedient, but I didn’t feel different. It felt like I was doing the right things and like God accepted me, but I felt like the same person as before. Walking out of church that day I felt different. I was brimming with hope that somehow God would be able to redeem my life and make something useful out of it. The next steps for me were to learn what it meant for God to use me and to begin readying myself for that service. I didn’t know where it would lead, but I began preparing for the journey ahead full of excitement and hope.