As soon as I pray, you answer me;

you encourage me by giving me strength.

Psalm 1-38:3

Bowling pins.

Not the nice neat set, standing at attention like good soldiers. Nope. 

These just got slammed into. They are noisy, colliding and ricocheting off one another, careening this way and that just before collapsing into a haphazard heap. The whole scene never takes long, but the resulting pile looks a little different every time.

In the unceasing way of the game, the beaten-up pins are swept aside and replaced with a new, more soldierly, ready-to-face-the-day set, only to repeat the process again and again and again until somebody turns off the lights and goes home.

Nobody told my weary folks, who still held high hopes for their only daughter, that they’d be scooping up knocked-down pins and setting them upright time after time after time. Bless ‘em. My proverbial bowling alley was open 24/7. Nobody ever turned off the lights and went home. No doubt exhausting. 

Pretty sure the collective sigh of surprised relief in our family was audible as high school graduation came and went.  I had failed to land in the obituaries.  Nor had I caused anyone else to appear in print. (Clearly, and entirely undeserved and unbeknownst to me, a large, over-the-top soul-watering bucketful of grace was going before me. Thanks be to God.) Still, even as a tassel-flipped alum with all its accompanying assumptions of put-togetherness, I could not grasp my place within the framework of the world. No sense of self actualization  or responsibility existed. There was no connection to the cosmos around me. I was small. Of no consequence. Adrift.

Unlikeable

Unloveable

But wildly popular among my “friends.” 

And still not smart. Even with a diploma.

During those early summer days of 1979 I floated along on a deep ocean current of careless lies and half truths – so, either to get rid of me as a peaceful vacation for themselves, or to keep me from the boyfriend they didn’t like – my folks sent me to Europe for my high school graduation gift. Bless ‘em. I imagine it was a time of utter bliss for them. 

Upon returning from my 7-week European tour to my little apartment under the Rogers Townhouse dining room, I immediately opened a card perched among two dozen roses from none other than the parentally-hated boyfriend and went out with him that evening. Did I pause long enough to express any genuine thanks or gratitude of any kind for the extraordinary gift my dear mom and dad had bestowed upon me? Do you need to ask?

 I gained not only a bit of European culture, but also a few pounds, because the only words I could manage confidently in French were “bread,” “cheese,” and “lemon ice cream.” Italy? Hardly remember it. There were now two University of Arkansas credits to my name as the tour was sponsored by their Fine Arts department. I managed to blow through all my spending  money (plus some I borrowed from the tour director) to finance the same ocean current of bad behavior – this time on the other side of the Atlantic. Apparently, two college credits were also insufficient to  make me smart.

Welcome to the second half of summer. That special time in life when reality hits about your college destination.

Being blank and opinionless about subjects that truly mattered, I responded, “Whatever” to the choice my mother made as to the university I would attend. Miraculously (although as it turns out I failed to enjoy the “miracle”) my 3-point-something-or-other GPA was adequate to admit me to Southern Methodist University in Dallas. 

Ok. 

Whatever.

It can’t be any worse than my last two years of high school, thought I.

Turns out I should never have tried thinking.

Off I went to SMU, armed with the genes of two wonderful scholars and everything I could want or ask for. What I wanted was to go back home to Two-Dozen-Roses Boy whom I had been assured loved me, and if I couldn’t have that, I would make every effort to force all the strangers around me to like me just as I had my last two years of high school. That, friends, is a wildly perilous state of mind for a young woman whose brain is full of bowling pins and whose heart does not know a Savior.

Misery knew no bounds in Dallas. That beautiful southern campus may as well have been a portal to hell itself. Its buildings were of stately southern architecture. The university’s academic reputation was known far and wide. Classrooms were equipped with the latest technologies and professors of renown. Student services had housekeeping who would come and change sheets on dorm beds so we didn’t get the traditional experience of taking bedding home at Christmas that had never been washed. Food in the multiple dining rooms was top notch. Old Texas money was everywhere. I think I remember most people being friendly. I hated it all.

I didn’t understand the rhythms of life or my place in this subculture. My mother had chosen my roommate during a springtime orientation we’d attended, and unbeknownst to dear Mater, there could not have been a more untamed escapee from Catholic high school than this wildling with whom I shared space. I was a rookie compared to the roomie with her sophisticated grasp of the world and its array of forbidden delights. For me, every day was an act in a costume. I was her student. I did, however, carry certain talents of my own with me from my bowling pin days at home, and honed my crashing-into-heaps skills in the state of Texas where the legal drinking age was 18. Classes? I went sometimes. Why some advisor  plunked little me into General Biology, Macroeconomics, Survey of Philosophy, English Composition, and Tennis (tennis!) I will never know. I spoke the language of my English class and a bit of Philosophy, but the others were communicated to me in some Mandarin dialect I couldn’t put my finger on.

Southern Methodist University and I did not share the same orbit. Or universe.

Except for one interaction.

In a rush to get to a class, speed walking along sidewalks among hundreds of students sharing that same goal, I encountered a man in front of the main quad who was handing out little books. Nearby were a few others doing the same. With no seconds to spare, I stopped anyway. I took an orange one and thanked him. It was a simple, accidental encounter (if you believe the “accidental” part I’ve got some swamp land . . . ), one that would prove to be the initial step toward my eternity. In my possession was a pocket-sized Gideon New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs. I never lost it. Thanks be to God for His unmerited grace.

Defeated on multiple fronts with the weight of shame on my shoulders becoming heavier each day, I went home to Arkansas for good in late October, primarily to try and get the boyfriend back. However, I did not advertise that purpose to the parentals. As far as they were concerned I was just a flunker, a drinker, and a mess in need AGAIN of resetting.  

The object of my laser-focused love purpose wasn’t at his fraternity on the U of A campus when I went to surprise him my first day back.  I located him later that day in the high-up cab of the backhoe he was running at his job digging graves at our local cemetery. It was a weird standoff. Not a typical cemetery scene, that’s for sure.  Onlookers peered through windows of the office. Not only did he not want me, he wouldn’t even get out of the Caterpillar. It took a few minutes for that to sink in. I can still feel the late afternoon sun and his eyes on my back as I retreated with crushing steps of shame to where I had come from, over multiple resting places of our  town’s loved ones on the way to my car.

So much for roses.  

Thoroughly dried up depressing useless tumbleweed is more like it.

Lower than low.

I can hardly even dredge up any more memories of those first days back home in the fall of ‘79. My poor parents. They’d had to leave their long-anticipated vacation to come extract me from the Pit of SMU. My bank of recollection holds literally nothing of that time except the dark shadows of my last night in Dallas when my roommate’s much older brother assaulted me at his apartment.  The brand new shoes I was wearing disappeared that night.  And I flew home with my mother the next day. Did I tell her of the night before? Of course not. Never.

 The details about exactly when a phone conversation took place escape me, but this man’s sister, my roommate, called after I arrived home to Arkansas and offered  to buy  an identical replacement pair of shoes like the ones I’d lost on that last night. She would mail them to me if I would send her the money. I sent the money.  A couple of weeks later the shoebox arrived. Empty. 

I stared into the box for the longest time. Turned it over a couple times. Was there a secret compartment with shoes in it? No. Nothing redemptive about the hollow box. Just betrayal. Mockery. Humiliation. 

Lower than low.

Roots under my feet were loosening.

I was blowing away.

And then came Sunday.

My father, the Ph.D golden boy who had backed away from association with a small evangelical denomination known as the Church of the Nazarene in the 60s when he was on the ladder to great heights in academia, announced he was going to church that morning and would I like to accompany him. Why yes. Yes I would.

And so we sat in a pew on the right side of the sanctuary, he and I, in that red brick building with the white steeple and the bell that rang from it. 

There on Olive Street.  Rogers, Arkansas. October 1979.  First Church of the Nazarene.

I took the first deep breath I could remember taking.

The music was familiar because the music of the church, of Jesus, had never stopped in our home. Mom would play the piano. Dad would sing. I would absorb.  It was the thread that kept us connected.

Pastor Fred Agee preached an unapologetic gospel sermon. He was of the genre of southern pastors who invited visitors to stand and be introduced. Dad and I complied. And began lifelong friendships.

The next Sunday Mom came too. The three of us in a pew. In a church. On purpose.

Miss Janie started up “Just as I Am” on the big black piano and couldn’t have gotten to the first time through the chorus before I was on my feet and trampling people to get out to the aisle. At the altar I knelt because I had been watching others and learning. It felt natural. An ancient tiny little lady with a pink crocheted hat came and knelt across from me on her ancient tiny little knees. Prayed a mighty un-tiny prayer of an angel and led me to Jesus right then and there.  Sister Nena Henbest. 

Soon I would know another one of Pastor Agee’s quirks – he jammed a microphone into my face while I was still on my knees and asked, “What has the Lord done for you today?” In my surprise and habitual ways of spinning untruths, I uttered the first purely truthful thing I’d spoken in a long time: “He saved me.”

Days to come were awkward. Finding my feet in this new land with new eyes and a newly minted heart didn’t come 100% easily all at once. It took time to shake off the old and put on the new. There were destructive relationships that needed severing – no two ways about it. And that’s hard. My parents were supportive but were not prone to speak of these things easily or in casual conversation. That is completely understandable and if I were the two of them, I’d be mighty gun shy of anything this kid told me. I found support in a young adult Sunday school class and in showing up at everything I could at church.  My church family became my circle. It struck me how these people could enjoy each others’ company, laughing and singing and praying and working and worshiping and just existing, without substances. I still made mistakes . . . sometimes bad ones.  I was a baby Christian. These new people, these Nazarenes, stuck with me. And still are from a distance. Thank you is too small. 

Fun Fact: I could have gone out to the back lawn of the church and looked across at a row of small, single-story houses whose chain link fences were right up against the church property. I could’ve pointed to the one  (a church-owned parsonage for staff) that I would move into 18 years later with my husband, four kids, and a dog. But I didn’t. Because I could never have imagined it. There’s that bucketful of overflowing grace again . . . 

I found Jesus on Olive Street and never looked back. 

My dried up useless lower-than-low good-for-nothing tumbleweed-y self had a new spring in her step. A root began to form.

Because you have made us for Yourself, our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.

Augustine, Confessions, 1.1.1.

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