November 17
Having grown up in Texas I never really noticed the humidity. Larry did. He would come home from his first class, take a shower, lie on the bed wearing just a pair of athletic shorts hoping for the air conditioner to cool him off. Before bed he would shower again. He really was not a fan of the humidity. Larry saw a lot of my comings and goings and tended to perform as a mentor/older brother/conscience. I was a bit upset with him on more than one occasion as he tended to shun me. His chosen major of church administration was probably the perfect match for him. He had a nice car and I don’t recall him ever having to work to pay his bills.
Me, on the other hand — I started working before my first class. In my first fall and spring semesters I worked in the business office. I typed deposit slips and took student payments and did data entry. I also helped go through accounting printouts looking for discrepancies during audits. My gung-ho attitude somehow translated into some sort of threat to the existing full-time workers, mostly ladies just a few years shy of retirement. They actually talked to their boss who sat me down and asked me to be more sensitive when dealing with them. Evidently I came across as condescending, as if I knew how to do their jobs better than they did. Well, there’s only one way a kid barely out of adolescence could cause them to feel that way, and that is because it was true! They were older and set in their ways and I’m sure the computers in the office intimidated them a bit. I was destined for tech support and didn’t even know it.
The next spring the Baptist Student Union (BSU, as in “Don’t let the BSU B.S. You!”) sponsored a ‘missions’ trip and I went along. We went to this odd little children’s home near Weatherford and helped them with some projects. One or two days I helped paint fencing and gates with a silver galvanized paint. The rest of the week we tore out walls in an old building that had most recently been used to store hay. The walls were made of some sort of concrete stucco and were reinforced by a steel mesh. The only way to remove them was to poke holes in them with a heavy metal bar and then break the concrete up with a sledgehammer. After you had a nice pile of debris on the ground you then shoveled it into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it down the hall to a truck. We were given free meals in the kitchen and then most often just showered and passed out in the evenings. We slept on the floor in a spare room in the main house, which looked like a very out-of-place castle. At the end of the week we returned to the college campus but we all felt physically drained and spiritually charged. We had really done something good.
That week really demonstrated something to me regarding my spiritual upbringing. On one hand, church tended to be boring, but I never doubted the theology behind it. This type of service was different. It was productive, physical — and it felt good. We didn’t just pray and send donations, we showed up and did something. And it was a great example of the principle of sacrifice. A very popular saying of Jesus was “Greater love hath no man, than that he lay his life down for a friend.” By sacrificing something of yourself for another you were performing the greatest possible act of love. This principle is a foundational bedrock of Christianity. It is the method whereby the church gains so much work from volunteer members. It is why members contribute so much to church coffers. It is the underpinning of missionary work. Self-sacrifice. It goes way beyond being nice to others, being polite. It is mandatory.
One of my roommates, my first I think, was Dan who was a psychology major. I don’t think he was as religious as myself. Plus he was older and quieter.
This is one reason I gravitated to the guy we shared a bathroom with, Mark. Mark was raised a bit more on the edge of American religion I believe. He had a relative who had a bit more Charismatic bent than I did, and we read some of her letters and recommended books and it wasn’t long before a superstitious paranoia took over. Keep in mind, one of the reasons to go to college is to learn, and I was at a college which purported to teach one of all things spiritual, so I was doing that. But I’m pretty sure that Dallas Baptist never taught a class on demons. At one point I even wrote a scripture on the back of anything hanging on the wall as some sort of protective juju. It was a strange mixture of theology. On one hand you believed that the gifts of the Spirit mentioned in Acts were still here today! (Healing, miracles, prophecy, etc.) On the other hand you also believed that demonic activity was alive and well and that they were out to possess as many bodies as possible. This mentality causes one to live in fear while supposedly owning the most powerful force in the universe. It is like holding a cross to the forehead of a vampire. It doesn’t make the vampire any less scary! You feel as if you are protecting the world from dark forces. Only you know the secret. Others are blind.
The psychological motivation behind this sort of belief system is strong. It gives one a sense of power and importance on the inside, regardless of how plain and simple or perhaps pathetic your external life might be. It also gives you lots of excuses for not actually doing anything to better yourself, what with constantly being attacked by demons and having to do a lot of reading in order to better defend one’s self.
I eventually got over this initial brush with charismania, but it wouldn’t be the last time I dabbled in it.
I believe it was some time in the spring semester when I was riding in a car with someone and first heard the words and music of Keith Green. I asked them to turn the music up and heard Keith singing “To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice” with the uncompromising lyrics:
To obey is better than sacrifice.
I want more than Sunday and Wednesday nights,
Cause if you can’t come to me every day,
Then don’t bother coming at all.
As if the message and attraction couldn’t be any clearer, the album was named “No Compromise.” This was an obvious appeal to fundamentalism, and it definitely appealed to me. It was a ‘moth-to-the-flame’ attraction. Keith railed against complacency and how religion had become compromised. This came out in many of his early songs. And not only was he a singer, but he had a ministry. By the time I discovered Keith he was on his second album and the ministry headquarters had moved from California to Texas, less than two hours from the college I was attending. I bought a cassette tape or two and practically wore them out. I began receiving his Last Days Newsletter (later Magazine) and devoured each issue, each article. I bought song books and began playing on the piano. Once again I was tackling someone with downright virtuoso skills, both vocally and on the keyboard, but I was that drawn to him.
Over the next several years this mentality ruled my life. I was zealous, uncompromising, condescending and a general pain in the neck. Woe be unto any one within earshot if the conversation veered into religion. Of course at the time I considered myself a very reasonable person who just happened to be initiated into something that most people were not. I don’t think I made a total ass out of myself but even my dad didn’t pass muster when it came to my new spiritual guidelines. Not even the local churches, including the huge First Baptist Dallas, could satisfy my hunger for uncompromising religion. I usually just played and sang at a piano somewhere on Sunday mornings. My relationship with Keith would not end well.
I got to see several great concerts while at Dallas Baptist. David Meece came and played. Yet another virtuoso pianist with a freakin’ four-octave vocal range. I didn’t even bother picking up one of his song books. He came through while I was dating Lisa and she hung around for a bit of ‘counseling’ although she never said what about. Dogwood came through and I remember them because it was their last tour and Lisa Whelchel showed up with a friend. We chatted briefly. Amy Grant was a pretty big concert as well, but it might have actually been her first concert tour after her first album. She was YOUNG and my roommate Larry had a crush on her, big-time.
One early bible study I attended sticks out in my mind from this time. A church leader from First Baptist Dallas led it in the student union building, and there were less than ten of us in the room, mostly guys if I recall. At some point one of the students, an odd guy I had done some painting with at one point, asked a question about the end of Mark where it mentions drinking poison and handling snakes. The leader obviously wanted to dissuade this kid from these beliefs but the question was valid considering the fact that there was a big debate raging at the time regarding the inerrancy of scripture. This man was one of the leading proponents of absolute inerrancy, but he quickly shot down the whole poison/snake issue by stating that the last part of the book of Mark wasn’t in our earliest texts and had obviously been added in at a later date and was therefore not strictly part of the canon! I was floored. If this was true, why were they still printing it in the Bible? The leader in question was Paige Patterson. He recently served two terms as the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as I write this he is the President of SouthWestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I was definitely not the best student in the world. My first semester, between girls and goofing off and poor study habits, I was put on academic probation. The next semester I fared a bit better but not by much. That summer I applied for a position at a Baptist summer camp in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, Glorieta.
Overall it was a very memorable summer. Pine trees everywhere, chilly mornings, warm afternoons. The work was almost on a volunteer basis. It was considered a form of mission work so we were paid below minimum wage but the room and board and meals were free. I was assigned to the main auditorium and spent the entire summer moving chairs, vacuuming, buffing, sweeping and cleaning toilets.
