So I had to do a lot of driving this weekend, and there is nothing like hours on the road to lead me down rabbit trails, memory hallways, doors and windows, and contemplative chutes-and-ladders in my 61ish-year-old brain (give or take about 9 months in utero, ha ha!)
I often have a lot on my mind, and I often imagine writing out my thoughts, opinions, or various stories.
Possible content and titles may morph over a day or two of thoughts when they seem inter-related to me. I’ve really been dwelling on thoughts about my personhood, gifts and talents and purpose in life–long term and short term aspirations–recently.
Somehow as my mind meandered, I recalled two statements my first husband had written about me in his college journals, before we were really involved with one another. While I hesitate to quote verbatim, I feel that my personal storytelling here rests a lot upon this conceptual thought and surely, he was not the only person at that time who knew me to be somewhat of a newly-converted Christian zealot!
While things did not work out for him and I in the life-long sense, God used those twenty years to give us two precious sons together, and two precious grandchildren. God’s ways are not our ways (obviously), and my memories surrounding these long-ago college era statements trigger a number of thoughts about both my “young self” and my “current self.”
Actually, it makes me smile.
Again, before I write out the two quotations, I want to emphasize this is not about his thoughts, per se, but it is about me and about who I am. We were both very young, in a number of ways. We had met each other in a Religions of Mankind class at the UD, taught by a professor Chris Largent.
“Eileen had a paper of hers deemed unacceptable by Chris Largent. I can see why. That girl must climb off her high horse of religion if she is to pass that course. She claims to have the ability to speak in tongues. I believe her. I still cannot buy her propositions on the nature of God though. She must, if only for the sake of that one class forget her views and listen to Largent’s. If not she will never pass.”
Later, another entry:
“When she leaves school she will do something productive and worthy. The Peace Corps perhaps or working with the needy certainly. She is concerned about the world and brings light to it simply by walking through it.”
__________
And now, for my story.
I turned to God in a “born-again” experience somewhere between August 1981 into that fall. There was a specific encounter I had with the Holy Spirit (August) getting my attention and placing a hunger and thirst in me to know God and to “find Him.”
And then, there were some gradual, periodic things I could describe as being at work in me that led me to the point of connecting with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship January 1982, one Friday night on the UD campus.
I was raised in the United Methodist Church and had Sunday School and church experiences to some degree, prior to this time. But like most things, it was complicated. I used to attend church with my father, and after his death the spring of my high school sophomore year, this came to an end. And as I became a teenager prior to his death, my church attendance/desire was diminishing.
I do believe that as a child I had significant desire for God and experiences with Jesus, and with an amount of biblical ideas from Sunday School and bible reading, but I did not have any specific adult conversion encounter until that summer following high school graduation.
And once that happened in full speed the spring of 1982, I was “on fire for God,” as they say.
Inter-Varsity, like other campus ministries, trains young Christians to think in terms of evangelism. In retrospect, I had a pretty good and quick understanding of the gospel message, but like all of us who come to faith in Christ, I was literally and spiritually young and unseasoned.
I can look back and reflect on various things from that time period in my life with a number of thoughts and observations about myself.
I remember in the Religions of Mankind Class the professor began by introducing us to Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism, and then on similarities between creation “mythologies” in all cultures and religions.
I knew enough through my Christian fellowship learnings to be/feel on guard against unbiblical teachings, especially in some college class materials, and somehow I had a strong bent toward theology and apologetics!
Ha.
I smile, because when we recognize things in us that are consistent (though they may become more refined) throughout our lifetime, we need to pay attention and honor, so-to-speak, the way God has made us and is working in and through us. Such things may serve to confirm our sense of purpose.
These days, I still feel focused on a number of the same-themed things in my life, as well as my art.
I have a number of samplings of writings and memorabilia in various boxes, as some of us who collect and save things do! Over the years, I’ve tried to sort/organize things and keep it limited and manageable. If “Marie Kondo” came into my closet-boxes she might say, “Does this ‘spark joy’ in you?” and I would retort, “You darn-tootin’ it brings me a form of joy even if I never fully look through it all again!”
Tonight, I did some digging and found some stuff generally relating to this time period in my college life. I’m going to try scanning a sampling of things. Unfortunately, whatever paper I wrote for Professor Largent’s class was never among things I saved!
I can vaguely recall having to write a paper and mine was so full of bible scriptures and arguments (probably very well-reasoned and true!) why all other religions apart from following Jesus were false. I do recall now feeling confused when the professor pointed out there were two creation stories in Genesis, and I recall praying and reading and trying to work through it in my mind, and the actual recollection of reading through Genesis and eventually having only the parts where it said, “And God said, and it was so” stand out to me.
I can remember wrestling through some things and deciding I might never figure it all out (scientific details of creationism) but all I needed to believe and confess was that “God said, and it was so.”
__________
I remember taking note of my first husband (also a UD sophomore at the time) from across the lecture room. He was always seeming to raise his hand and comment or possibly be arguing (other points?) in class. He got my attention. And then one night after class he, and this other guy named Kevin that I knew who usually walked me back to my dorm from this Wednesday nighttime class, found ourselves standing out on the corner of South College Avenue debating stuff from the class.
Neither Kevin nor my first husband were Christians, and I was being zealous and “argumentative” I suppose!
It was raining that night and I had an umbrella we were standing under. At some point Kevin turned to the young man (who later became my first husband for 20 years) and said that he needed to go up to Main Street and asked if Jim would walk me back to my dorm.
Jim agreed, and we continued talking about religion all the way back to my dorm. By the time we reached the Gilbert Hall dorms, I was pressing Jim to pray the “sinner’s prayer” with me! Ha ha ha…he agreed to kneel down and pray the Lord’s Prayer, and we did that. But, not the “sinner’s prayer.” I believe I asked him if he wanted to “invite Christ into his heart.” As I’d been instructed to say!
My roommate came down, frantic and wondering where I was. We took this “Jim” guy up into the dorm room and both of us were trying to talk about God and the bible (to convert him) until late into the night…as I recall…
College.
Weird times…“MRS” degrees and “BS” degrees in a subject never (technically) studied…oh the complicated sequence of stories and one thing leading into another…
__________
God has taken me “up and down and all around” since those days. There were times when I was not so zealous, and even questioning of my faith to some degree.
I do also recall the words of a Pastor to me years ago in an email which included, “You are obviously a sensitive person and a woman of deep and abiding faith, and that faith has been evident and guided you throughout your life…” (paraphrase)
My college years were full of a lot of searching for what it was I wanted to “do” with my life. I do hope that the “spirit” of who I am that was expressed in those journals so long ago is still as evident, and now seasoned through the years and better formed–through joys and sorrows, hardships and flourishing, and diligence and perseverance.
Mid-way through college I had a crisis of “future imagining” and decided there was no future for me in “art” and besides, “Jesus was going to imminently return and burn all the art up…possibly before I could act on my young, natural desires that women have and become married with children!“
I attempted a switch into Community and Family Services and took a two-month missionary jaunt to Mexico City in 1984, contemplating sacrificing every last normal and natural womanly dream to God. I clearly remember literally kneeling and praying aloud one night (in a parking lot I used to sneak my old ’69 Toyota Corolla into that was off Haines Street) and telling God some version of, “I don’t need anything or anyone but YOU! Take me, take my life…I don’t need a husband or a family! I will go wherever you send me in this world!”
That was some time in the fall of 1983. Upon returning from Mexico and having become more entangled with that young man from the Religions class (we kept meeting up for meals and other visits/talks and I kept trying to convert him…), I found myself on my knees again in that same parking lot around fall 1984 pretty much begging God to work in his life and bring us together.
I was deeply in love and deeply drawn to him. I was willing to risk some unknowns…I was…I was…young…and many other things.
I believe many of us have those messy memories and situations that could have gone in a variety of directions. Who knows the mystery of God’s ordaining of each of our existences…I do believe in the sacredness of human life and that God knows each of us and plans for us to come into life and existence.
So, how is it that each of us who lives, was in fact planned in the mind of God before the foundation of the world, yet our two parents may not have been walking in God’s perfect will for their lives or fully following His commandments?
I don’t know. That’s too big of a conversation here.
All I know is that even though my first marriage ultimately ended in divorce for essentially spiritual and other very real and irreconcilable reasons, that I would “do it all again” those 20 years with the very same outcome just to have our sons be precisely who they are and have life, from the millisecond of their exact conception.
This is a mystery.
I loved Jim, quite a lot. We had some good years. No marriage lasts 20 years if 100% of the moments were 100% bad. I don’t want to digress from the topic here, but I’ve written a number of pieces here on my blog regarding divorce. One can put the search term into the search feature here on the home page, and browse pieces with various contemplations on that theme.
Divorce is the breaking of a covenant–in my mind–and not simply the legal ending of a partnership. It’s all hard–very very hard and will present life-long recollections and various struggles.
__________
And now, below are some scans…for the fun and humor of it!
First, my UD transcripts. Awhile back I highlighted in pink the classes I got an “A” in. I did in fact pass Largent’s class (I don’t recall if I did it by getting off my “high horse of religion” or not…I may have somewhat toned things down while making my uncompromising views clear) with a “B.”
So…HA.
In this last image–as I browse through my many “1984 Mexico” photos that were scanned awhile back from slides, I’m reminded that even then after I had exited being an “art major” that the creation of images and even a primitive “calligraphy” came so natural to me.
I made this quick little folded paper that jokingly says, “Comida con Fuego!” (“Food with Fire!”) to capture/remember a funny experience we had that night at table with our Mexican family. I was trying to ask them to “please pass the hot sauce” in Spanish and I didn’t know how to say “hot sauce.” I fumbled in attempting to use the word “fire” (fuego) for “hot” and they were all laughing!
It’s a powerful thing to know and sense what you are most suited to do in life and to see that consistently unfold. Too many people can go through the motions/expectations of life and living without such purpose.
Thank you for reading my story if you got this far! I’d love to hear your thoughts that spring to mind from this expression here about your own life experiences. Blessings!
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