Ptahlis and JAB…I’ve been holding off on answering Ptahlis’s question on this, but not for the reason you think. First, to tell the story in anything like sensible fashion, it’d be far too long a post. Second, one important part of it “washes the dirty laundry” of someone else, and I don’t feel right about posting that.
Secondarily, a lot of it is quite simply subjective, and I’m going to need to convey the feeling involved. There was no “And then the angel touched Grandma, and the cancer went away” sort of miracle involved, just mundane events that led inexorably to gratifying results, though nobody involved could have known it at the time.
In brief, though, here’s the story:
At age 15, attending church as socially appropriate but having doubts about what I’ve been taught as a kid, I pray the “Glitch prayer” – If You’re really there, give me some sort of assurance. And during the hymn that follows this prayer, which was “Nearer My God to Thee” as it happens, that’s precisely what happens. The simplest way to describe it is with a line Larry Niven used about thoughts placed into the narrator’s mind by a telepathic alien: “I never sensed receiving any such thoughts. But there was in my mind a crystal certainty that had not been there before.”
Move onward to 1982. Intellectual knowledge of God and the Christian faith, but no sense of its being meaningful in my life. Attend a theological course by extension, taught at my church by a priest/college professor using a curriculum from a church-affiliated university seminary. In the course of this, in an ironically silly way, events happen that bring a sense of God’s presence to me. And activate a drive within me to commit to Him. I described the feeling above, and cannot explain it any better than that, though I’d be glad to resolve any questions about it – bearing in mind that there may be no good answers to the questions.
In 1989, I was working for a state agency, more or less enjoying my job but with effectively no life outside it. My wife and I were not estranged, but had no emotional involvement with each other’s lives – we just shared a home and kept our feelings hidden away. I had very little self-confidence, a very negative self-image, an online presence (on the AOL predecessor PC-Link) that functioned in place of a social life, no close friends and a fear of making any – that they would end up not liking me. We were childless, extremely likely to stay that way. I’d lost my parents and both aunts in the preceding decade, and had no real hopes or dreams left.
A neighbor kid showed up on the average of every couple of weeks to do what chores we wanted him to do: mow the lawn, rake the leaves, shovel the walk, and so on. He was a fairly personable teenager, and we both enjoyed his company. On occasion, he’d come to play games on my home computer. On one such occasion, he brought his same-age cousin and best friend, who thereafter fell into the same roles – occasional visitor for odd jobs and casual friendship. In retrospect, that we were adults who treated them as people, not “specimens of the species teenager” probably had a lot to do with the relationship that evolved.
Flash forward. I have a heart attack, and the cousin discovers me, alerts my wife (not at home but reachable), and she rushes me to hospital, takes time off from work to nurse me through the ensuing months of recuperation. Quadruple bypass operation follows. The two kids visit me in the hospital.
Back home. Resume life as it’s been happening. However, two incidents need recording. First, I had been scheduled (and my wife fulfilled the obligation) to do one scripture reading on the day of my surgery. Text is from Ezekiel: “I will take away your heart of stone; I will give you a new heart and a new spirit.” Uh, in both a literal and a metaphoric way, that is just what He did. If not a new heart, a “valve job” that replaced the arteries “made of stone” (arteriosclerotic plaque will stand in quite effectively). And immediately after the heart attack, I had a sense that whatever was left of my life needed to be personally fulfilling and meaningful – I may not have many years left, but they’ll be good ones. This was about half commitment on my part and half a promise to me, and I recognize that that clause may not make a great deal of sense to anyone else as it stands, but that was the sense I got.
A few months later, one of the two kids – the cousin – shows up and tells me that the other one has been arrested for a socially repellent crime. (Yeah, I can name it, but this is where I’m being exceedingly cautious not to mess around with his dirty laundry in public.) My initial reaction is not to cast aspersions on him, but to think, and say, “He’s going to need friends after this.” No sense of sticking myself out for someone else, but just a “this is the right thing to do” feeling – it was almost spontaneous, and assuredly God’s doing, or at least that’s the sense I got.
So he’s out on probationary, pretrial release, and cannot go home to his parents’ house (more laundry). Meanwhile, the cousin is physically abused by parents and leaves home. At this point, we’re living in half a two-family structure I’ve inherited, with the other half vacant. We agree to put the kids up in the other half, rent whatever they can afford, on the basis that they either attend school (both dropouts at the moment) or work and agree to work on reconciling with parents, not necessarily immediately. Slowly a near-“family” relationship starts growing between the four of us, heterodyned by the original boy’s 18th birthday – which his girlfriend picks to break up with him, causing a crash-and-burn emotional crisis which his cousin comforts him through – and emotionally starved me is zapped by this scene, realizing for the first time as a gut reaction that honest caring and emotional closeness does happen.
Thirty miles away, another teenage boy, formerly a neighbor and close friend of the cousin, gets into sequential fights with his boss at work, his girlfriend, and his mother – they heterodyned, each giving rise to the next – and hitches back to the city we lived in to find the one thing he can turn to, his friend the cousin. And ends up at our house.
The night he showed up is engraved on my memory. The cousin tried to introduce us, hoping we’d get to like each other. Little did he know. The two of us were “in synch” from first meeting – swapping stories, talking like we’d known each other all our lives. One of the funniest memories I have is of the cousin looking back and forth between the two of us, with his jaw agape, as we talked. (It needs to be noted here that I was very introverted at this point, and this quick friendship was totally out of character for me.)
Wife’s boss changes, and work becomes a hostile environment for her. She’s approaching the 20-year mark for retirement, though too young to retire. I tell her to resign when the 20 years are up; we’ll live off my salary.
As I enter into helping the third boy out of his emotional turmoil and get his life straightened out, he reverses the process and lifts me out of the negatives in my life, giving me self-confidence, self-assurance, and a sense of self-worth.
And he falls in love with the sister of the first boy; they marry and have three wonderful children for whom I am a stand-in grandfather (his father having decamped years before and hers being dead).
In the course of all of this, my boss retires, is replaced by a guy whose attitude makes my job less than enjoyable. But I’m now building the self-confidence to change jobs, relocate where I like the weather and the social ambience better, make a new life for myself.
Slowly but surely I evolve from the cloistered, introverted, self-disliking creature into the guy you know from these boards.
