I started my Junior Year of high School in late August of 1990, three weeks after my dad was deployed to Saudia Arabia for Desert Storm. That Summer had launched a new beginning in my life. In July I had attended a week-long youth retreat in Tennessee called “Centrifuge” with the youth group from the church I started going to the previous year. I spent most of the week with Greg, Kevin, Paul, Scott, Randall, Chico and Dave. Seven incredible guys who loved Jesus and had been part of the church youth group for quite some time. At some point during that week I felt my heart “strangely warmed,” as John Wesley once put it. It occurred to me that I really believed the message I had been hearing all week about the promise of forgiveness and new life, and wanted to embrace it personally and live it practically. And so, one week after my dad left for Desert Storm, I stood before the church, professed the Christian faith, and received the Sacrament of Baptism in the presence of countless friends and family. Afterwards I called Beth to let her know, because I knew she had prayed for this. The next week, school started.
It was a splendid Fall. Everything seemed new. I was excelling academically in school, loving church, and was involved on the youth council leadership team. I was learning and growing in my faith. I was attending church Sunday and Wednesday, and youth events on the weekends. One Saturday Mrs. Stokes took a bunch of us to the mountains for the day. We listened to Simon and Garfunkel in the car, and talked a lot about Christianity. We met up with several other carloads of youth from the church when we arrived. We hiked all day, and it was pure joy. A week later Marc started coming to our church. He had just moved to Virginia Beach from Washington D.C. We hit it off immediately. He played the guitar. I played the guitar. He wanted to write songs and perform them. I did too. He loved to laugh. I loved to laugh. He was a Godsend, and I loved him.
Just after Thanksgiving everything seemed to fall apart. The girl I had been dating for a year and a half called and told me we were finished. In retrospect it was the absolute best thing that could have happened to both of us, but at the time it opened the floodgates of drama, jealousy, hurtful words, and a self-inflicted emotional hell that refused to go away. A week later my mom got engaged and announced that she would marry in July. While most people would view such news as reason for celebration, I viewed it as salt in the wound, and honestly, as a threat. I had been the man in my mom’s life for the past 4 years while my brother was away at college and mom raised my little sister and me. I didn’t want someone else moving in and changing our family, or worse, telling me what to do. I was terrible at expressing to her how I was feeling, so I coped in rather unhealthy ways. I withdrew into a shell. I was unkind to her. I ignored her. I told her I might move out. I argued with her. Inside I was a wreck. I wanted to talk to my dad about it but he was in the Middle East. We didn’t have Facetime, email, texting, Facebook or Skype. On top of all of this tumult, I started struggling in school. My grades were slipping. I had trouble with math and science. My mind just didn’t work that way. I enjoyed music and english (partly because I had a crush on Mrs. Denson), but was finding it hard to apply myself. It was hard to focus as I stewed about my mom’s pending marriage, worried about whether my dad would survive the war, and tried to save face in light of the girl who dumped me and was now seeing someone else. I started to slip back into the depressiveness I had experienced the year before, which was awful.
I realize now, as a 41 year old pastor, that I have dealt with far more serious situations than what I’ve described above, both personally and with congregants. But as a sixteen year old, my world was smaller, my life experience was limited, and the issues I was facing at that time seemed utterly unbearable. The saving grace, however, was that I had my faith, my friends, and my music, and I clung tightly to all three, and I would soon learn that God’s presence came to me through all three.
Christmas came and went uneventfully. On New Year’s Eve, Marc and I were headed to a party in his beige Mazda truck. It was rainy, cold, and dreary. He turned on the radio and we heard a few news reports about the latest fatalities in the Persian Gulf. He turned it off and we looked out the window in silence as he continued to drive. “This war, ” he said. “It… just sucks.” More silence and staring through the beads of rain on the window. Suddenly we looked at each other, and knew we were both thinking the same thing. Almost simultaneously, we said, “We’ve gotta write a song.” Over the next couple of days we worked out the music on the guitar and then wrote lyrics. We entitled it “The Gift of Love.” This was the refrain:
There’s an answer to this madness
There’s an answer to these factions
And there’s an answer to these rumors tearing at my brain.
It may seem too good to be true
But it all depends on you
Because the hate in this world is driving me insane
The answer is simply love and it’s given from up above
I can tell you anyone in the world can have it as their own
It doesn’t take much just to ask God above for love
And we can all live together in peace
And Saddam, I pray that you might find the gift, the gift of love
Someday
We had no idea the song would become as popular as it did. A reporter from The Virginian-Pilot came out to the school talent show when Marc and I performed the song publicly for the first time. The next day the paper ran the story about our writing and performing of the song. We went into a studio the next week and recorded the song and gave copies of it to friends and family. People requested it at every party and youth group event we attended. It was surreal.
Around that same time, Cathy entered the picture. I had actually known her since we were 12 years old, but aside from marching band and a class or two, we never really hung out. Now, however, she was suddenly part of our youth group, and in particular the same group of friends I hung out with. Her mother was a Pastor. Her brother was a friend of mine.
Her appearance on the landscape of events during that cold Winter turned out to be an important turning point in the storyline of my life that year. During the tumultuous war I was experiencing emotionally, Cathy managed to steady me. She did this not by giving me advice, but simply by being present. There’s a scene in the movie “Lars and the Real Girl” where the main character, Lars, is grieving. A few women from the community come over to his house, and they simply sit in the living room and sew. Lars comes into the room, looks around, and asks, “Is there something I should be doing?” One of the women replies, “No dear… We came over to sit. That’s what friends do when tragedy strikes. They come over and they sit.” That’s kind of what Cathy did. She came over. A lot. She listened to me. She had a good rapport with my mom and her fiance, and her visits to our home had a way of smoothing over the tension I had created over their engagement. She was good with my little sister. Truthfully, it was nice to have a relationship with a female peer that was simply a friendship and didn’t involve romance, drama, or pretense. And so we spent almost every weekend together that winter. We drove all over Virginia Beach in her brown Toyota Corolla and listened to our favorite songs. She helped keep me away from the petty bickering that was taking place in parts of our social circles. At school, we usually saw each other in the morning at our lockers. One morning in mid-March she handed me a folded sheet of white typing paper. I looked at her quizzically. She put her right hand on my left shoulder, kissed me, and said, “Just read it when you get a chance.” As I walked away and headed to my first class, I unfolded the piece of paper. It contained the typed lyrics to the song “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips:
I know there’s pain.
Why do you lock yourself up in these chains?
No one can change your life except for you.
Don’t ever let anyone step all over you.
Just open your heart and your mind.
Is it really fair to feel this way inside?I know that there is pain
But hold on for one more day
And break free from the chains.Hold on…
Hold on…
Now, that may seem to some like a sappy teenager moment, like a scene from Glee or Saved By the Bell, but I’ll tell you this: things really did change after that. Spring came. The war in the Gulf ended and my dad came back to the States. He bought me a car, and the next week I got a job at Chic-fil-a at the Military Circle Mall where I would be working with my close friend, Greg. I started getting along better with my mother, though she had been forgiving of my selfish behavior all along. I started reading the Bible through a new lens which helped me to see hardship as a blessing that can make us stronger. I’d like to think I became less self-absorbed. Greg and I helped each other out at work, gave each other rides, and laughed a lot and sang a lot. Marc and I began to use our music to try and bring hope to others who were hurting. And I became more aware and attentive to the pain Cathy was feeling when I learned her mom was going through chemo.
On the last day of school, I walked out of the building into the student parking lot, looked up at the cloudless blue Virginia Beach sky, took a deep breath, and smiled. I felt a peace come over me, a peace that I had not experienced in quite some time. I got into my 1982 white Subaru, turned the key, and made my way to Greg’s house. As I was driving, I popped in my favorite cassette tape, “Nomads, Indians, and Saints” by Indigo Girls. It started playing the last part of the song “You and Me of the 10,000 Wars,” and I immediately heard Emily Saliers sing these words:
After the battle and we’re still around
Everything lights up and the air has settled down
We sweep the ashes and let the silence find us
A moment of peace is worth every war behind us
“Yes,” I said to myself, nodding. “Yes.”
And then began the memorable Summer of 1991, which is a story I need to tell, and in time, I will. In the meantime, may you hold on. And may your days be filled with peace.
Common Grace 