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Growing Up Country

Today, looking back on that first trip into Somaliland, I often wonder, What in the world was I thinking? In many ways the experience seems just as surreal to me now as it did at the time. There was nothing in my rural Kentucky background that would have hinted at a life of international travel and hair-raising danger.

I was the second oldest of seven children. My family heritage provided me little in the way of privilege. Before I left home at the age of eighteen, I had traveled outside of Kentucky one time. Our family was both poor and proud. My parents instilled in their children a strong sense of family loyalty, a solid foundation of integrity and personal responsibility, a determined self-sufficiency, and a strong work ethic.

Looking back, I don’t know whether I would claim to have had a particularly happy or unhappy childhood. Mostly, I worked hard and kept busy; I didn’t have much time to think about whether I was happy or not.

From my parents and my neighbors, I learned that life is hard work and that happiness is being with family and friends. Those simple lessons have served me well over the years.

No one in my family had ever been to college before my brother and I went. My dad earned his living in the construction business. My mom was a housewife, which meant that she was also a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, and much more. On weeknights and on weekends, our family farmed a nearby piece of land, and there was never an end to the work.

I spent weeks at a time living with and helping out my maternal grandparents who were themselves poor, life-long tenant farmers. They had moved from place to place—working the fields, caring for the livestock, and tending the land for various absentee property-owners.

Typically, I would be up at four o’clock most mornings to help with the daily chores, which often included milking twenty cows by hand. Breakfast would be on the table before six. After breakfast, I caught the bus at the start of its long, meandering two-hour route to school. I would be in class all day, then get back on the bus for the two-hour odyssey back through the countryside to whatever place my grandparents were farming at the time. We would eat supper and head to bed early in hopes of getting enough sleep to rise long before dawn and go through the same routine the next day. There simply wasn’t time or opportunity to get into too much trouble with a schedule like that.

We got more than enough exercise working, but for fun and recreation my brothers and I played Little League baseball in the summertime. And, of course, growing up in the Bluegrass State, every kid old enough to dribble or drool followed the exploits of the University of Kentucky Wildcats and their legendary basketball coach Adolph Rupp on the radio all winter. Many people in Kentucky ascribed divine status to Coach Rupp.

Speaking of God, the good people of my community did so often. Many of them seemed to be on a first-name basis with Him. However, I have to confess that the Lord’s name probably came up a lot less frequently, and occasionally less reverently, in my household than it did in the homes of many of our neighbors.

My parents weren’t much in the way of churchgoers. The best chance of catching them in a pew would be Christmas Sunday or maybe Easter—and whenever their children had a part in a play or program. To their credit, my mother and father took my siblings and me to church often—getting us up early and dressed in our best clothes to be driven and dropped off for Sunday school and worship.

I suspect that my parents’ faithfulness in getting us to church each Sunday may not have been as motivated by their concern for our spiritual nourishment and training as it was by the appeal of free babysitting and the promise of two hours of weekly freedom from their own parental responsibilities. Spiritual instruction at home was limited to an annual reading of the biblical account of the Christmas story, and my dad’s occasional verbalized critiques of the sins and shortcomings of the “good church people” he knew—as if he wanted to convince us, and maybe himself, that our family was as good as anyone in town, maybe better, and (without a doubt in his mind) certainly less hypocritical.

I actually liked going to church to see my school friends in Sunday school. I even enjoyed Sunday morning worship. I especially loved the choir music; it prompted my very first sense of awe. Church felt so different from any other part of my life, usually in a good way. But that also meant that church and real life seemed to have little in common.

I tried to listen carefully to the sermons, but I usually failed unless the preacher told a good story. My least favorite part of church took place during the closing hymn. At the end of every service, any good preacher worth his salt would give the requisite altar call. Just when a young boy’s restless feet were itching to get on with other things, just when I would begin to salivate over thoughts of Sunday dinner, just when everything seemed to be winding down to a merciful and humane conclusion, the service would inevitably grind to an abrupt, albeit predictable, halt. The worst part was not ever knowing how long this pastoral appeal might last. It also felt like a dangerous time, because these appeals could sometimes feel terribly personal.

One Sunday afternoon, after worship, my older brother and I were at home getting changed for an afternoon of Sunday fun. My brother took an unusually serious tone with me to say, “Nik, I think it’s time you got saved.”

At first I didn’t understand what he meant. He saw my puzzled look. He explained, “We were talking about this in my Sunday school class today. And I have been thinking that you’re old enough to know what it means to get saved. So next week, at the end of church, when the preacher asks people to go down to the altar, you need to go, Nik. And then just tell the preacher why you’re there. Okay?”

I nodded in reply, but I didn’t completely understand what my brother meant. I was seven years old. The following Sunday, as the preacher gave the invitation during the closing hymn, my brother nudged me. When I glanced up at him, he motioned toward the front of the church. I wasn’t at all sure I was ready for this, whatever this was; but I didn’t want to disappoint my big brother. So I stepped out of the pew and began walking very slowly down to the front of the sanctuary.

The preacher met me at the altar and bent over to ask me why I had come forward. I said, “My brother told me to!” The pastor got a funny look on his face and told me that we would talk after he dismissed the service. I can’t say I remember much about the conversation we had in his office that day—except that he started by asking me a question that I wasn’t at all sure how to answer. Then he asked me another question, obviously looking for some different response that I didn’t know how to give him. Confused and embarrassed, I quickly dissolved into tears. And that effectively ended our little talk about my spiritual condition.

Some years later, I learned that he had called my mother later that week to tell her what had happened. “I’m not at all sure that Nik really understands the concept of salvation,” he said, “or what it means to be saved from our sins. But I’m a little afraid that if we don’t go ahead and baptize him, we might set him back in his faith.” For that reason, I was baptized the very next Sunday. That service was more memorable because of the coldness of the baptismal water than because of any real meaning or significance the experience held for me at the time.

The first truly significant and personal spiritual experience I ever had in church didn’t occur until four years later. It was Easter Sunday. I was eleven. I remember the details vividly.

The church was already packed by the time we got there. Our regular pew was already full. In fact, the church was so full that our family had to split up. I slipped into a single spot in a pew near the front. Perhaps it was the different-from-usual-feel to the experience that made me somehow more attentive to my environment that morning.

I remember it being a sparkling day. The sun shone extra bright outside, making the stained glass windows of the sanctuary glow with a deeper, richer color than I had ever noticed before. The congregation sang with more gusto than normal. And when the choir sang their especially triumphant anthem, I could feel my inner spirit soaring with them.

And the unusual and powerful feeling I was experiencing in church that morning didn’t even stop when the pastor stood and began to preach. As he recounted what should have been the familiar story of all that had happened to Jesus at the very end of His life on Earth, I found myself drawn into the story.

I absorbed the pastor’s words like background narration, while actually seeing in my mind, and feeling in my heart, all that took place with Jesus and His disciples during that holy Passover week. I sensed the love and the closeness between Jesus and His disciples at the Last Supper. I felt the sadness, disappointment, grief, and fear in the garden. I felt genuine outrage at the mistreatment of Jesus in the course of His trial and His execution. I desperately wanted to do something, or see God do something, to make it all right.

For the first time, I understood something of the price that Jesus paid for the sins of the world, and for me. I could imagine the deep despair that the disciples must have felt after He died and His body was placed in a tomb. What a dark day that Saturday must have been! When the preacher finally got to the Easter-morning part of the story—the part about the rolled-away stone, the angel, the empty tomb, and the resurrected Jesus—something deep inside of me wanted to shout right out loud: “Hooray!” I felt like breaking into song just like the crowds in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

As I tried to imagine what would happen if I actually did that, I quickly glanced around at the people around me. Other children were drawing or writing on their bulletins; some fidgeted, others stared blankly, deep into their private daydreams. The majority of the adults that I could see seemed to be sitting and listening intently enough—looking and acting no different from any other Sunday during any other sermon.

I felt like shouting “Hey everyone! Are you listening to this?” I had sat around some of those same folks at football games where they would yell and scream. How in the world was it that these people managed to get so much more excited about what happened at a high school football field on Friday nights than they did about the resurrection of Jesus at church on Easter Sunday morning?

That didn’t compute in my eleven-year-old mind. I simply could not fathom how it was that nobody cared enough to be truly celebrating this incredible story about Jesus’ death and resurrection that we were hearing.

Unless . . . the very thought quickly and completely squelched the spirit that I had been feeling that morning. Unless . . . the reason that the people sitting around me in church that Sunday were not getting excited about the Easter story was because they had heard the story so many times before. Maybe they had heard the story so many times before that, now, they saw it as . . . just a story.

I am sure that they believed that it was the truth—but it was truth that had very little to do with real life. Evidently, it was a story that did not demand much excitement or response. Evidently, it was just another good story, maybe even a great story, which I needed to relegate to my “once upon a time” file along with a lot of other entertaining or inspiring tales that I had heard at other times. When I walked out of that Easter Sunday service that morning, that is exactly what I did. I mentally filed the resurrection story away as “interesting.”

For the next seven years of my life, I found little about the Bible, church, or the Christian faith that excited my spirit again.