I don't remember much about my last year of high school. Ironically, I can remember my first day of high school in vivid detail, but my entire last year of school remains a blur in my memory. At the beginning of the year, I was enrolled in several rigorous classes that would really challenge me academically. I enrolled in the classes when they were an idea, I quickly dropped them when they became a reality. My teachers, my friends, and my parents seemed to have higher expectations for me than I had for myself. I was never pressured, but I was pushed to excel.
Throughout junior year, everything revolved around college preparation. I spent a Saturday morning cooped up in a room at my high school's rival school taking the ACTs. I scored a 26. It wasn't anything exceptional, but I was told that a 26 would allow me acceptance to almost every public university. I was encouraged to start looking at all of my options, think about where I wanted to go, what I wanted to study, and have a good feel for my college future by senior year.
College seemed inevitable. I really wasn't interested in going to college, but it seemed like the right thing to do. My teachers encouraged me to enroll for AP classes my senior year so that I could start racking in college credits early. It sounded like a good idea at the time. I enrolled in AP biology, and I was planning on taking anatomy and physiology too. My past teachers were excited to have me in class again, and my mom was ecstatic that I was taking college seriously.
The summer before my senior year, I got a job at Texas Roadhouse as a busser. They glamourized the position and called it a Server Assistant, a title that I have opted to utilize on my professional resume'. Although I was just a busser, I took my new job very seriously. I always came to work in uniform, I always arrived early, volunteered to stay late in case I was needed, and I began to flourish as a bus-boy. My brother was a server at the same restaurant, and I enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with my best friend since I hardly ever got to see him now that he graduated and moved out of the house. It took several months for most of my co-workers to piece together that we were brothers, and I enjoyed the fact that I was not labeled "little-brother" for once in my life. I earned my reputation as a hard, devoted, and meticulous worker who strived to assist servers more than bus tables.
The first week of my senior year is one of the most memorable weeks of the year. Before setting foot in any of my difficult classes, I scrambled to drop out of my AP biology and anatomy and physiology classes. I never intended to take the classes. I only enrolled to appease the masses. Everyone had great expectations for my senior year of high school, but I just wanted to coast my way to graduation. I dropped all of my difficult classes, and enrolled in service related "classes" like peer tutor and teacher's aide. I enjoyed English classes the most, and I had enrolled in several English electives my senior year. I also decided to enroll in Yearbook. By the end of the first week, my senior year leaped from academically rigorous to nominally challenging. I was happy with the changes. My parents and teachers were not. I didn't change my mind.
I made my senior year unmemorable. Apart from my English classes, I did not have to do much. Write an essay here and there, that's all. I flourished as a member of the yearbook staff, and enjoyed taking on the role of a publisher. Despite my intentions of not getting too involved, my talents as a writer made me the perfect candidate for copy editor. Although it was my first year on the staff, my teacher and peers decided that I would review everyone's pages before submission. I enjoyed this immensely, and enjoyed being more involved with the yearbook than I ever expected. By the end of the year, my fellow seniors were talking about naming me as the Editor in Chief in the colophon. I was fine with being the copy editor.
Most of my high school friendships didn't last past the summer after my graduation. Although I spent a lot of time with a certain group of people, I never felt like we were really friends. I enjoyed spending time with them, we shared a lot of common interests, but our relationship was isolated to the high school campus. Outside of school, we never really hung out. It wasn't until I saw familiar faces in college that I became good friends with some people I went to high school with. (As a copy editor, I probably would have given someone grief for ending their sentence with a preposition, now I don't really care.)
High school ended rather anticlimactically. The love of my life noticed me, we survived three awkward encounters, and I decided to walk away from the prospect of the romance I had imagined all three years of high school. I graduated within the top ten of my class, even though I decided to sit my senior year out academically. I received a faculty scholarship for my work on the yearbook staff. I had been accepted to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS), and was set to start classes the following Fall. I enjoyed my unexpected celebrity status as the guy that made the movie for prom season, but my success only confused me more about the future that seemed to be approaching me at the speed of light. I walked across the stage at my graduation ceremony, shook hands with some people, was given my diploma, and I walked away from the ceremony without looking back. High school was behind me. I was moving on.
Although I was enrolled as a full-time student at UCCS, I had about as much intention of graduating college as I did of taking AP biology my senior year of high school. I would go through the motions for a time to appease the masses (particularly my parents), but college just seemed too cliché. Everybody went to college anymore. For me, college wasn't about getting an education. It was always about getting a piece of paper and paying dearly for it. Listening to my peers senior year, I quickly discovered that most of them were excited about going to college for different reasons. The way they talked about it, it sounded like college was one giant party disguised to look like an education.
I didn't want to go to college, and I certainly did not want to live on a college campus. Honestly, I was scared to death of the idea. I was still struggling with pornography, using it as means to feel loved and accepted. I was no longer focusing on my past high school crush, but I felt susceptible to going down a similar path again with another girl. I was struggling to feel accepted by my peers, and I felt like nobody knew who I really was. I excused myself from letting people know who I really was by believing that they would only reject me if they knew. I knew that my life would change drastically if I moved out of my parents' home and moved into a dormitory. I knew that my lifestyle was self-destructive, and that I would quickly deteriorate on a college campus. I was afraid of the choices and friends I would make. I was scared of college.
For me, college was not an opportunity to further my education but a temptation to exacerbate my sinful habits. In college, I would have a clean slate and I could be whoever I wanted to be. I wouldn't have to keep up the image of being a Christian and being most innocent. I could be myself rather than the façade of a Christian, and my parents would be miles away and completely out of the loop. I could jettison the title of Christian and blame college for it. I could be free of morality, free of expectations, and free of my hypocrisy. It was too simple. It was the easy way out. I feared what I might become with too much freedom.
Part of me desperately desired to shed the Christian title that I had used since I was a child to define my every thought and action. I wanted to try the grass on the other side of the fence. I wanted to try being the romantic. I wanted to try being the artist. I wanted to challenge my Christian worldview, and try on a different pair of rose-colored glasses. I wanted to see the world as an atheist, as an agnostic, as a materialist, as a secularist, as a modernist, and as a postmodernist.
Part of me, on the other hand, desperately clung to the Christian title. It was only a title, yes, but it wasn't a bad one. I sought to be a moral person publically, so the title just seemed to fit. If my private life didn't seem so blatantly un-Christian, I'm sure I wouldn't have any reservations labeling myself as a Christian. Christians are nice, friendly, caring, considerate, compassionate, forgiving, gentle, encouraging, and above all else--loving. I genuinely loved people, and if Christianity was an appropriate title for someone who loves everybody then it was a good title for me.
But if you loved everyone, then did you have to be a Christian? Could there be other people out there that valued being nice, friendly, considerate, compassionate, forgiving, gentle, encouraging, and loving without labeling themselves as Christian? After all, I had one high school friend who didn't profess to be a Christian and he was by far one of the nicest guys I had ever met. Right after high school, I began to question what it meant to be a Christian. I began to question what made me a Christian, and why I felt required to bear that label. I began to wonder why I assumed every nice person was a Christian and every person that smoked, cussed, and talked about sex wasn't. I began to recognize a problem with my perception of what a Christian was. My public life personified what I believed a Christian was and my private life personified what I believed a Christian wasn't. Furthermore, I was struggling to understand who I truly was. Was I the nice, quiet, caring, peaceful guy on the outside or was I the perverted, idolatrous, pornographer on the inside? Even if I was truly the nice, quiet, caring, peaceful guy, did that make me a Christian? Why?
A couple of weeks before attending my first college semester, I decided to move out of my parents' house out in the boonies and move in with my grandma and grandpa, who lived conveniently close to UCCS's campus. My grandma and grandpa welcomed the idea, and my parents thought it was a good idea as well. I would save money on gas, and I was expected to help my grandma take care of the house and my grandpa, who's health was slowly deteriorating. I could give college a try, at least, and see if it was as terrible as I thought it might be. After all, I was given a scholarship and it would be a shame to let it go to waste.
Living with my grandparents was difficult to acclimate to, at first. I expected to make my own meals, and pretty much function as a tenant renting a room. Naturally, my grandparents expected me to join them at the dinner table, to interact with them regularly, and function as a grandson living in their home. I joined them for a few meals, but passively implemented my ideal living situation by studying through dinner, and hanging out with friends whenever I wasn't busy with work or school. I would help out with some chores like mowing the lawn, but I contributed as little as I could.
My grandma and grandpa were devoted Christians, and they wore their faith on their sleeve without any reservations. Oftentimes, I would come home from one of my college classes at night to a house filled with church friends who had gathered at their house for Bible study. I was the grandson that so many people had heard so much about. I couldn't help but wonder what they had heard so much about, considering that I spent as little time at the house as possible. I also couldn't help but wonder if they had heard good things or bad things. Was I the grandson that was such a help around the house or was I the grandson that was such a bum and almost nonexistent? I felt like the latter, but everyone seemed excited to meet me so maybe my grandparents bragged about me more than I deserved.
College met all of my expectations, and I was already planning on dropping out as soon as possible. My classes were uninteresting, my professors were pompous, and my friends were all re-runs. I was fifteen minutes late for my first class because I couldn't find a place to park, even though I arrived an hour early to find a spot to park. My first class was psychology with about 200 other students. My graduating class at high school was 210, and now that was the size of my first college class. I arrived late, but I was not panicked because two girls from my high school also arrived late for the same reason. We sat together in class, and listened to our first college professor lay down the law. The course was sixteen weeks long, the book was sixteen chapters long, and each week we would have a test on one of the chapters. The professor would discard our two lowest test scores and there was not going to be a final. After spelling out the ground rules, he dismissed class because he had to take his dog to the vet. We had a test two days later on the first chapter of the text, even though the professor had not wasted a breath teaching it. I aced the test, alienating me from my former high school classmates who couldn't believe what they had gotten themselves into, and I wrote off college right then and there.
Why did I need to pay an institution an astronomical amount of money so that I could buy an expensive textbook, go home, read it, and answer some questions on a scantron? I could get a better education than that by just reading books that interested me on my own. I wasn't getting an education. I was wasting my time and my money. In my mind, there wasn't anything a college professor could teach me that I couldn't teach myself. My first semester of college was very similar to my last semester of high school: it was a joke. I went through the motions. Besides psychology, I was enrolled in an English class, a very basic math class that was required for an English major for some reason, and a logic class. The only class I enjoyed was my logic class. My professor was not full of himself, the textbook cost me fifteen dollars, the course challenged me, and I felt like I actually learned something that was practical and more interesting than I anticipated (it also helped that my classmates were juniors and seniors rather than new freshman).
My very basic math class was at night, and a girl that I went to high school with was also in the class with me. We both flourished in the class, so I didn't feel alienated from her for doing well like I did in my psychology class. We were never really good friends in high school. We quickly hit it off in college.
In high school, she was on the varsity cheer squad, she was a good friend of my high school crush, and she seemed to fit the popular, blonde cheerleader role perfectly. She was very nice in high school, and I never got the impression that she was stuck-up or anything. We were in the same chemistry class as juniors, and she loved to review my homework. She always asked to see my homework. She said she wasn't copying it, but rather, was making sure we got the same answers. I really didn't care, either way.
In college, she was a different person and so was I. We started with clean slates. She wasn't the blonde cheerleader and I wasn't the goody-two-shoes anymore. I was still the smart guy, however. Several times, we decided to ditch class and finish our homework in her dorm room. At first I felt uncomfortable going into her dorm room alone, but the feeling subsided. We sat down, and we would work on the math problems together. As the semester went on, the math class covered some basic logic problems. Since I was in a logic class, these were already a review for me. I helped my new friend with her homework, and our friendship quickly blossomed. We would often ditch classes that weren't required because of quizzes and tests and just do the work in her dorm room.
We quickly became good friends. We both hated UCCS, and were both settled on dropping out ASAP. I was dropping out at the end of the semester, but she was committed to finishing the year because she was living in the dorms. We would talk about life in general, love and relationships, movies, people in high school, shopping, and anything and everything. In high school, we were complete opposites, but in college, we were two peas in a pod.
We were friends and nothing else. The relationship never felt awkward in any way. She was a beautiful girl and she was very attractive, but I never thought anything of it. This was a breakthrough for me. My view of women and relationships was maturing. In high school, pretty girls were practically goddesses to me. I was afraid of them and always felt unworthy of their affection and attention. They were too lofty and beautiful. I clammed up around them, and didn't say a word. Now I was becoming friends with one of the prettiest girls in high school, and our friendship had nothing to do with the way she looked. Amazing what a few months' time can change.
After my first semester of college, I decided to take some time off. My parents weren't thrilled, but I did what they expected me to do. I needed some time to figure out who I really was and what I really wanted to do with my life. I hadn't even really lived my life yet, and I was expected to know what I wanted to do with it. I'd spent my entire life studying books, but I hadn't experienced life outside of school. I wanted to give it a try for once.
Laura, my friend from college, was also good friends with two other friends that I went to high school with: Christy and Sabrina. In high school, Sabrina was always really loud and I tried to avoid her as much as possible. She always seemed mad. Christy was always pretty quiet, on the other hand, and always seemed happy. All four of us went to high school together and were never friends, and all four of us went to UCCS together and became good friends. Naturally, I was the odd one out because I was the only guy in our group, but I enjoyed our friendship nonetheless.
The girls spent a lot more time together without me, but that was of my own choosing. They all enjoyed going to the clubs and bars as soon as they turned 21, but I never enjoyed alcohol or the bar scene. It had nothing to do with my morality, I just despised the taste of beer and most forms of alcohol. The only kinds of drinks that I did like I didn't dare order at a bar for fear of having my manhood harshly criticized. The club and bar scenes were for extroverts, and I was the most introverted of the group. They excused my absence regularly, never treating me like a sub-par friend for missing out on all of the festivities. We often went to movies as a group or out to eat. We talked about a lot of things, but nothing memorable. I just remember smiling and laughing a lot.
One winter, my friends were planning on taking a trip up into the mountains for the X-Games. Christy was an avid snowboarder, Sabrina was an avid dirt-bike racer, and Laura just loved excitement. We were talking about renting a condo, spending the weekend up in the mountains, and just having an all-around blast. All of sudden, having three female friends became a bit a predicament. I wasn't romantically involved with any of them, and I didn't want to be. They were my friends and nothing more. I decided that no harm could come from sharing a condo with them. I was seriously considering going.
Despite moving out of my parents' house, and living a more independent life, I still valued my parent's opinion greatly. In many ways, after my brother got married and moved to California, my mom and dad became my best friends. I saw them every Sunday when I went to church, and I often came over to their house out in the boonies for dinner and a movie. They were family. They were closer than any friends could ever be. I never felt like spending time with my parents was uncool or childish. I didn't mind being nineteen and walking around the mall with them, chowing down on a DQ Blizzard.
I found both of my parents fascinating and amusing in their own ways.
Growing up, I didn't know my dad really well. He was always working when I was a kid. I remember him coming home from work to have lunch with us, but he would just sit down and watch the Rush Limbaugh show and then go back to work. I got to know him better when he decided to stay home and teach my brother and me. He instilled his fascination of the Civil War and WWII on me, and I loved going to WWII airplane museums and watching classic war movies with him. My dad and I were intellectuals, cut from the same sheet of cloth, and I grew up to love and adore him more and more as his knowledge and wisdom impressed me more and more.
My dad was the smartest man I had ever met, and he never went to college. Almost every evening, we would watch Jeopardy together before dinner. He knew every answer. As a child, I just assumed it was a re-run that he'd seen before. It never dawned on me that he was really that smart until I was in middle school. Wherever we went, he was like a living, breathing encyclopedia. He seemed to know everything.
He raised my brother and me on John Wayne westerns and classic slap-stick comedies starring Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, the Marx brothers, Red Skelton, and Peter Sellers. We grew up watching Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, and classic war movies like The Longest Day, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, and A Bridge Too Far.
He was an elder in the church I went to, and I enjoyed watching his personality blossom every Sunday morning. He was quiet and reserved like me, but he was a different man on Sunday mornings. He smiled from ear to ear, shaking hands, hugging people, and genuinely elated to see them. As soon as we joined the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, he seemed to have finally found his purpose in life. I'd never seen the man so happy. He became very involved with the church, and served in as many capacities as he could.
My mom was a constant throughout my life. As a child, she was always home taking care of my brother and me. She was my piano teacher, and although I tried to give it up, she pressed me to continue learning. She instilled in me a love of music, reading, and writing. One of my most cherished childhood memories was sitting down and reading to her. I always enjoyed the goofy stories, and she enjoyed listening to me act out the parts.
She was always my biggest fan. She loved to watch me perform. Whether I was singing on the fireplace, playing my rubber-band guitar for the masses on the driveway, performing a magic show, practicing my puppet skills, or experimenting with writing music, she was always there cheering me on.
Every summer, she required my brother and me to read a book and write a report on it. At the time, I did not enjoy this fascination of learning that my mom enjoyed, but looking back on it as an adult, she taught me not to take learning for granted. She taught me to love books, and to find something that I enjoyed reading, and read it. She taught me books weren't an assignment but a gateway to education and learning.
As a teenager, my mom worked part-time as a public-health nurse, and I loved to hear her stories as we sat around the dinner table. My brother and I always asked mom if anything interesting happened at work, and mom would usually have a story to tell. My dad despised the conversations, usually, finding the stories too grotesque for the dinner table. My brother and I would encourage mom to continue the story, and then we would laugh and holler at the slap-stick and crude punch-lines of the tales. Dad thought it was gross. It was his fault that we loved slap-stick and crude humor.
Before I could commit to spending a weekend sharing a condo with three girls I had to ask my parents. Part of me felt I needed their permission even though I was in college. Part of me felt like just telling them I was going to spend the weekend with some friends in the mountains. I knew they would ask questions, I knew I would have to divulge that I was the only guy, and I knew they would not approve. I knew that if I asked for their permission they would not give it. I knew that if I just told them that I was going as a common courtesy they would disapprove. I was really tempted to go, leaving them out of the loop, and telling them after the fact. I couldn't pull myself to do it, though. I loved my parents too much to betray their trust like that.
Morally, I had no qualms spending a weekend in the mountains with three girls. They were all friends, I trusted all of them, and I didn't foresee any compromising situations arising. In my new, college intellect, I found it close-minded to think that guys and girls couldn't live in the same space without being married. We were adults, we were mature, and we could handle sharing a condo without anything happening.
I decided to tell my parents about the plan and ask them for their feedback. We had a small family meeting in my bedroom at my grandma's house. I expected my parents to tell me unequivocally No! However, their response wasn't what I expected. They told me exactly what I felt, I was more or less an adult now and I needed to start making these kinds of decisions on my own. They both told me that they were opposed to the idea, but that I needed to make the decision for myself.
At that moment, something changed. For once in my life, right and wrong wasn't determined by what my parents said. I had to determine it on my own. A right decision wasn't going to be met with praise and a wrong decision wasn't going to be met punishment. If I made the right decision, then I would need to figure out why it was the right decision, and the same for if I made a wrong decision. For the first time in my life, I faced a moral dilemma that I had to overcome with my own code of ethics rather than my parents'.
It seemed like a simple predicament, but it caused me to start down a philosophical road that I had never really trekked upon before. What is right and wrong? What is truth and what is false? I knew what my parents believed, and I knew that they believed what the Bible taught. My entire life, I took the Law for granted. I just assumed that the whole world based what was right and what was wrong off of the Bible. Culturally, there wasn't much contrast between the laws of governments around the world and the second table of the Ten Commandments. Disobeying parents and those in authority is wrong. Murder is wrong. Sleeping with your neighbor's wife or husband is wrong. Stealing your neighbor's stuff is wrong. Lying while under oath is wrong.
If there's no God, then what is right and wrong? Who makes the rules? Who makes the laws? Society? Nature? Consequences? History?
This time, I decided to trust my parents' judgment. Although I didn't feel that going on the trip would be wrong because we were all just friends, I decided that a small weekend excursion with three friends wasn't worth jeopardizing my relationship with my family. I stayed home.
When my friends returned, it sounded like I didn't miss much. It wasn't as much fun as they thought it would be. I was glad I didn't hurt my relationship with my parents for a trip in the mountains that wasn't really that fun anyways.
It seems silly to think that it wasn't until then I began to think for myself about what I believed. For some reason, I always took it for granted that the whole world believed that the Ten Commandments were right. I thought that everyone was playing the game of life with the same set of rules. For my entire life, I had been puffed up by self-righteousness that I was beginning to doubt now. What if the Bible wasn't true? What if God was only an invention of man? What if the church was forcing their own Law on everyone else? Who is to say what is right and wrong? Right and wrong seems to make the world go around, but who's in control of the moral compass? Who is the deciding factor?
From that point on, I remained committed to my ethic code and my own understanding of what morality was. I dropped the label of Christian until I actually knew what it meant. My morality became less hypocritical in a bad way. I still didn't use foul language, but only because I thought that it was a sign of inferiority and illiteracy. I still didn't sleep with girls outside of marriage, but only because I thought that it was impossible to emotionally detach from sexual encounters and that meaningless sex would leave me an emotional train-wreck for the woman I might eventually marry. I still desired to be kind, courteous, and loving, but only as a sign of sophistication and good pedigree, as it were. I was no longer judging myself by the Law. I was judging myself by what I thought was right and wrong.
People still called me a Christian. I neither embraced nor denounced their label. If they found my behavior Christ-like, then that was their judgment to make. In my new job at Texas Roadhouse, and throughout my years at community college pursuing my dream of video production, I never called myself a Christian. I distanced myself from many of my Christian friends, but one in particular challenged me philosophically, so I remained close with him.
All of a sudden, I became a philosopher. All of a sudden, I became a free-thinker. All of a sudden, I became a blogger!
I had been on Myspace and Facebook for a while now. I was on Facebook to keep in touch with people I went to high school with. By "keep in touch" I mean look at their profile pictures here and there and see what their status reads. When I first started getting into social media, Myspace and Facebook were in their infancy. Both sites only allowed you to upload a handful of pictures and share a handful of information about yourself. I was on Myspace to meet girls, and I would spend hours every night browsing profiles of single girls in town and around the country. I would add them as my friends, and start perusing their profiles. Eventually, Myspace allowed you to start writing blogs. I wrote a couple, and a few people were amused.
As I began to think for myself, trying to strip everything I had always taken for granted, and starting afresh with a new appreciation for the world, I wrote copiously about my thoughts and experiences. The blog started shortly after my first semester of college, and continued until I discontinued my Myspace account three years later. Before deleting my account, I copied and pasted all of my blogs into a word document, and was surprised that I had written almost 500 single-spaced pages of my thoughts over the years. In many ways, these 500 pages outline my transformation and conversion to Christianity. I read them today, and I see a free-thinker battling everything he's taken for granted and trying to figure out who he is and what he believes. I see a depressed, lonely individual trying to find his place in the world, and trying to understand the meaning of life. I see a man being molded and shaped into a new man, learning what true faith is, learning that knowing God is not an intellectual endeavor, and that everything he took for granted for truth was nothing compared to the Truth.
I had to stop being a Christian so that God could show me what true Christianity was all about. You might be surprised by what I discovered...
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