Crossing KCU

Mexico, Buddha, and the Broken Down Bus

I walked alone through the main street of the small town. The sky was empty but for the sun that burned bright in the mid-afternoon heat. There wasn’t much to look at here, but I had come with a purpose. I knew this town. I had grown up here, long ago, in simpler times. I briefly recalled a moment somewhere out of the depths of my memory, it could have been a century ago… there was a small group of us, all kids, running around in the front yard of the church. We had a football, but we weren’t really playing an organized game with it. I think we were just chasing whoever had the ball, knocking them to the ground, and ripping the ball out of their hands however we could. Then whoever retrieved the football became the next target. It was a rough game. I remembered it was cold outside because at points we were breathing so hard that our lungs hurt from sucking in all the frigid air.

I reached over my right shoulder and felt for the hilt. “Where did this come from,” I thought as I drew it forth in front of me. And more importantly, “what good is this here?” In these few moments the giant swung his axe, narrowly missing me, as I threw myself onto the ground. I rolled over to find the giant standing directly over me. This was it. It held aloft the great axe and as it cut through the air I raised the small sword and held it over me, the only shield I had. I knew I was going to die in that moment. But I did not die. As the giant’s axe made contact with the blade it shattered his weapon into hundreds of pieces. With a terrible scream of pain, the giant staggered back, a look of shock on its face. Then I stood up, and as I did, I woke from the dream.
_______

I guess before going any further I should explain something of why I ended up at Kentucky Christian University in the fall of 1997. I suppose, at least from a technical point of view, it had a lot to do with the particular church tradition that I was raised in from the time I was born. I came from a small town, Indiana church that was not affiliated with any organized denominational structure. However, it did have a heritage as part of the Restoration Movement, or Stone-Campbell Movement—the same movement which founded Kentucky Christian University at the beginning of the 1900s. So, as could be expected, the leaders of my home church had all been trained at this school. Because of that I had been aware of the school from an early age, and throughout my years in the high school youth group, the youth minister had the habit of encouraging his favorite students to attend there after graduation. In the end there were about five or six of us who decided to go to Kentucky after high school. None of us knew what we were really doing. I mainly decided to go because it was the only college I had ever visited, it wasn’t too far away from home, and I would at least know some of the other students. A close friend of mine named Marc had also decided to go. That was all the encouragement I needed.

My last couple of years in the high school youth group had been extremely educational, and a little confusing. I began taking Christianity a little more serious when I turned seventeen during my junior year, but my understanding of the faith was still very immature. I was a pretty complex kid during that time in my life. On the surface I appeared to be a relatively confident person, and for the most part I was. The problem was that my confidence and sense of self-worth rested on assumptions about myself and my life that were simply a large collection of lies that I had trained myself, or been taught by others to believe. In fact, by the age of eighteen my life was full of so many illusions that I really had no idea who I was.

This was the product I had been chiseled into by American society. The educational system had prodded me along for thirteen years, moving me from one level to the next preparing me to be, in the end, just another taxpayer. The church I had grown up in since I was a baby had done pretty much the same thing, raising me to believe that if I attended services every Sunday and I gave 10% of my money, I would make it into Heaven one day. But this wasn’t good enough for me. I wasn’t satisfied with the things that everyone else seemed to just accept about life. I wanted to be more. I wanted to do more. I knew, deep down inside, that I was meant to do and be more than I was taught to believe.

Back then, there were really two distinct sides to my personality, and I would switch back and forth between these two depending on where I was and who was around. One side of my personality was the “good Christian boy,” which in religious terms meant that I had pretty decent grades, was never sexually active, was in the top ten of my class, went to church two or three times a week, participated in youth group activities, and to top it all off in proper evangelical fashion, even preached a sermon in front of the entire church one Sunday morning. However, underneath the surface was the other, darker side of my personality. In reality I was a very angry teenager who rebelled against authority figures, cussed out teachers, had a habit of flipping people off while driving, made a hobby out of hacking into the high school’s computer system, sent anonymous hate mail to the principal, pulled fire alarms, didn’t think twice about lying to people, and spent large amounts of his free time looking at porn on the internet.

Despite my spiritual immaturity, there was some part of me that genuinely sought to understand the faith that I had been taught to believe throughout my life. I had accepted that Christ was Lord and God and been baptized in water at a very young age. I had done this without the slightest bit of coercion, fully aware of what I was doing, yet without the slightest knowledge of what the implications were for living life as a follower of Jesus. As I neared the end of my high school years, my life began to become heavily polarized, with one side being filled with churchy things, and the other filled with worldly things. I was very confused, and the guidance that I desperately needed from those like my youth minister was sorely lacking. Most of the lessons I heard during our youth group time consisted of lectures about why we should not date or marry non-Christian people, or how we should not listen to non-Christian music, or how we should find ways to invite other kids to church. It wasn’t that I necessarily disagreed with those sentiments, but they just didn’t have anything to do with me. I was being told not to date non-Christians, but there was no one who wanted to date me, period. I was being told not to listen to non-Christian music when some of the only satisfaction I had in life came from the bands I listened to and the concerts I attended—none of them Christian. I was being told to invite other kids to church when I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I myself really wanted to be there.

Along these lines, a very powerful, formative experience came at the end of my senior year in high school. Our youth group took annual trips to Mexico during Spring Break, and having gone the year before, I was actually excited about these trips. There was something entirely different about them, something compelling, and when I went to Mexico, even with a group from the church, it didn’t feel like church. It felt like an adventure. We would travel down to Mexico on the church bus, stay at a missionary compound and Christian school, and spend the week doing manual labor. During my first trip there I had helped to build a couple of roofs for people in the surrounding, poverty stricken neighborhood. When the opportunity rolled around again during my senior year, I was very eager to go back a second time.

This time, however, I was among a privileged few who were allowed to visit a church in a city much deeper in the interior of Mexico. Normally our group helped out a mission that sat right across the Texas border, and while the main body of students (about 80 total) were still going to be working there, I would be taken in a van with a few others to a place called Saltillo. Once there, we dispersed and stayed a few days with different families from the church we were visiting in that city.

I stayed in the pastor’s house, a man named Mario, who had a wife and a little girl. I was amazed by the fact that they all made me sleep in their bed, while they slept on the floor in the living room. I couldn’t understand what would prompt that kind of hospitality; it simply made no sense to me at all. Equally astounding to me at the time was the intensity with which the Christians in that place loved praising God. Their church services were loud and energetic, and they carried their joy with them wherever they went. Ultimately, I saw something in Mexico that I had never seen before. I saw people who truly loved God. It’s not that the people in my church didn’t love God; I had just never seen it before. But there, in the midst of that poverty, there was nothing else for the people to clutter their lives with or mask what they really cared about. There was no illusion covering up what was going on in their lives. They were real, and their relationship to God was real. They gave whatever they could with joy, because they truly loved people, even strangers. The kindness, attention, and love I received from these complete strangers in the few days I spent with them were enough to make a very large tear in the fake Christian façade I had developed for myself. It wasn’t enough to radically change my life at the time, but it did give me a much needed, new perspective from which to view the faith that I had so casually grown up with, and had learned to take for granted. It was like the Christianity I had grown up with was a meal that had been sitting in front of me for years, and while I had been told a thousand times what this meal was called and what it tasted like, I had never taken a bite of it before. In Mexico that spring, I had my first real taste of Christianity.

Something else happened on that same trip that had an equally impacting effect on my understanding of Christianity, only in a much different way. As I mentioned earlier, the smaller group I was with was just an offshoot of a much larger group that was stationed in a town near the Texas border. In that group of eighty or so, there were three guys who had been coming to the youth group for several months, and had been getting more and more involved in the months leading up to the Mexico trip. They were not Christians, but were interested and curious enough to keep coming to the youth group meetings. So they came to Mexico with us that year, and from spending time with them, and talking to them, I noticed that the trip had done much to foster the beginnings of a change in them. These guys were very much like myself in terms of their general attitude about life, and the things they did outside of church. The difference was that they hadn’t grown up in the church their whole life like I had, and so they weren’t very good at hiding the things about themselves that church people didn’t like.

For instance, our youth group was only allowed to listen to “Christian” music while we were on a trip like that, which meant that I had to hide any music that I brought because I only listened to what is known in the evangelical community as “secular” bands. These other guys, who listened to the same stuff that I did, would be wearing Nirvana or Pearl Jam t-shirts and end up having their stuff thoroughly searched because of that. If anyone searched my stuff I would just show them a few Christian CDs that I had procured from my parents’ collection as a camouflage. Aside from music, appearance was really the thing that caused these guys the most trouble with the rest of the youth group. As I mentioned before, they would wear clothes with the names of the bands they liked, but they also wore chains on their jeans, and sometimes dyed their hair; all things that were generally frowned upon by the youth group leaders. Despite all the trouble they encountered, being looked down upon by other kids and adults in the group, they kept coming. I was one of the few who made friends with them; after all, we shared many things in common. Well, a few things happened near the end of that week in Mexico that brought some of the outward differences of these guys into sharp focus and scrutiny from the rest of the group.

It had been raining continuously throughout the last couple of days we were in Mexico, and as such, the larger group was unable to get the work done which the leaders had assigned for them. When you have that many teenagers sitting around in Mexico, in the rain, with nothing to do, tensions will inevitably rise, and minor arguments will break out. For some reason, the general attitude of gloominess, combined with extreme boredom, created an explosive mixture of widespread bickering and arguing within the group which inevitably splintered into a number of smaller cliques. Again, for anyone even casually familiar with the social dynamics of teenagers, none of this would be considered out of the ordinary. But considering that this happened within a church group, with poor leadership, it soon took on a very nasty transformation.

After we left Mexico, and headed back to Indiana, one of the buses kept breaking down, and part of the underside even caught on fire once. The bus was very old, and it was always breaking down, so there wasn’t anything particularly surprising about that at all. But… we had a Buddha on board.

One of the few guys I was talking about earlier (who was not versed in the finer aspects of the typical evangelical subculture) had purchased a small porcelain Buddha statue from the Mexican market earlier in the week. The guy wasn’t a Buddhist, he just thought it looked funny and bought it on a whim at bargain price. No one cared the least bit about it until the bus began breaking down on the way home.

I was never entirely sure afterwards about what led to the rapid rise in the Buddha’s fame among our youth group. After all, I was sitting in a broken down bus on the side of the road in the sweltering heat of a Texas afternoon, passed out with my head phones on when I awoke to my youth minister tapping me on the shoulder. I immediately thought I was busted, that he had somehow discovered I wasn’t really listening to Carmen after all, but the Smashing Pumpkins. As I took my headphones off he asked me what I thought about everything that was happening. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Seeing the look of confusion on my face, he went on to inform me that during the last hour the group leaders had been approached by a large portion of the students and after a frantic discussion had come to the conclusion that Buddha was somehow responsible for every inconvenience that had occurred during the entire week, from the continuous rain, to the arguing among the group, right down to the bus breaking down and catching on fire. Of course, despite the fact that it was Spring time, when it tends to rain a lot, and the fact that the broken bus was from the 60’s, and our group was full of white middle class kids who complained about anything and everything, these didn’t seem to be logical explanations. At any rate, once the accusation was made against the Buddha statue, it spread like wild fire around the group. In the end, the youth minister made the kid who had bought the thing dig it out of his luggage from atop the bus, take it out on the road, and smash it to pieces.

There were some additional repercussions to this event which unfolded a week after we had arrived home from Mexico. During the Sunday night gathering, the kid who had the Buddha, along with his few friends who listened to non-Christian bands and wore different kinds of clothes were put on trial before the entire youth group assembly, including the dozen or so adults who were sponsors, with the youth minister presiding. Jesus was conspicuously absent during the proceedings. At any rate, the guys were informed by the adults that their attire and choice of music was utterly unacceptable, and that they had a choice to either, dress differently and listen to Christian music, or to never come back to the youth group or the church. All of them decided to leave, and they never came back again.

When these three guys were thrown out of the youth group for not measuring up, dressing differently, and listening to the music they liked, it made a very large impact on my understanding of what church was. I realized that if I hadn’t learned to hide these things about myself so well, I might have been kicked out also. The truth was, I wanted a Nirvana shirt too, but they just didn’t make them in double XL sizes.

So I had seen Christianity in two different lights during that trip. On the one hand, the Mexicans had shown me how much it could transform people’s lives, and cause them to shower others in the love and joy they were getting from God. On the other, I saw from the leaders in my own church how people could use their religious affiliation as a means to demean, dismiss, and control others. I suppose it was this experience more than anything else that began to generate questions inside my mind; and more still, a desire to find answers to those questions. Deep down I was searching to find out who God really was, and whether or not I believed in him as I had been raised to believe in him. In short, I wanted to know which God was the real God… was he the God I had seen people worshipping in Mexico, or was he the God that some of the people in my church used to accuse and judge others? I had to find out.
_______

Kentucky Christian University seemed like a place that might have had the answers I was seeking. However, the questions I had about church that had been brewing in my mind before I went, eventually gave way to complete disillusionment by the time I ended my first semester there. The campus was more like a prison than a college. It was full of Christians who strutted around like little dictators telling me what to do and what not to do. There were so many ridiculous rules that it didn’t take long for me to get annoyed at the place. What bothered me more than the rules was the way people would never talk to you if they had a problem, but would just turn you in to the authorities or talk smack about you behind your back. I translated all this division and legalism into a desire to pull completely away from the church and all of its related activities, which I came close to doing, but for some reason, I was never fully able to accomplish. I think my parents had a lot to do with that. My parents, along with a few of my other family members, were the only ones to ever show me the real love of Christ. Whenever I experienced or witnessed horrible things happening in the church or at K.C.U., my parents were able to offset these things with simple, unconditional love.

What I did do was become more and more rebellious and disrespectful toward just about anyone in a position of authority. I was tired of pretending to be the “good Christian boy.” That’s what anyone looking into my life from the outside would have easily noticed at the time. What most people did not see was the inner reactions going on in my life; the things I could easily hide from people. Mainly, I was moving into a state of deep depression. This was so deep-seeded and dark that it would eventually move me into a near suicidal state of mind. Much of this had to do with my obsession for Lana, as I talked about earlier, but there were other factors as well.

This was the time when I was really introduced to recreational drug use. I had smoked weed only a couple of times before, during the previous summer after I graduated from high school. At K.C.U., however, it was all over the place. So there I was, away from home for the first time, in a state of depression, confusion, and hopelessness, without any real spiritual guidance at all, and no one that seemed to really care. Aside from that, I also had a few close friends who were also going through a lot of the same things as I was. We were all struggling, but none of us new how to really help each other. Drugs became a fun, but temporary way for us to escape from reality.

As that school year wore on toward its closing I was starting to find myself in an increasingly degenerative mental state. Instead of dealing with reality, I just kept pushing it away until it began to overwhelm me from the inside out. Whatever I was doing at that time, one thing I remained consistent with was pushing God out of my life. Somewhere deep down, I knew he was the answer to all the questions I was asking, and the way to find true freedom from my confusion and depression, but something was still keeping me from fully acknowledging this truth.

Then one night, in the last month of the spring semester, something happened to me that I will never be able to forget. The few weeks leading up to this night had been very odd. Someone had been breaking into my dorm room and stealing or breaking things. It had happened nearly a dozen times, always when my roommate and I were gone. Nothing really expensive was ever taken, only things like the remote controls to the TV and stereo system, batteries to the cordless phone, and video tapes. We never found out who it was, but they were somehow able to know when both of us were away from the room, and able to enter despite the door being locked. One night they even left us a note telling us we were going to Hell because we had posters of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Nirvana hanging on our walls. So finally, one night my friend Brian and I decided to go to bed with the door wide open and the hallway light on. We knew everyone who lived around us, so we were basically just waiting to see if anyone walked past the door who was unfamiliar or didn’t live in that section of our floor.

Now, before I go into what happened that night, I think I should note that I wasn’t on any drugs, and was perfectly in my right mind at the time. I say this because what happened to me that night has no rational explanation, and can only be considered a completely supernatural, spiritual experience. I don’t care if people think I’m crazy, this is exactly what happened to me, and it was not a dream.

As I began drifting off to sleep sometime after midnight, I was lying on my back with my head propped up and facing the door so I could see anyone walking by in front of the room. Then at some point I fell completely asleep, and the next thing that happened is still the most terrifying experience of my life. I was jarred horribly awake by the feeling of two great hands grasping me like a concrete vice crushing my shoulders and arms. They felt so huge that my mind was completely unable to register who had a hold on me. Then, with one great heave, I was lifted up into the air above my bed. At that moment a wave of paralyzing fear shot through my entire body as my mind struggled to make sense of what was happening. I thought at first that I was having a horrible and very realistic dream, but it didn’t feel like a dream should feel; and besides that, I could see Brian lying there in the other bed asleep, and the clock on the bolster, and nothing in the room out of place. Moreover, I was completely conscious of everything happening to me. Something very large and invisible had grabbed me and pulled me up out of my bed, and yet there was my body still lying below me, fast asleep. As I was still processing all this, I noticed I was being dragged towards the door. As I looked outside our room, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Where the hallway, and the neighbor’s door on the other side should have been, was complete blackness, lit only by a small campfire set in the middle of the woods somewhere.

Around the campfire were several figures all wearing hoods and chanting together in what sounded like some other language. It was as if I was somehow looking out a window that showed me something happening far away. As the fear raced over me like a tidal wave of freezing cold water, I abandoned reason completely and ceased to try and understand what was happening to me. I knew what was happening. Some evil, demonic force had come into the room and was trying to kill me. As soon as that thought entered into my mind, then from something like instinctual desperation more than logical thought, I screamed as loud as I could for Jesus to help me. In the instant Jesus’ name left my lips, the two hands pulling me towards the door abruptly released me, and I went flying back into my body in the bed. I slammed back into myself so hard that it flipped me over onto my stomach and I started shaking uncontrollably from how cold I was. All I could do was climb underneath my blankets, pull the covers up over my face, and cry until I was able to fall back asleep. The whole time, Brian never even woke up. It was like nothing had happened. But something did happen.

Since then, I’ve only spoken of that night to a few close friends, but I can definitely point to that experience as a fork in the road of my life. Without really understanding the whole thing, I knew that God was trying to get my attention, and that he had allowed this to happen so I would wake up and start listening to him. He didn’t want me listening to all the crap Christianity that was being sold at K.C.U., or putting too much stock into the poor leadership I had witnessed in youth group. It wasn’t about any of that junk. Christianity was about Jesus Christ, plain and simple. That’s who I needed to be listening to. From that point on I was different. I was still confused, depressed, and angry about my life, but I knew that God was there, that he was real, and that he was indeed Jesus Christ. All I had to do was call out for him, and when I did, he had saved me from what I knew to be certain death. With just his name alone he had saved me from the giant who was trying to smash me into the dust.

“As the Scripture says, ‘Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.’ For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’” –Romans 10:11,13