Crossing KCU

Within a few months after being expelled I had found myself working as a night janitor in a movie theater. It wasn’t a bad job, but I worked alone most of the time, and it gave me plenty of solitude to think about my situation as I cleaned up other people’s messes of spilled popcorn, soft drinks, and candy. As I mopped the large tile entry way each night, I would think about how God was constantly cleaning up my messes as well, and that most of the time this went completely unacknowledged by anyone, least of all me. More than that, I was cleaning up stupid messes; messes that people had made by accident while they were enjoying a movie, or had happened when someone decided to throw their drink on the floor instead of in the trash, never even considering the poor guy who was going to be cleaning it up that night. But that’s how it was with God too… he was always there, picking up after a crowd of people who were making messes because they were more concerned with enjoying themselves, than with thinking about the work he was doing for them.

That was a time of great reflection for me, and one of the best times I can remember quite honestly. I was working twelve hour shifts each night, and I would come home in the morning completely exhausted. That was the time that God really started breaking me apart on the inside. The job I had was teaching me the value in humility and hard work, things which I still struggle with. But God’s discipline in my life during that time was priceless, and even though it really sucked at the time, I look back on it now with gratitude.

In the meantime, I had been reading the Gospels again, and Christ’s words had reminded me that I had the same calling as every other Christian. Passages like the one at the end of Matthew made it so clear:

“Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” –Matthew 28:18-20.

I had heard these words several times growing up in church, and at K.C.U. they had been thrown around so often that they became words I heard without really thinking about what they actually meant. There is even a phrase used to give title to these words spoken by Christ just before his ascension into heaven: “The Great Commission.” In fact, the college I attended had prided itself by taking on the name, The Great Commission College (this was before it changed from being a college to a university during my time there).

At any rate, these words meant something different to me as I was reading them anew during this time of great change in my life. They were more than simple words in a book that was centuries old; they were the final words of the one who I had come to realize was my Lord and King. He had spoken these words to his first disciples, and now he was speaking them to me. And even though I still wasn’t completely sure of what these words meant, I knew for the first time that this was something that had to be acted upon. There were lives and souls at stake all over the world. I thought of how many people there must be in other countries who didn’t know who the real King, the real God was, and how much suffering they were enduring because of that. I thought of all the false gods people were enslaved to, and how there was probably no one to show them the freedom that Christ had ushered in through his death and resurrection. At a time in my life where I was broken, with nowhere else to go, and nothing left to do, I knew that I had to submit my life to God, and commit to obeying him, no matter what that meant, and no matter where it was going to take me.
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It was during that time that I found a new friend in Luke Erb. Most of the friends I had made in college had been lost when I was expelled. And I was at the age now where other friends were beginning to get married and settle down into family life, and that brought with it a natural separation. Everyone around me was realizing they needed to get responsible and have a steady job, get insurance, 401K, little league, home equity, good credit, satellite television, high speed internet, plasma screen, the newest cell phone, etc., etc.. I was realizing at the same time that my life didn’t consist of these things, that no amount of material accumulation, financial security, education, or progression in job status would ever bring me happiness or meaning in this world, and that those were in fact just illusions that God was teaching me to see through.

My friend Luke was learning these same things. I had first met Luke a couple of years earlier when he came to K.C.U., right about the time I was getting ready to drop out. He had been a really different person then, and in the time since he had dropped out of the college, he had undergone a pretty extensive spiritual transformation. Basically, Luke had left Christian college, and subsequently learned what it meant to be a real follower of Christ. Ironically enough, the catalyst that sparked our friendship was that Luke had been dating Lana for awhile, and when the relationship went sour, he sought me out for advice. We even ended up at a few of the same parties at the time, and we would immediately launch into some pretty deep conversations about God and spirituality… and women.

After I was kicked out of school Luke and I started hanging out on a regular basis, as he lived in Indiana as well. The entire basis for our friendship was our mutual interest and pursuit of God, and that was really the first time I made friends with someone for that reason alone. My friendship with Luke became the first time that I experienced what true discipleship really was as well. It wasn’t that I was learning things from Luke, or that he was learning from me, but we were both learning the same things from God, at the same time, and we were learning them together. He was passionate about mission work as well, and through our times in studying the Bible together, we both decided to leave behind our comfortable lives and move to Asia.

It may sound a little extreme, but this was the first time in our lives that we were learning to take Christ’s teachings and example seriously. So in our excitement and in complete innocence, we set about planning our trip during the next several months. All through the winter and spring we put things in order one by one, making contacts, flight arrangements, visas, and raising support for the journey. It was an exciting time for both of us, and the lessons I learned while I was doing this have remained with me ever since.

I hit a snag, however, when I asked the elders of my home church congregation if they would support me on this mission trip. They called me into a meeting a few weeks after my request, and then proceeded to tell me that they could not offer me support because I had been expelled from K.C.U., and that this left me unqualified for the mission field. It really upset me at the time because they were basically telling me I wasn’t good enough to be a missionary, and since I wasn’t a graduate of Christian college, I never would be. But there was nothing I could do about it, and arguing with them was pointless. Luke’s church had provided enough money for the both of us so this wasn’t a serious setback to our plans, just a disappointment to me personally.

Never-the-less, a week before we were scheduled to get on a plane, Luke came to me with a strong sense of conviction, and said that God didn’t want him to go on the trip. I was completely shocked by this and not really knowing how to respond, I just went home and poured myself out to God in prayer. I had labored for many months under the belief that I was doing what God wanted me to do, but it seemed that I was wrong somehow. I thought of going on alone to Uzbekistan, and then to China as our plan had been, but I realized during the next few days that I couldn’t do this. It was extremely unwise, and if Luke felt so strongly about not going, I couldn’t just ignore that because everything we had done, all the preparation, all the time spent in prayer, had been done together. If Luke wasn’t going, neither was I.

So there I was again, back at square one. I had quit my job as a janitor so I could spend those couple of weeks before we left in preparation for the trip. I had sold my car back to the dealership as well, so I was now without a vehicle. Looking back on it now, this was one of the most depressing times for me—even worse than actually being kicked out of school. Everything was gone, I had nothing, and if my reputation hadn’t already been shot by the expulsion, it was now completely destroyed by the fact that I had spent several months planning for a trip that was never going to happen. It would take a long time for me to get over the idea that I had somehow let God down by not going, that I had failed him terribly and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t see at the time that God had used Luke to keep me from making a very big mistake and doing something I was completely unprepared to do. Later on I would realize this, but at the time I just felt like a total failure.
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A few weeks after the trip fell through, I was coming home from a friend’s house one night, driving the old family Astro mini-van, which was pushing 250,000 miles and very much on its last leg, when the brakes went out right before I had to make a 90 degree turn. I ended up in a deep drainage ditch instead, with the back end of the van sticking up in the air. To make matters worse, I was out on a deserted country road in the middle of the night. I wasn’t hurt, and I was only about three miles from home, so I figured I would just walk there. But the particular road I was on added some anxiety to my journey.

Try and picture in your mind the scariest, darkest, old country road you can imagine. Then imagine you have to walk down this road, at the end of which is an extremely old, decrepit, single room church building from the 1800s, complete with a graveyard. There are no lights, no houses, and only sparse rows of old trees lining the road which in the nighttime look like giant, bent, evil looking old men that are leaning over the road like trolls ready to eat any unwary traveler who happens by. This is the road I was walking down.

About halfway down the road, with the old church looming closer, I put my head down and began praying. The wind was howling that night, and as it came through the trees and brush at the side of the road, it made all kinds of noises. When I started praying, I began hearing voices in the wind, laughter, accusations, whispers that had no real substance and only served to drive fear into my heart. So instead of praying silently in my mind, I started praying out loud to drive the voices away. Demons never miss an opportunity to drive fear into the heart of a Christian.

I had a good talk with God during that walk. I remember thinking through my situation, pouring out my thoughts to the Lord, asking for direction and guidance, and pleading with him to give me something, anything to do. It was coming up on my one year anniversary of getting expelled, and my life was in complete shambles. I felt completely lost, like God had abandoned me. All I could do was continue asking for God’s help in my life, and this was what most of my prayers consisted of during this time of despair.

The most frustrating thing of all, in spite of all this, was that I had been having a recurring dream throughout that year, almost from the day I was kicked out of school. The dreams were always about the same thing—in all of them I was moving back to Grayson, Kentucky and continuing my education at K.C.U. These dreams tormented me. All I wanted to do was forget about that place. I hated it. I hated everything it stood for, and I would never go back there in a thousand years, even if they were willing to let me back in, which was extremely unlikely.

As I reached the old church, my thoughts were filled with despair and doubt. Obviously I had done something wrong. I just didn’t know what it was. God was still there, I knew that. I just didn’t know what he wanted from me. Wrecking the van was just the latest experience in a string of failures that led all the way back to my expulsion.

I prayed for God to speak to me, to show me some evidence that he was listening. And as I stopped in the road across from the graveyard, and I stared at the tombstones, still a couple of miles from home, a truck came around the corner and pulled up next to me. There were three guys sitting in the cab, they all looked about my age, and they were passing a whiskey flask back and forth. They asked me what I was doing out there, so I told them. They pointed to the bed of the pickup and told me to get in. A few minutes later I was home, waving goodbye to this odd trio of angels that God had sent my way.

So God was listening, I got the picture. Life in general really sucked, but there was obviously a point to everything that was happening. As I went to bed that night I had the thought that maybe God had been speaking to me all along. Maybe all these difficult experiences were his way of guiding me towards something specific. I was definitely being stretched and disciplined in ways that I had never known. In the midst of everything that had happened, the expulsion, the alienation from many of the leaders in my home church, the tedious routine exhaustion of cleaning up the movie theater for several months, then the time spent in preparation for a mission trip that never happened, and finally the effects of losing my car, my job, and my sense of purpose—through all of that, I was learning more and more how important it was to stay close to God, no matter what was going on in my life.

Don’t get me wrong, there were times when I was really mad at God. But in my confusion, depression, despair, and in my search for God’s will, I learned that communicating to him in an honest way, no matter what I was feeling, whether it was anger or sadness or whatever—the important thing was that I kept communicating to him, being honest with him, and seeking his will.

Something else that became vitally important to me during this time was reading the scriptures on a continual, daily basis. I found that reading the Bible gave me strength when I needed it the most. As my own relationship with the Lord deepened, I began seeing something about scripture that I hadn’t really noticed before. Scripture began making more sense, because I started seeing how the whole Bible did not only tell us who God is, but it was also a chronology that revealed God’s communication with people throughout the history of the world. The stories, poems, prophecies, histories, and letters of scripture were a record of God’s relationship with people, how he had spoken to them, and how they had responded. This gave me encouragement during this time of trial because I was able to read the stories of other people, people living thousands of years ago, and in those stories and records I could see them interacting with the same Lord that I knew.

I still didn’t know what I was supposed to do exactly, but I did know that God would show me somehow. Nothing made much sense in my life, so I just kept going to God in prayer, and I kept listening to his words in scripture, and I trusted that he would work things out when it was time. It wasn’t easy, but there was no other way.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” –Proverbs 3:5-6