“Well, it’s a loan, of course. There’s a commitment to come back here and serve for a few
years as an associate to the pastor. You could work with a youth ministry, or a street ministry,
or whatever your personal interest is, in addition tqoffering spiritual counseling, providing
leadership in the Sunday School programs, and, of course, spelling the pastor in the pulpit
now and then. I think that’s something you could handle.”
It was my turn to be silent. My mind was spinning.
“How does that sound to you?”
“It sounds fantastic. Are you offering it to me?”
“I think the Presbytery seems ready to do that, yes. They’re certainly ready to explore it.
They’d want to talk with you personally, of course.”
“Of course.
“Why don’t you go home and think about it? Talk to your wife about it. And pray on it.
I did just that.
My wife was totally supportive. “I think it would be wonderful,” she said, beaming. Our second
child had been born twenty-one months after the first. The two girls were barely toddlers.
“What would we live on?” I asked. “I mean, this is just tuition they’re talking about.”
“I could get back into physical therapy,” my wife offered. “I’m sure I’d find something.
Everything would work out.”
“You mean you’d support us while I went back to school?”
She touched my arm. “I know this is something you’ve always wanted,” she said softly.
I don’t deserve the people who have come into my life. I certainly didn’t deserve my first wife,
one of the kindest human beings I have ever met.
But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. Everything was in place, everything was perfect—except the
theology. In the end, it was the theology that stopped me.
I’d done as Rev. Shaw suggested. I’d prayed about it. And the more I prayed, the more I
realized that I could not preach—no matter how quietly—a sermon about natural-born sinners
and the need for salvation.
From the earliest days of my youth I’d had trouble seeing people as “bad.” Oh, I knew that
people did bad things. I could see it all around me as I grew up. But even as a teenager, and
then a young man, I held to a stubbornly positive understanding of human nature at its basis.
It seemed to me that all people were good, and that some of them did bad things for reasons
having to do with their upbringing, their lack of understanding or opportunities, their
desperation and their anger, or, in some cases, just plain laziness... but not because of any
inherent evilness.
The story of Adam and Eve made no sense to me, not even as an allegory, and I knew that I
couldn’t teach it. Nor could I ever teach a theology of exclusion, no matter how benign,
because something deep inside my soul caused me to know, from the time I was small, that
all people were my brother and sisters, and that no one and no thing was ugly or