“I wrote for my high-school paper, and had some journalism in college, yes, sir,” I answered
hopefully. “I think I can put a few sentences together.”
After another pause, Jay said, “All right, you can start tomorrow. I’m going to put you in the
newsroom. You’re going to be writing obituaries and church news and club notices—nothing
you can screw up too badly. I’ll be reading your stuff. We’ll see how you work out for a couple
of weeks. If it doesn’t pan out, there’ll be no harm done, and you’ll have made yourself a few
dollars. If you show me something, we’ll have ourselves another staff writer. As it happens,
we’re one man short right now.
(Surprise, surprise.)
Now nothing can give you a liberal education faster than being a newspaper reporter,
especially at the paper-of-record in a small town, because you cover everything. Everything.
One day you’re interviewing the governor, the next, you’re doing a feature on the new Little
League coach. Now catch the tie-in here. See the beauty of the design.
I’ve always wanted to be a communicator of God’s love. At first I was confused, and later I
became disaffected, by all the teachings about a God of fear. I knew that this couldn’t be the
real God, and my heart ached to bring people to an awareness of what
I felt in my heart.
At some level I must have known that I was destined to do that, and also known exactly what
it would take to do it. A part
of me (my soul?) must have known that I would be dealing with people from all backgrounds
and experiences, and interacting
with them in deeply personal ways. To do this requires highly developed communication
skills, and rich exposure to people from varied cultures and walks of life.
I’m not surprised—now—that I spent my early work-life honing exactly those skills—first in
broadcasting, moving south where I exposed myself to racial attitudes foreign to me, then
going to work in an environment in which I could understand that prejudice from the inside
out, and finally creating a medical condition that allowed me to start a new career of delving
into everything from the grisly police blotter, to what makes the town’s new Presbyterian
pastor tick.
When I was living these moments, I called some of them good luck and some of them bad
luck. But now, from my present vantage point, I see that they were all part of the same
process—the process of life itself, and of me, becoming.
I have learned to judge not, and neither condemn, but to accept with equanimity the
experiences of my life, knowing that all things happen in their perfect way, at their perfect
time.
I don’t know when it was during my first month at the newspaper that I’d been officially
“hired.” I was too busy writing obituaries and church news and tidying up the press releases
that came in from the Boy Scout troops and the community theaters and the Kiwanis and
Lion’s clubs. But one morning I found a note on my desk, handwritten in bold, red felt-tip
strokes: Please accept a $50 weekly increment—Jay.