Recipes for Living Jeff Brown

My story will take awhile because it will include my going from a philosophy about God to a relationship with God...from being a small, white, middle class kid growing up in Osceola, Iowa, to scavenging for food with my homeless companions on the streets of Washington, D.C. . . from being brought up in a Methodist Sunday School and Youth Fellowship to becoming a missionary in the Southern Baptist tradition serving in Venezuela...from being single to becoming a husband and father. There have been other metamorphoses that have shaped me into who I am and continue to become. It is a long story because every part contributes to the whole, so I sit down to tell it to one of our family's prayer supporters, exactly twice my age (44/88).

My intent with this story is to use the events as a skeleton or framework to carry a series of reflections. The point is not the framework or chronological sequence of events, the point is what I have learned and my reflections on the meaning of those events. So if I have left out big chunks of my childhood, my growing up, it is because what I am trying to do is pick those things that run like a thread throughout the experiences, tying them together. I could go on and on about how blessed I am by having the parents that I do, all they have done for me, how supportive they have been, and what they have meant to me. Instead I have isolated out a few dynamics of that relationship that seem to me to take the story on to wherever it will go.

My parents, Jim and Beth Brown, lived in Des Moines when I was born, and we continued to live there until I was half-way through second grade. At that time, Dad had an opportunity to become associated with Reynoldson Law Firm in Osceola and we moved over the New Years holiday to the brick house at 229 West Cass Street. Three days later my sister Julie, who was entering kindergarten, and I started to school. We crossed the street to John Steams' yard to the bus stop. There were a handful of kids - Reynolds, Stearns, and Kentners. That day I met Bruce Kentner, who was a year ahead of me in school, but we hit it off that first morning at the bus stop, and have been close friends every since.

I loved Osceola and am so glad we didn't continue in Des Moines because there are a lot more opportunities in a small school. In the city you have to compete for opportunities but in a small town you are welcome. A city may offer more options, but you are lucky if you can participate in sports or games or music. The other awesome benefit was that I could get on my little bicycle and ride all over town or even out of town until the 6:00 whistle blew. There was no crime or anything of that nature that kids and parents needed to worry about.

In third grade at East Elementary, my teacher, Mrs. Hunt, gave me what I considered a loathsome assignment. I was to be in charge of a project with one or two other kids. I learned at that early age that I was not a natural manager. I failed the assignment because I refused to complete it. Years later, in college, I would dislike only one required clas -Management 101, and it all started with that class. It is ironic that later in life I often found myself in management.

In junior high and high school, I loved being in the band, jazz band, chorus, all state chorus, basketball, cross county, and on the tennis team. I wasn’t involved in student government or those kinds of activities. I was painfully shy. Every year I was the smallest kid in my class and that continued at least through tenth grade. In early years, that is an advantage. When Rick Baughman and I were the two smallest kids, we always won the kind of playground games where you have to get from one side to the other and not get touched. That changed in junior high and high school, where I was picked on mercilessly by both boys and girls who were older and larger. Anybody who was a bully or had any bully instinct in them at all exercised that aspect of their personality by picking on me. So I tried to avoid them in the hallways but I don't think it scarred me for life. I had my circle of friends - the academic kids, music kids, and some of the kids who were in my sports. And I was "in" with the kids who liked to go to the pool hall and play pool and go to rock concerts.

I remember feeling different as a kid, not realizing at the time that it was going to lead to my becoming a missionary. I always had this global perspective. I remember discussing, for example, the Palestinian issue, although I couldn't find very many kids who were interested in talking about those things. I loved it when I could. I wanted to talk existential philosophy and this was before I really knew God, so it was before I was informed by God's perspective. I loved to consider the universe - what's outside our universe...is our universe just a speck in some larger universe...can there be a divine being outside of time? Ed Wallace and I used to talk about those things but he was about the only one.

There were really two things from all this that are relevant to the rest of my life. One is my progression toward God. I may have been about junior high age when, even though I was going to a church that didn't believe that way, I thought that God was made in man's image. Man needed a god so he created one in his own image. In other words, God was limited by the limits of our brains. God was only as grand we can think. But then, still in junior and senior high years, I started believing that no, God created man in His image and Jesus was just a good guy, as opposed to being the Savior of the world, let alone my personal Savior. Later, in high school years, I started toying with the idea that Jesus really was who he said he was, but however far that line of thinking went, it certainly didn't go so far as there being anything I needed to do about it. This led me to the David Wilkerson rally, which I will tell about later. This is one of two aspects of thinking where I differed from my peers.

The other one, that was not so existential, was this global perspective while living in provincial Osceola, Iowa. As far as I knew, there were no other vegetarians in 1973, in the town that was the home of Jimmy Dean Sausage. That year, at the age of 15, I first heard about this life-style called vegetarianism, which held for me two immediate appeals. If it really was, as it was touted to be, more or less healthy, there was a good chance that it would be good for me. The other thing was that eating animals that were fed grains was approximately seven times less efficient to get protein needs met than eating the grains themselves in the right combination. And since so much of the world didn't have enough to eat, particularly protein, I thought this was a way I could do my part against global hunger. So here I am, 15 years old in a small town in hog country, considering becoming a vegetarian. My parents weren't espousing this. My mom said I would be dead in three years, but both my parents now have largely a vegetarian diet.

I graduated from high school in 1976. I didn't want to graduate because I loved high school, especially jazz band with Mr. Nugent. In fact, one of my motivations for getting up in the morning was band practice. Also, I was in a rock band - not a very good one, but we didn't know that - called Black Diamond. We played for dances for school, clubs, and organizations in and around Clarke County. Graduating and going to college would probably spell the end of that. I didn't know what I wanted to be. I knew that I loved math, so I went to Mr. Riley, my math teacher, probably in my senior year. I told him that I wanted to do something with math, but I didn't want to teach it. He told me I could be an actuary. I hadn't a clue what that was, but he told me it had a lot to do with math, so I enrolled at Drake in actuarial science.

I went there and moved into the dorms. I loved living in the dorms. The college experience was so great that I soon forgot how great high school was. I had thought that high school graduation was the end of the fun part of life, and college proved me wrong. I enjoyed the classes. I loved the academic challenge of the actuarial course. Forty students had started that major as freshmen and nine of us made it through to graduation. The others spun off to easier majors or left. I made a few friends, but Kevin Dorland was the only one I knew there, and he wasn't in the dorms. I was still painfully shy, so I would come home on weekends, and sometimes even mid-week. That meant that I didn't build great relationships on campus, because weekends are when you do that. That had its good side because, if I had stayed on weekends, I may never have attended the David Wilkerson rally where the good news of Jesus finally got through to me.

I had grown up in the Methodist Church, was taught in Sunday school and was active in the youth group. This was true, also, of Diane, whom you will meet later. But neither of us, through all that church time, understood why Jesus came. We may have had opportunities to, but for one reason or another, neither of us really did. Then a guy moved to Osceola - I don't recall his name and I have only a vague notion that he lived west of town in 1976, '77, or '78, and was connected to the high school. He took over leadership of the youth group from Shirley Woods during my first year at Drake. In the summer of 1977, I tagged along when he took the group to Des Moines to a David Wilkerson rally. He wanted us to get into a fresh context, outside our environment, so that somehow we would "get it." At that time David was known for his popular book, The Cross and the Switchblade. I was sitting at the rally, and I don't remember any particulars of what David Wilkerson said, but I do remember that I heard and understood for the first time why Jesus came, why he had to come, and what it would mean for me to do something about that or ignore it. At the end he asked people who wanted to have a personal relationship with Jesus, to come forward. It was the first time the message ever got through to my young, philosophical brain.

That was the first major turning point in my life. The second was during my sophomore year. About halfway through the year, I had moved to a different dorm. I went to a dance one night and I was sitting in a chair, actually writing letters to people who weren't there. I was more comfortable than I was interacting with people in the same room. But I met someone who would prove to be a lifelong friend, Linda Dowden, who was social. She introduced me to her circle of friends and through my friendship with her, God did something to my personality. I metamorphosed from a shy person, not to an outgoing person but to a middle-of-the road person as it pertains to meeting new people, making friends, and interacting with strangers. So then I stopped going back to Osceola and began developing a social life in college and making friends that would outlive college to the point that, when I graduated, I remember thinking of that graduation day as one of the two worst days of my life - surpassing the day I graduated from high school thinking again that the enjoyable part of life was ending. I didn't have an appetite for further education as you'd think I would, because I'd loved academia, but that wasn't even on the radar screen.

Late in my junior year of college, I got the wild idea that I would drive up to Alaska after school was out that May. I told my friend Linda about that and she mentioned it to a friend of hers named Sandy. Sandy showed up at my dorm room one day and asked if she could ride along. So we drove up in my hand-me-down station wagon.

It took seven days, most of it on gravel, rarely seeing anybody, especially through the Yukon, which is spectacular. There are lakes - huge, gorgeous lakes. If they were in the United States they would be inundated with tourists and campers, but up there they are a dime a dozen and nobody pays any attention to them. They are just stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, next to 20,000 snow covered peaks. We looked around in ghost towns; stopped in little roadside cafes, and always made sure we had enough gas to get to the next little dot of civilization. That was my first real exposure to Native Americans. Life is pretty slow up there, which is appealing. Matter of fact, one time I heard a radio play by play broadcast of a local golf tournament. That is how hard up they were for entertainment.

Sandy and I made it to Alaska and parted company. She went to work at some lodge up by Mt. McKinley and I started looking for a job in Anchorage. Sandy stayed in Alaska and didn’t come back to school. I don't really know why I came back. It just seemed like the thing to do. I drove back by myself, a 10-day drive, and 16 hours of driving a day from Fairbanks to Texas.
I went back to Drake for my senior year, continued in actuarial science, and graduated in four years. This whole business of not going on to further education, while at the same time enjoying everything about the academic experience, continues to be a thread that runs through my life. I loved high school, but didn't want more; I loved college, but didn't want to go further. When we signed up to be missionaries, we were required to take 20 seminary hours. I was disappointed and not looking forward, but once into it, loved it and wished I could take the entire three years of the seminary program. When we were in Venezuela, looking forward to our time in the States, Diane wanted to take the other year of seminary and I didn't want to. At this time we are contemplating our second term, and the last thing God had to get me to surrender to, as he was moving us from the Venezuela experience to more of a frontier missionary ministry, was the idea of having to study another language.

My gradual approach to God (existentialism) must simply have been God preparing me for missionary life even before I believed in a God that could prepare people. After I became a committed follower of Jesus, I didn't really give being a missionary much thought, and when I did, I was a bit afraid of going down that path. The reason was a question: since I had always wanted to live somewhere unusual, could I trust that any call I had to be a missionary was God's voice and not my wanting to live in some strange place and cloaking that desire in religious garb? As a direct result of my childhood global perspective, against all provincial, rural American odds, I wasn't going to consider seriously being a missionary unless God wrote it in the sky. That was because, once I became a sincere disciple, I wanted my choices to be his directive and not my own. Eventually, God did write it in the sky.

To summarize the three salient points of my childhood, or the three aspects of my childhood that contribute to who I am today: (1) my romanticized memory of my childhood in a small farm town, (2) my progression from an existential philosophy toward God, and (3) the inexplicable global perspective that I had even as a youngster. The two things that contributed to who I am from the college epoch would be becoming a follower of Jesus at the David Wilkerson rally after my freshman year and my second metamorphosis during my sophomore year from being very shy to being comfortable.

After college graduation, it wasn’t easy for me to find a job as an actuary because I was in the bottom third of my class of nine, and I hadn’t passed any of the 10 professional tests of the Society of Actuaries. I enjoyed college but I maybe did less studying than the rigorous course demanded. However, I did get a job with Mutual of Omaha and went to work in Omaha in a building that had more employees than Clarke County had people. I got an apartment in sort of a quasi-ghetto neighborhood within walking distance of my work, and I found that I felt drawn more in the direction of the lower number streets, toward the ghetto, than the higher numbers which led to the middle and upper class neighborhood. I'd never spent any time in poverty neighborhoods but I felt more of a kinship with the ghetto neighborhood than to the middle class to the west. There was more life, more vigor. They didn't have air conditioners so, when it was hot, they were outside, getting to know one another. They played, and that appealed to me.

And so I was an actuary in Omaha and got the name "Art." The way that came about was that we were in cubicles, much like the Dilbert cartoon comic strip, and working there was a lot like working in the Dilbert strip. This was a massive office. You could look over the cubicles and see a whole city block. I didn't know anybody in this department. One of the other nine from Drake, Dawn Leach, came to Mutual of Omaha, but worked across the street. In my department there was this very gregarious actuary, which is an oxymoron, Kevin Breyer, and we struck up an acquaintance. On one of my first days I did this quirky thing that I thought would be humorous. I needed to talk to Alice, whose cubicle was behind mine. At the moment, she was at a cubicle in front of me, talking with someone, but close enough to her phone to hear it ring. I telephoned her and she walked right past me, with my phone to my ear, to get to her phone to talk to me. I thought that was humorous. Little did I know that the guy who used to be in my cubical had a penchant for doing this very thing, not as a practical joke, but because he thought it was sophisticated and business-like. But Kevin knew, and Kevin saw what I did, so he came over, got a piece of paper and put it over my name in the slot for my name-holder. Then he started introducing me as Art. Even now there are people who think my name is Art.

There were projects for me through which I learned computers for the first time. I used a main-frame computer, learned some computer languages, and had some time off to take actuarial exams. I passed the first one on the fourth try, just after I graduated from college. That boded poorly for my actuarial career. These exams are offered twice a year all over the world, and people usually just take one at a time, because they are so hard. I passed the third and fourth ones in consecutive attempts. That did bode well for my actuarial career, which as it turned out, lasted a total was 20 months.

There were three things that put my career to an early rest. One was my realization that, because I liked math and hated management, my boss's job was not attractive to me, nor was my boss's boss's job nor his boss's boss's job. I didn't like it as a third grader, I didn't like it in 101, and I didn’t like the specter of being an actuarial manager. So there was no future, looking at it from a career track perspective. I did love the mathematical part, but even as an entry level actuary, it wasn't nearly as mathematical as college had been.

A second factor was an epiphany when I was living in this apartment. I had the smallest black and white TV I could buy sitting on a trunk, a beanbag chair, and a stereo. That was my living room. I later got a couch that the Presbyterian Church was disposing of. I was watching TV, probably eating peanut butter on toast, and drinking chocolate milk. I was watching a Sally Struthers famine-in-Africa documentary with appeals for money. Then came the commercials. One was for a restaurant, and they panned across food after food after food, showing someone pouring on gravy or chocolate sauce. The contradiction was just too much for me and served as the catalyst for this epiphany. I put the Sally Struthers experience alongside what I was doing at Mutual of Omaha, and vaguely, not in any defined sense, I thought, "What am I doing with my life?"

The third of the three things came to a head when I finally got up the courage to ask one of my 6,000 co-workers, Jennifer Zaporowski, to lunch. We had lunch in the cafeteria, starting to get to know each other, and I said something about going to the Presbyterian church, and she said, "That is my church." She said something to me that found a place in my heart and in my brain, something that resonated. It was something I didn't want to hear. She said, "Oh, I didn't know you were a Christian." I didn't want my boss's boss's job, Sally Struthers caused me to ask what I was doing with my life, now Jennifer unknowingly pointed out that my life really wasn't counting for much except adding to the profits of an already wealthy corporation.

I went to one of the fellow actuaries in my department, Dick Leach, who was a Christian, and said, "Dick, I've got to get out. I'm not doing anything here." He protested that I could stay, and my life could matter to the people around me. I replied, "I want to make a difference, and I'm not, and you're not, either, and I'm gettin' out." I think if I hadn’t taken that step, probably I would never have married Diane, and I would probably never have become a missionary, so thank you Sally and Jennifer.

What do I do now? I turned in my two-week notice. When I went to work there I had long hair. I had this big, long pony tail, but I took out the rubber band when I went to work, because they didn't approve of pony tails. They couldn't force me to cut my hair, but during this two-week notice period, I went to Chariton and had them cut off 14 inches. I showed up for work again and people who wouldn't even look at me, let alone speak to me, before the haircut, were saying hello to me in elevators, etc., probably not even knowing it was the same person. This was my first experience with discrimination based on appearances. Again, probably a little preparation activity going on there in God’s agenda.

I left Mutual of Omaha, bought a Volkswagen Beetle, got a hold of Linda from college, and we took off across the country. She was headed to join the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Portland, and I had absolutely no destination in mind. Being an actuary is a well-paying job. I had never learned to spend money. I had wanted a bowling ball and a tennis racket, and it hadn't occurred to me that I could just go buy them, so I had thousands of dollars saved even after I bought the Volkswagen. That was what I lived on as I tried to figure. out what I would do next with my life.

I ended up in Prescott, Arizona in the home of my mom's best friend, Judy Overholtzer, and her kids. I did a lot of hiking, had a lot of time to think, and came across a small book Invest Yourself; that had thousands of full time volunteer opportunities in North America. I read through that, noting ones that seemed of interest. One that seemed both interesting and way too scary was the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNY) in Washington, D.C. So, predictably, that is where I ended up.

The fact that I ended up in the scariest place was not predictable at the time. It was my first experience hearing the voice of God giving me directions through fear. As I look back, there is a pattern in my life. Whenever the only reason for not choosing to do something is because I am afraid to do it that is what I choose. If there are other reasons, such as it would be good for somebody that is different. But if I can identify in my heart that the only reason for not agreeing to do something is because of fear, I recognize the pattern in my life that this is God's voice telling me to do it and that it will turn out great, and it always has.

Originally as I read through Invest Yourself and was struck by the intensity of CCNY, my thought was to "get my feet wet" with some other less intense experience like working for "ACORN" or an underground newspaper or something like that. But then God showed me that it was just fear, nothing else, stopping me, so I called CCNY and told them I'd be there.

I pointed the Volkswagen toward Washington, D. C. That was in 1982. I gave my life to God in 1977, but as I mentioned, I was just sort of floating around as this "born again person," but not really pursuing life as a disciple, a follower of Jesus. I wasn't prepared to go to Washington, D.C. God knew that, I didn't. Enroute to D.C., I stopped in Omaha to stay a week or two with the mother of my girlfriend, Alison, who was also a member of the Presbyterian Church I had gone to in Omaha. Little did I know that I would be there for almost a year. That was my preparation time for D.C.

One day in Omaha I went to a movie with Mary, an ex-girlfriend from the same Presbyterian Church. Mary's current boy-friend was abusive, but I didn't know that. He was also violent and had a record of arrests in other states, so when I dropped her off after the movie and we were talking, he came to the door and she wouldn't let him in. I didn't know why, so I told her, "See what he wants," which was a mistake. When she unlocked the door, he blasted through it. She went reeling across the room, and just as I turned toward him from seeing her hit the opposite wall, my lights went out. She later told me that he continued to beat me in the head with his fists until she got on the back of the couch and kicked him off me. That made him mad at her and he broke her foot. I must have gained partial consciousness because I did run, but into the bedroom. He told me to get out or he would kill me. It was an easy choice. I drove myself to the nearest hospital, which, it turned out, had the best plastic surgeon in the region. Alison worked at another nearby hospital, and I worked across the street from another, but I drove to the St. Joseph Hospital to which I had no ties.

I was near death. My jaw was broken in four places. Each piece held several teeth and was sort of floating in this sack of skin that used to be my jaw. The left side of my skull was crushed in and my left eye hemorrhaged. I was on life support for three days in intensive care, and then had reconstructive and oral plastic surgery "to put Humpty Dumpty together again." I still have wires in the left side of my skull, and I can't sleep on my right side, but other than that, I have very few lasting effects.

After I got out of the hospital, my jaw was wired shut for a couple of months. I had four months of convalescence with follow up exams and all of that. I mention that incident because it had two very positive long-term consequences, and one short-term negative consequence. During the four months of convalescence, I really wasn’t myself. The trauma affected me emotionally much more than I recognized, and I felt like I was someone else walking around in my body. I remember being reclusive and surly and totally lacking in motivation. This damaged my relationship with Alison, so I moved in with Kevin from Mutual of Omaha.

That is where the short term negative consequence was redeemed by God into the long term positive ones. Todd Wetherilt, Kevin's roommate, led a Bible study. I was there, of course, and couldn't believe my eyes. Here were all these guys, just sitting around, and I could see that they were dead serious about having God's word penetrate and affect every area of their lives. I had never seen anything like it. I thought, these are the people for me. It turns out that they were all from a large Southern Baptist Church called West Side Community Church in Omaha. Without the involvement in West Side Church, that the Bible study led me into, I don’t believe I would have been spiritually prepared for Washington, D.C. So getting beat up was really the precursor to becoming a fully devoted follower of Jesus.

The other positive consequence from that assault was that, while it wasn’t the first time I had almost died (I came close when Bruce and I were climbing around Mt. McKinley in Alaska), it was the first time that I had come close to death at the hands of another person. But it wasn't going to be the last, and so in another way this was preparation for my work in D.C. I can't say that I didn't have any fear on the streets of Washington, but being beaten almost to death in Omaha gave me the perspective of what can happen. You can either seriously injure me, which I'd already been through, or you can kill me, in which case I'll be with Jesus. So that kind of takes the edge off fear.

I got intimately connected with a singles group at West Side Church. When I took off for D.C. in the summer of 1983, 10 months after the assault, they sent me off and supported me. They stayed connected with me and prayed for me a lot while I was in D.C. But their biggest gift by far was giving me a living example of what it means to live a life fully devoted to Jesus.

I lived in D.C. twice. The first time was from the summer of 1983 to the summer of 1985. Those two· years I was working with CCNV. When I showed up at the row-house where most of the members lived, I had two impressions. One could be called either busy anarchy or anarchical busyness. The other was that they only sort of knew that I was coming to join them, and it didn’t seem to bother them at all.

For the first six months I worked out of the row-house. I was on a crew that drove out each day about 4:00 a.m. to food distribution warehouses that serve as supermarkets, to scavenge food that they threw into dumpsters. As long as we did not interfere with their operations, we had their permission to do this, which we needed even to get into their compounds. There were a number of times when I was in one of their dumpsters at the loading docks throwing food out to a partner, while a warehouse worker was throwing food into the dumpster. As long as we didn't interfere with that, we could take about anything we wanted.

One time I was in a dumpster throwing grapefruit to my partner while a warehouse worker was throwing grapefruit in. The only thing wrong with the grapefruit was that some were a bit flat on one side. The warehouse knew that when customers came into the grocery store they would bypass grapefruit that had a flat side in favor of perfectly round fruit, even though they would taste the same and had the same nutrients. It is just the way our culture is. So we got them. If there was a 50-pound bag of potatoes and the worker could see there was even one partly rotten potato, they threw out the whole 50-pound bag. There was no mechanism in place to sort potatoes at the grocery store level and throw away the rotten ones. It had to be done at the
warehouse level where the thinking was that one rotten potato ruins the whole bag.

We also had routes to meat markets and farmers' markets. Being a number nerd, I couldn't help counting and approximating how much food we were taking in this way. On a typical week we would bring about 12 tons of food into the row-house. I was also assigned to "clean" food, which meant to sort through the 12 tons of food and throw away the part that even we couldn't use. We were left with approximately nine tons of food each week. We used the food at a soup kitchen that we ran at the day shelter, and at a free food store that we operated out of a ghetto church. Sometimes I was assigned to the free food store.

Direct service to the homeless was one of CCNY’s emphases. The other was raising awareness of homeless issues. A lot of that was done through public demonstrations including civil disobedience. Another of the things I was involved in at the row-house was the planning of these public education demonstrations. CCNV was run by consensus rather than democratically, and we would discuss which direction we should take until we would arrive at some consensus. It was a good model, a counter-cultural model.

One of the things that I was struck by about the Community was its resilience. Most of the members were not Christians and were not constrained by the Holy Spirit within them, or the Word of God (the Bible), and a lot of times they didn't treat each other very well. But there was this amazing resilience. I remember getting into it with a guy whom I didn't think was treating the women very well. It got a little heated, and I came up to him sometime afterward to reconcile. To him it was no big deal. He gave me a big hug and I had no sense that our relationship was damaged in any way. So in many ways CCNV practiced what it preached more than any place I have ever been.

Resilience was just one of a number of God-lessons I learned at the hands of these people, most of whom did not believe in God. These were lessons for life, not just lessons for while I was there. Another lesson is that, by and large, at least among people of basic good will, everybody is doing the best they can with what they have to work with. There were cats in the row-house. Sometimes they would jump up on the dinner table, which upset some of the members. I remember others would say, "It’s a cat. That’s what cats do." In other words, the cat is doing the best it can. That is what it knows to do.

It is helpful to me to see people, in most cases, as doing the best they can. If a person does not have the Holy Spirit of God living in them, how can I expect them to live as if they do? If a person has never known love in relationships like family such as I have, how can I expect them to act toward others as if they knew what that is like? To me these were powerful lessons that I learned early on. To be honest, sometimes as a Christian, I felt shamed by atheists who exhibited aspects of the character of Jesus more fully than I did, more fully than I was accustomed to seeing in the Christian community.

It was a time for me when I didn't have to "have devotions" in order to lead a devotional life. Everything was so much barer than in typical U.S. life-style. Because it was a commune-in other words, amongst ourselves-and because we were working with a population that was not all dressed up in fancy cultural trappings, the teachings of Jesus were more real or perhaps more obvious than I had experienced before. So to walk thoughtfully through these experiences was itself kind of devotion.

I came to CCNV in the summer. As winter approached, we were trying to decide if we should provide a homeless shelter year-round. Before I got there, CCNV had shelters for the winter season. We decided that is what we should do. We asked for volunteers to live in and run a homeless shelter, and I didn't hesitate. It seemed like doing that would get me even closer to that sense of what I had thought the CCNV experience would be about, when I'd first read about and was afraid of it. Three other guys also volunteered, but we didn't have a building. On December 23, our main spokesperson, Mitch Synder, went on TV to ask for an abandoned building. A guy who owned a large downtown hotel that was slated for demolition offered us the use of that hotel temporarily. We went in on Christmas Eve, 1983, and frantically tried to board up all the open windows that formerly contained air conditioners, and otherwise get the place ready for homeless people to stay. It was a symbolic night-Jesus and Mary had no place to stay.

Almost everything we did in CCNV had a symbolic element to it, to try to reinforce in the public's consciousness that there were people in this first world country that were living a sort of third world existence. We got the place open, and 550 people showed up the first night. On New Year's Eve, we had a party to which some of the cast of "Happy Days" came. Early in 1984, we got a building that still houses the CCNV shelter, one block long, 1/2 block deep and four stories tall Almost immediately we were housing 1,000 people - 750 men in three wings and 250 women in one wing. That was the building's capacity. We moved the soup kitchen from the day shelter to the basement of the new building. My assignment was to be in charge of one of the three wings of the men’s shelter, specifically the one to which - not planned by us - the elderly, the mentally ill, and the late stage alcoholics had gravitated. My main role on that wing was to see that they were protected from the younger, more able bodied men in the other two wings. Also I was there to see if they had any needs that could be met by a doctor, to be friends with them, and give them some sense of human relationship.

We had been joined by the day-shelter staff and lived on the top floor. The building had been abandoned for some time and was in bad condition. The top floor was partly exposed to the elements. The roof was dilapidated. It was the least desirable part of the building to be in, but that was also part of the CCNY philosophy. We weren’t there for ourselves but for the poor.

The shelter sits three blocks from the United States Capital building, but it might as well be 300 miles in social distance. The streets that surround the shelter give very little indication that three city blocks away lies the seat of government of the most powerful and prosperous nation in the history of the planet. The shelter was a building with 1,000 homeless people in it, some of them families who at one point had a taste of the American dream. On my wing, most of the men had lived that dream some time in their lives, but had lost it due to alcohol or mental illness or senility. Most of the rest of the people who used the shelter were from the urban ghetto, as were their parents and their grandparents, and they were very much unlike me. I used to describe myself as a small, middle class, white kid from the Midwest because that seemed to encapsulate the significant ways in which I was different from the people in the shelter. I was white, they were black. I was from the middle-class; they had been poor for generations. I was from the heartland of America and they were from the streets of the urban ghetto. Identifying myself as small may have been less a reality than an emotional perception due to the baggage that I grew up with about urban, poor, black people. Whichever the case, it was this difference that exacerbated what I call an undercurrent of fear.

The reality of the shelter was that there were almost no rules. That was a philosophical choice of the community. Poor people, especially homeless people, had suffered many indignities at the hands of many well-meaning people. While we could not entirely avoid it, we tried to minimize it as much as possible. Many shelters had sort of a cattle-herding mentality, driving people through group showers with anti-lice shampoo, and slapping them with what seemed at times to be arbitrary rules and regulations. So, we had only two rules that were anything but arbitrary-no men on the women’s side, no women on the men's side; the other was that you can’t hurt anybody with a weapon or you get kicked out. You usually couldn't get kicked out for hurting somebody unless you used a weapon, and you didn't get in trouble for having a weapon unless you used it to hurt somebody. Most people had weapons. This was the reality side of the undercurrent of fear.

The men on my wing grew to have a sort of guardian mentality over me. First of all, I liked them, not the kind of God-loves-you attitude, although that was there too, but I really liked them. I have to confess that I didn’t like most of the younger men in the shelter, who preyed upon them. I think they also knew that I tried to protect them from the predators. Different ones among them would tell me from time to time that if ever got into a scrape to let them know and they would back me up. That didn’t eliminate the undercurrent of fear, but it did help.

My social life was an escape from this undercurrent of fear, although not for that purpose. That part of my life primarily revolved around homeless men who would not come in to use the shelter. They stayed outdoors, slept on heat grates in the sidewalk, and had little to do with CCNY. Most times when I was with them, we were sitting around outside the Library of Congress or in some museum or another, taking in a documentary, or an art film, or a new exhibit or concert. I can't imagine a more cultured group of homeless people. When I was with them I was away from the pervasive low-level fear, but as soon as I stepped back in, it was there again. It was just part of the service, part of the ministry, and years later it made living through a period of rioting, looting, shooting, and a coup in Venezuela seem not such a big deal.

One of my friends in the shelter was named Joe. That wasn’t really his name but he called himself Joe, he called me Joe, he called everybody Joe. Harold was one of the four, who, after the first six months, left the row-house to run the shelter. As it turns out, Harold went to high school with Joe in Memphis in the 1960s. He had been valedictorian of Harold's high school class, but when I met Joe, he was about as out of touch with reality as you could get.

When we talk about causes of and solutions to homelessness, it is easy to think of it as a line on a horizontal plane, a line as easy to cross in one direction as another, that the quantity of missteps, bad choices, and bad luck can be corrected by an equal and opposite quantity of discipline and good choices and good luck. In reality it is a line but it is on a vertical plane and just as it is easier to fall 10 feet than to jump 10 feet, it is a lot easier to fall below the socio economic line than it is to crawl back above it. It would be hard to tell what caused this man to wind up below the line, virtually become incapacitated, unfit, barring extreme intervention and a lot of time; or what it would take for him to turn and make the kinds of choices to put himself in a position to experience the kind of good luck to get himself back to where he came from.

CCNV preached that message with some measure of success but it was only in the magic of proximity that this message was effectively received. One of the things CCNV provided, aside from its broader impact on the U.S. culture by virtue of its location near the seat of government and the nation’s policy makers, was to provide D.C. residents with an opportunity to come into proximity with homeless people. CCNV knew that was a dangerous thing for people to do, but they didn't advertise it that way so people didn't know it. The danger was that when middle class people came into proximity, even in a physically safe situation, they were in jeopardy of caring. They were even in jeopardy of caring to the point of doing something about
it. That is the magic of proximity. So it is through that proximity that one by one individuals could receive the message of the preceding paragraph.

The same thing is true in Christian missions. We know that if people will take a vacation or part of their summer and come overseas and serve for even a few days, that most of them will never be the same. They will care more than they did, and more significantly, they are likely to do something about it. Diane and I are kind of the odd ducks of missionaries. We hadn't been overseas nor done any mission stuff before we became missionaries, but most missionaries did. That is the result of the secret danger of proximity.

The window of my little room of the shelter looked out the front of the building onto an urban landscape, cement-colored for the most part. I remember looking out of my window especially in the minutes before we served supper in the basement and seeing this daily migration to the shelter. After the first year, it was open 24-hours a day, but most people would get out and about through the day. I remember thinking how sad that migration was because they would straggle in one by one, not in twos or threes or fours. There was no sense of community, and I think their migration back in to the shelter was a picture of their social isolation. How little these men experience what we think of as normal in our typical day- conversation, appreciation, recognition, the touch of a handshake.

Regarding the undercurrent of fear, sometimes it wasn’t undercurrent at all-it was in your face. As I said, there were only two rules, so you wouldn't think it would be hard to stay out of trouble. Not the case. An ex-Army Ranger, who called himself Blue, fit all four of the images I mentioned: he was black, he was poor, he was urban, and he was bigger than me. Actually, he may not have been bigger than me, but he was an Army Ranger and he talked bigger than me. One day I caught him trying to sneak a woman up the back stairwell of the men's side. I think he mostly expected me to look the other way but I didn't. I told him that he couldn't do that. She had to go back down. It's not just because I have some obsessive need for rules to be followed. It’s because I'd learned on the streets that if you are not respected, you are in danger. If I pretended not to notice and he knew it, then I might as well hang it up as far as any kind of direct ministry goes, because in a flash everybody in his circle, and everybody in their circles, and then everybody would know I was fair game, and all the rule breaking would be funneled my way. It wouldn't be a pretty sight. So it could be called enlightened self-interest.

Blue and I got into an argument. Blue did 90% of the arguing. My arguing was mostly reiteration that she had to go back outside. He got pretty riled up. We all had walkie-talkies so I radioed to the other staff, most of whom had been homeless people when we started this shelter, that I had this situation. That got him to take the woman back outside.

Because we weren’t allowed to keep the fire doors closed, on a day shortly after that, I was sitting in a chair inside one of the fire exit doorways, guarding the men on my wing. Blue came walking in my direction from maybe 50 yards away across the street. He picked up his pace as he started across the street, and then he started running straight toward me. I had no weapon and wouldn't have wanted to use it if I had, but I was in my 20s and hadn’t lost any of my youthful speed. The stairwell was down the hallway, 1/2-block away. I hightailed it down the hall, very briefly describing what was going on to any staff I happened to pass, and ducked into one of the rooms on the second floor of the shelter. The other staff took care of it. They found he had a knife, and he was barred from the shelter.

The next time I saw him, some days later, he was standing at the front in-take desk in the lobby. Immediately I knew I needed to approach him and express to him that I still valued him as a fellow human being, and I suggested that we just put what happened behind us, no hard feelings. I had no idea how he would react, but I had no reason not to do it except fear. (I have already said how that works: if the only reason not to do something is fear, I need to do it. There were reasons to approach him but none other than fear to avoid him.) So I went up to him and said those things. I think I stuck out my hand first to shake his, and he shook my hand, not with the handshake of an Army Ranger, but the handshake of a puppy dog with its tail between its legs, who knows it's been bad. I was amazed at that moment and greatly relieved. It reinforced in me a lesson that doing the right thing can be scary, but it's never risky. It's the same way with following God. To really follow God is often scary but it's never risky. It's the least risky thing a person can ever do. So Blue and I got along well after that, and he never tried to put anything over on me again.

I mentioned some of the staff of the CCNV shelter when we opened it. When we moved to the current building, as well as when we used that old hotel over Christmas and New Years, the four of us put in about 22 hours a day for about 1 ½ months. My experience has always been that when I get less than I need, I get sick, usually with a throat infection. Working 22 hours a day for 1 1/2 months was less sleep than I needed. I can't explain it, but I didn't get sick. It must have been God.

We gradually increased our staffing, first by closing our day shelter and moving that staff over to this shelter. About half of the day shelter staffs were former homeless people. As we identified homeless people who had used the shelter, and who seemed to have integrity and the motivation to serve other people, we brought them on staff as well. That was another element of the CCNV philosophy that programs are best run by the people they serve, as opposed to a bunch of white, middle-class college graduates pretending to know what it takes to address homelessness. This is the same philosophy as that of IMB (International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Church). Churches are best started by their own people who have just come to know Jesus, rather than by Americans who look at the world so differently, even if we don't realize or admit that we do.

One thing I haven't talked a lot about was my circle of friends in D.C. They were homeless people who wouldn't access the shelter system, even one as user-friendly as ours. These folks lived outdoors instead of in the shelters because, for one reason or another, they couldn't handle either the crowding or what little regimentation there was inside. I left CCNV in 1985 and those who are still alive in that group of homeless men are still friends of mine, and I get together with them every chance I get.

Our daily pattern was to scrounge up food during the course of the day, then meet at various museums, art galleries, Library of Congress, National Archives, etc., to go to some cultural event we had chosen the night before. Then we would come together from whichever event we went to and have what we called a picnic at a circular stone table outside the Library of Congress in the warmer months and a little used snack bar in the Library of Congress in the colder months. There we would pull out whatever we'd scrounged up that day or leftovers from previous days and share all around. I really didn’t contribute a whole lot because I had a "day job," but they didn't mind. They were simply pleased and perhaps astounded that this guy, who
was part of the establishment, would want to hang with them. The core of the group was Alex and Larry. They are still there. I was there in November and I saw them. Nothing had changed in 20 years.

Alex has since become a friend of the family. He counts as his friends my wife, my children, my mother, and one of my sisters. Mom and my sister Susan came out to visit me in DC for a couple weeks when I was working in the shelter. They were troopers! They threw in and helped on the women's side as much as they could, while I was on duty in the men's side. No experience of visiting me in those days would have been complete without joining the picnics outside the Library of Congress. They took part in our nightly routine of looking through the brochures, and helped plan the cultural activities for the next evening. They actually attended some of the affairs and soon were hooked.

Gradually they got up the nerve to eat some of the scavenged food. Mom took to it a little more quickly than Susan. We graded several aspects of our living-heat grates to sleep on and scavenged food to eat. Grade A food was still in the wrapper, Grade B was out of the wrapper but apparently untouched. Grade C was partially eaten but otherwise appetizing. Grade D was desperation. Mom and Susan didn't take long to get to grade B and even dabbled in Grade C before the time was up. To this day they continue to ask about Alex and Larry, and the last time I saw Alex he gave me something to take back to Mom. It was a special visit for them but it was also special to the guys. This was particularly true for Alex. I think it was another validation that he hasn't ceased to exist, he is still here, and he is still worth caring about.

Alex grades people, too. In the eyes of the "real people," as Alex calls them, I am a borderline real person. I'm a little too odd and familiar with their scene to be a real person, a little too much of an insider, but Mom and Susan are bona fide real people! I'll bet that the times when I have visited these guys, sometimes with Diane, and times such as when Mom and Susan came to visit are among the very, very few times in decades that they have experienced caring, physical touching, like a hug, or even a handshake.

They all like Alex because to know Alex is to like Alex. He became homeless in about 1980. I've seen where he grew up, a middle-class Washington area home. He was a radio specialist on the ground in Viet Nam during the war. As far as I can understand, he ran a radio relay operations unit connecting the front lines with Headquarters, from close in behind the fighting. He came back to the U.S. after the war and things slowly began to unravel. His mother died, and he had a hard time keeping a job. Somewhere along the line, he developed bulimia and an obsessive compulsive disorder. This condition prevented him from functioning in society. One of the last jobs he had, had to do with bunching stuff to ship out, like in a newspaper or printing place. He didn't last there because he couldn't keep his production numbers high enough. He couldn't deal with rubber bands having a twist in them or not being at 90 degree angles with one another.

Alex is one of the most intelligent fellows I've ever known. At various times, he has tried to teach me what he knows about astronomy, quantum physics, and other subjects, but I haven't been able to grasp most of it. Alex is the guy that, when a film projector breaks down while showing a documentary in a museum, leaps to his feet, turns on the lights, fixes the machine, and turns off the lights. He describes himself as Christianist, someone who believes that the message of Jesus in the Bible is true (and knows the Bible better than most Christians), but who won't appropriate for himself the hope of that very message. Alex planned on being on the streets for a maximum of five years, and it's been over 20. He is one of the most raggedy of D.C.'s homeless people, but he says that he doesn't want to clean up his outsides until he gets a handle on cleaning up his insides.

What I do now is attempt to work cross-culturally, bridging the chasm between my world view and other people somewhere in the world. If I don't bridge that gap, the good news of Jesus is not going to flow from Jesus through me to them. The first experience of that was right here in my own country. The homeless people I've been speaking of are, in many ways, a separate culture from the one I grew up in. I find that most people "from my side of the tracks" have a hard time understanding where homeless people are coming from. I doubt that I've been given the opportunity to bridge the chasm, but I regard what has happened as another preparation for what was to come later, and I think it's owed mostly to the time I spent hanging out with these men outside of work, as opposed to the time I spent working with the homeless in the shelter.

CCNV was full of idealists. I don't know that I ever worked with anybody there among us middle-class folks who was not pretty hard core idealist. I was, too, and have been as long as I can remember. I thought that the world could be transformed by human effort if we just all cooperated and treated each other according to some set of idealistic principles. I also thought, on a more personal level, that I could achieve some idealized vision for my own life where everything would get better and better every day in every way. Then either in spite of or because of being at CCNV, I don't know which, one day it hit me like a load of bricks-the reality was clear-everything in this world is doomed to be either imperfect or temporary or both. If something is or seems to be perfect, it's temporary. If something has a sense of permanence, it's imperfect. I don't know how I reacted to that revelation but I imagine myself to have put my face in my hands and sat stunned for who knows how long.

I think that was God's way of getting through to me that He and His works are the only things that can ever possibly be both perfect and lasting. I am still an idealist of sorts, but now I seem to have become an idealist in the way that we could call God an idealist. It replaces the arrogant idealism that we humans have, which says that we can control things and improve things and work hard and avoid the bad stuff. I believe the practical effect this had on my life was that in that moment I stopped planning to some day go live in Shangri-la and instead concluded that"grass isn't greener on the other side." I realized if I tried to run to some better place, the main problem was that I would have to take me with me, which would by definition make things imperfect. So I saw that the destination wasn't some ideal place "out there," but rather I was simply called to be as faithful as I could to what God had given me to do wherever he put me.

I am eternally grateful to God for giving me the CCNV seasoning. Toward the end of the second year with them, I sensed that we were heading in somewhat different directions. I felt like thre most effective servicer was donein the "smallness." CCNV on the other hand, was moving more toward "bigness."There are advantages to that, but I felt the disadvantages outweighed them. So I felt the pull to move into a smaller setting. I knew that my college friend, Linda, was in Portland, Oregona nd I didn't have anywhere else in particulare to go, so I arranged for somebody to take my place at the shelter, and told them I was leaving. I got a ride to an interstate, stuck my thumb out, and headed to the west coast.

On the way to Oregon I stopped in as usual at both Osceola and Omaha. I think it was this time, when I was at my parents' house in Osceola, it struck me that my parents had paid for the bulk of my college and that I was no longer in the career for which I'd studied in college, and what's more, I wasn't on any stable career track. So I asked my dad, "Do you ever think you have this son who's just kind of wandering around aimlessly in life, even though he has a good education in a good field?" I will never forget what he said to me, "Well, it's like I've always said. The worst thing you can do in life is to wake up one day ten years down the road and realize that for the last ten years you haven't enjoyed what you've been doing. You seem to be enjoying whatever you are doing, so I don't have a problem with it." That is an unsual level of moral support that I wish more of my friends enjoyed from their fathers. It fits well with Mom's attitude which, if I remember correctly, always was that after we kids graduated from high school, the last thing she wanted was for us to stay around town. She wanted us to go experience the big world out there. This attitude, this support, on the part of both my dad and mom is arguably the greatest gift they have given me.

When I got to Portland, I didn't tell anybody I knew there, that I had arrived. I had made few acquaintances there on previous visits to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps House. I told Linda that I was planning to move out there, figuring that my work, at least initially, would be with homeless people. Portland's downtown has a very distinct geographical section that is its skid row. I figured I would end up working there if not living there as well, and I wanted to see what the homeless scene was like in Portland from the other side, before I started getting involved in it from the ministry angle. Sol wandered around, asked people questions, found out where things were, slept in the homeless shelter, ate at the soup kitchen — and ran into one of my acquaintances so the jig was up. I got ahold of Linda and she helped me get a place hi an (SRO) single resident occupancy, hotel.

I got connected with a very small Catholic social service called Outreach Ministries, operated by a nun. I think I made $60 a month but my rent was only 30% of my salary, and there were soup kitchens in the neighborhood, so the living was inexpensive. The idea of Outreach Ministries was to try to talk the most vulnerable of the homeless population - mostly late stage alcoholics or the mentally ill - into letting the ministry manage their monthly income. That consisted of checks from pensions, social security, and the like. The "toughs" around these people came to know what time of the month they received their checks and hit them up for the cash. Once O.R. successfully talked them into managing their money, they would set it up legally so that the homeless person wouldn't even see the check. We would find an apartment for them, in some hotel in the neighborhood, and make sure that the rent was always paid. We would keep the landlords happy by regularly cleaning their rooms, making sure they got medical attention, intervening in conflicts - basically whatever it took to keep them housed. The other major emphasis of O.R. was to draw them into community with each other and with those of us who worked there. It was really a cool little ministry. The guys had a roof over their heads. They didn't get beaten and robbed because they didn't have any money on them. They were better fed because they didn't spend their money on alcohol, and they were encouraged to become part of an extended family of sorts.

My role was to look after a few of these guys, and I ran the Emergency Services Ministry. I think I even had "Emergency Services at Outreach Ministries" on a business card - my very business card. Emergency services was a fancy way of saying that we helped people buy Greyhound bus tickets or groceries or whatever they might need, if they seemed to be telling the and had a good story. The monthly budget for this ministry was something like $200. My was to decide whether or not some of that would be given to somebody asking for help, and months we ran out of the $200 before we ran out of the month. I include that detail because learned a profound lesson that I hope will stick with me the rest of my life. Like I said, my salary was $60 a month and, little as it was, I usually didn't spend it all. when the $200 of emergency services money of O.R. ran out partway through a month, I would bring in whatever of this $60 I had left and use it. When my $60 ran out, I would have to tell people, "Sorry, we can't help you, even if you have a good story." But there were some months when I didn't use my own money, and so I might build up as much as $250. The phenomenon I saw in my own heart was that when I had only $50 to my name, I didn't have any problem giving all that away, but when I built up to having $250 in my name, then I wanted to hoard it. I wanted to keep it for myself because now I have something! Now I've built up something! Now I have something to lose! There is a line in a Bob Dylan song that goes something like, "If you ain't got nothin', you ain't got nothin' to lose." I wasn't proud of what I in my heart. My reaction was that it would be a long time before I was ready for God to entrust me with a lot of money or a good income, because I had a big long lesson I needed to learn. The Bible says that if you are faithful in a little, you will be entrusted with much, and if are not, you won't. I felt very untrustworthy.

The year I spent in Portland was a period when I think I experienced more than just one of growth. I can think of three life lessons in particular that God taught me there. I just talked about the lesson of my heart's relationship with money and material possessions. Another to listen for God's directions or marching orders, so to speak, which I will tell more about The third lesson came to me one day when Kevin and I were walking across a bridge from Row to Baloney Joe's homeless hangout. I said earlier how, while at CCNV, I had a revelation that more or less spelled the end of my human idealism and replaced it with what seems to closer to God's idealism. But I found that day, that I still held out hope that social work or social services could profoundly change peoples' lives for the better. While I am still a huge advocate for social services, that day on the bridge, I finally gained perspective on the limitations of social work. I remember saying to Kevin something like, "What are we doing here? We're helping to improve people's lives, probably keeping some of these guys alive longer than they would have lived without us, but in the end they are going to die, and if they don't know Jesus, they're not going to go to heaven, so what good is it?"I think we kind of looked at each other said, "Huh." That rhetorical question, "What good is it?," was the starting point in my journey to where I am now. I believe we are put here on planet earth to worship God. God wants that from every one of his creatures. In the same way that "love God with all your heart" has its inescapable corollary, "love others as yourself," this purpose for being on earth — to worship God its corollary on the horizontal human plane. Almost everything I do needs to be done with eye toward how it can influence people, who don't yet know Jesus, to come to know him. I might support or be involved in feeding hungry people because it's the right thing to do and because God tells us to, but also I want those people to survive and have more of a chance to come to know Jesus. I don't really mind the death penalty as long as it is only applied to

I was thoroughly enjoying my life and my work in Portland and had no intention of leaving, but God had other plans. I've mentioned how I have made decisions-even significant life decisions-based on realizing that fear would be the only reason to say no. I even described that as a way that God and I communicate and a way in which He directs me. But up to this time I didn't consciously give God all that much credit for it. This next move would be different. This would be the first time-not the last, but the first-that I ever sensed a direct marching order from God to go to a certain place (back to Washington, D.C.) and do a certain thing (be a liaison between the homeless and the establishment). It set a precedent so, in all the moves since then, I've looked for a much more obvious directive from God, rather than making my own decision and asking him to bless it.

I always thought it would be cool to ride a bicycle across the United States, so I bought a bicycle. I didn't have many material possessions, but those I had I packed in three or four cardboard boxes and shipped them to my parents' house. I put a bedroll, a few bike tools and spare parts, a couple changes of clothes, a Bible and a journal on my bike, and headed out.

It was a great trip! If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't hesitate. I would encourage anybody who is single and carefree and likes to ride a bicycle, to do this. I rode by myself for 29 days, averaging 94 miles a day. My goal was to get back to Osceola in time for my ten-year high school reunion. To keep the dew off, most nights I slept under park benches or picnic tables in small town city parks. Nobody ever hassled me. The hardest part was the climb over Mt. Hood in Oregon. Coming down the far side of it I developed a knee problem and spent three days on the town square of Ontario, a small town on the Idaho/Oregon border. People would come up talk to me, curious about what I was doing there. When I told them I was riding my bike across the country, it was as if I told them I had just dropped in from Jupiter.

One of the main things I got from the trip was a feeling that I had rediscovered the soul of America. I mostly used back roads and went through small towns. People were very friendly and took me into their homes. In Idaho, under a store's awning, in a severe thunder-storm, I struck up a conversation with two high school girls who were selling bricks to raise money for cheerleading camp. I couldn't go anywhere until the storm was over. The father of one of the girls came by to rescue her from the storm. They started to leave and then stopped. The man told his daughter to ask if I had a place to stay. I didn't, but since I'd only made 40 miles that day, I was hoping the storm would clear enough so that I could get on down the road before the day was over. He gave me directions to his house just in case.

The storm didn't clear, so I rode over and spent the night there. It was my first shower of the trip, my first laundry of the trip, and my first home-cooked meal of the trip. As I was sitting there at the dinner table with this man and his wife and two young daughters, I felt compelled to ask them if they do this a lot, taking in raggedy-looking wanderers they've never met before. He answered that he had never done anything like that before, but God seemed to be telling him to invite me in. This is just one of many stories I could tell about the people that I met.

Riding through the states of Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming, there were long periods of intense isolation. Towns there are small and very far apart. I would go hour after hour without seeing another soul, not even a car on the road. I got to the point where I would hold conversations with cows, and I spent a lot of time singing as I pedaled. My favorite song on the trip was "Amazing Grace," which was odd because I never really liked it that much before. Obviously, I had a lot of time to think. That is usually good, but not always pleasant because I had time to notice the sin in my heart that didn't go away entirely just because I'd let Jesus in. It was as if God wanted me to trust him moment by moment in every temptation instead of trusting him once when I was 19 years old and having him at that time remove temptation totally from my life. I count this as not just a valuable experience, but a valuable experience with God.

Riding a bike across the country just to get from point A to point B is a somewhat unorthodox mode of transportation, but so is hitchhiking. I have hitchhiked from coast to coast a few times. One time I tried to calculate how far I had hitchhiked in my life. If I remember right, I estimated that it was the equivalent of one time around the world. I used to keep a little notebook in which I logged the place somebody picked me up, where they took me, and their occupation. I got rides from a nuclear engineer, doctors, lawyers, a lot of salesmen, even housewives, sometimes with their kids in the car. Whenever a woman picked me up, I always asked her if she didn't think it was kind of dangerous to be picking up hitchhikers. Most of them said that they had hitchhiked themselves, and they knew the look on the hitchhiker's face when a car passes them by. Sometimes the men asked me if I didn't think it was dangerous to hitchhike because some crazy person could pick me up. I always said I could be a crazy person the same as they, so I guessed we were in the same boat. The fact is that I was never in danger, and of all the hundreds of rides, in only two was I even slightly worried. I kept in touch with some of the folks that picked me up.

As I traveled back to Washington D.C. in June of 1986, I came to grips with the commitment that I was making. I came to the point where I said to God, "If this is what you want me to do - living on the streets, being a liaison between the homeless people and the system - even if it is for the rest of my life, I'll do it." I started to think how I was actually going to carry out that assignment and got sidetracked by being involved in a charismatic church, Maranatha. I learned there about the spiritual abilities, or "gifts," the Holy Spirit gives to every Christian, and by December 1986, after a half year of living outside, I understood what those gifts were and that I needed to use them in the context of a local church rather than as a loner doing my own thing.

My search for a place to use them led me to a local church in Lincoln, Nebraska. I resorted to my familiar mode of transportation. I strapped on my backpack, took public transportation from the outskirts of D.C. to an interstate, and stuck my thumb out. I spent Christmas in Osceola, and arrived in Lincoln on January 1, 1987. I have asked myself if the "failure" of the ministry I went to do in D.C. means that it was a mistake for me to leave Portland and go back to Washington, but I don't think so. I can see now that it was exactly where God wanted to put me to learn a valuable lesson about who He has made me to be and my role in His kingdom on earth. It started a whole chain of events that led eventually to overseas mission. I am not sure I would be a missionary today if I hadn't gone back to D.C. then.

On the first Sunday, I headed for New Covenant Church, which at that time was about 2 1/2 years. There were about 50 people in attendance. New Covenant at that time was led in worship by anywhere from one to three people standing up front with acoustic guitars. Nobody asked me if I played guitar or had any interest or experience in leading worship, nor did they have any reason to ask me. Looking back on it now, it seems so audacious, but somehow I got it in my head that I would help lead worship. I was a piano player, not a guitar player. Nonetheless I bought a 12-string guitar and taught myself how to play. Then I asked Kirk, a new friend at the church, if he would teach me the songs that we sang in worship. I learned and memorized the songs and worked into the role of leading worship. We met in a small upstairs room of a Seventh Day Adventist church building. It could have been sometime in 1988 that we moved downstairs to the sanctuary, and gradually over time, I became the main worship leader.

I had a lot of other roles during those 10 years at New Covenant, most notably handling the finances. But the worship leader role is the one in which I most clearly felt God working through me. "Worship leader" is not one of the gifts listed in the New Testament, but it sure felt to me that God had given it to me as a spiritual gift. I still thought of myself as somewhat shy, though not as acutely shy as when I was a kid. So to get up in front of what became 300 to 400 people and play guitar (not my main instrument) and to sing into a microphone (not having a solo singing voice by any stretch of the imagination) was not something that I was naturally given to doing. I was supernaturally given to doing it, shown by my feeling when I was leading a congregation in worship. It was the most natural thing in the world. If someone had asked me while I was in D.C. to predict what type of ministry I might have through a local church, I probably would have said something having to do with the poor. Leading worship wouldn't have even been on the radar screen. But that is God for you.

We were married three months later in a beautifully informal ceremony at Wilderness Park in front of a couple hundred family and friends. We didn't plan to have children for a few years but so much for planning. We got pregnant with Daniel four months into our marriage. My sisters and I were very close in age, which I liked. Diane and her sisters were not close in age, which she did not like, so we wanted to have our children fairly close together. Two years and four days after Daniel was born, Alyssa was born.

I still didn't have what one might call a career or a career path. When I got to Lincoln, I started working in the area of social services with people with physical disabilities. Finding myself married with children, I thought it would be good to have some sort of career path. I decided to start with an entry level position in a fairly large social service organization, working with adults with mental retardation. After a year there, I was promoted to group home manager. I think about a year after that, I was promoted to a coordinator's position, working in the main office of several group homes. The position was fairly stressful and in order to enable Diane to stay at home with the kids, I needed to work part time for New Covenant. In most respects, life was good. We bought our first house, which moved us from a rented farm house into the city. You could even say we had made the bottom rung of the American dream. Sometimes people remarked to me, "It must be hard working with those folks," meaning our clients with mental retardation. I always responded, "Yes, it is. And sometimes even the clients with mental retardation can be difficult." It was the workers I supervised that caused me the stress.

In 1996, two things happened almost simultaneously. The first had to do with missions. A man I knew as the former director of Lincoln's homeless shelter and who since had become the director of a missions agency, came knocking on our door. We considered his offer to join the agency but didn't feel it was for us. I think it was while we were yet considering his offer that the second of these two events occurred. The American dream thing unraveled a little bit. To save money, my employer demoted me and pretended it was for performance issues. This demotion caused me to reevaluate what I wanted to do when I grew up. I focused in on three options - school teacher, missionary, and continuing in social work Even though we rejected the offer to work with the missions agency, just the fact that someone like that would approach us out of the blue gave us pause to wonder what was going on.

Diane became a Christian when she was a young adult working in Texas. Her first Christian circle of friends thought and talked and prayed often about missions, so as far as Diane knew, that was what Christians did. You become a Christian and missions, therefore, become very important to you. Beginning long before I was a Christian, I wanted to live overseas in some strange part of the world. However, strangely enough, Diane and I had never really talked much about missions.

One night not too long after my demotion, two minor miracles happened (if you can say that anything is a "minor" miracle). The first one happened at 11:00 p.m., while Diane was lying in bed, still awake and alert. Diane is anything but a late night person, so even that part of the miracle was unusual. Suddenly, she turned to me and said something like, "You know what I think we should do? We should sell our house, move to San Francisco, go to seminary, and be missionaries." In my family of origin, we tend to think things over a long time before making a decision. The second miracle that night was that I immediately said, "Yes, that's it. That is what we are supposed to do!"

We didn't have a clue as to how to proceed, but some friends did, and since New Covenant is a Southern Baptist Church, we naturally contacted the Southern Baptist Missionary Agency, the International Mission Board. Even though the realtor said it was unlikely that our house would sell in that market at that time, we sold our house right away and moved to San Francisco to attend seminary there from January to August of 1998.

During the 1 1/2 years between making the decision to go into missions. and actually packing up and moving to seminary, I changed jobs and became the director of a program for homeless families and the director of AmeriCorps at the Lincoln Action Program. That was one of my favorite jobs. Although low paying, I had a great job, a great little two-story house, a great church, great friends, and a generally great life in Lincoln. However, I don't think I ever considered looking back after the "night of two minor miracles." The American Dream can't hold a candle to whatever God had planned. I would have been foolish to give up God's will and plan for this "good life."

To us, seminary was a necessary but unwelcome delay on our way overseas. We had to get 20 hours of seminary credit. Right after beginning classes there, Diane and I both found ourselves in an exhilarating and slightly scary process of having our beliefs stripped away. The seminary professors weren't the cause. It was God. Over the years as Christians we had come to believe some things that the Bible teaches and some things that the United States Christian community teaches that are not found in the Bible. Through our seminary experience, God showed us which was which. We felt stripped of our comfortable beliefs but never, ever in danger of losing our faith.

God was always trustworthy; however our own beliefs and those of others were not necessarily trustworthy. We began to see that this was exactly the preparation needed to go overseas and work cross-culturally. The baggage that people from another culture bring into and try to superimpose on top of Christianity is a different baggage than that which we in the US bring into and try to superimpose on top of Christianity. We needed our cultural baggage stripped away so that we could help people in other cultures defend against their urge to bring their cultural baggage into their faith.

All over the world Christianity, as well as the other world religions, has run into the problem of people combining this new thing called "Christiamity" with their old thing, whatever that was, be it the river god, or Buddha, or what have you. In the US, most of us don't tend to combine faith in Jesus with faith in the river god- that's not our stumbling block. In the US we tend to combine faith in Jesus with faith in the American Dream. We put our hope in jobs, the economy, the government, education, etc. Just like the tribal people who end up with a combination Jesus/river god deity, many of us end up with a hybrid American Dream Jesus, who isn’t really Jesus at all. But we still go to church and act like it's Jesus.

The journey from Lincoln to our first field of missionary service, Venezuela, took us through San Francisco, Virginia (missionary training center), and Costa Rica (for Spanish language study)-four moves. As far as culture shock and cultural adjustments go, the easiest was transitioning from the Midwest to San Francisco. Nearly as easy was moving from the US to Costa Rica. When we were in Costa Rica, we had the naive notion that Venezuela would be just like Costa Rica. Both countries speak Spanish and both are lumped into Latin America. Venezuela was incredibly different. Costa Ricans are warm, open, inviting people who speak a fairly clear brand of Spanish. Venezuela, at least those seven million in Caracas, is, in general unfriendly, closed, with notoriously bad Spanish. They will even say these things about themselves. It took me about nine months to reach the level in Venezuelan Spanish that I had attained in Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a difficult country to leave. The people and the natural environment conspire to keep people there, but God wanted us in Venezuela.

In area, Caracas is about the size of Des Moines, Iowa. The slums housed more than five million people. The middle class live in high rise apartments, as did we. The poor, most of the people, live in little shacks that sprawl up the hillsides. The arrangement can be pictured as dumping out a big bucket of Logos on the floor. The resulting jumble is a fair picture of a Caracas slum neighborhood. I loved being in the slums. The slums smell bad, look bad, have a reputation for being dangerous, and are the only place in Caracas where you are likely to be greeted and treated in a friendly way. As a missions agency, we weren't ready to have our own live like that, but had I been single without dependents, I certainly would have pressed our leadership to allow me to live there in one of the slums.

I had two roles in Venezuela- one was as the treasurer/business manager for the 100 or so Southern Baptist missionaries in the country, the other was as a member of a church-starting team in the slums of Caracas. I enjoyed both roles. However, the administrative role ended up taking a disproportionate amount of my time.

Four days after we landed in Venezuela we experienced the floods and landslides of December '99. This made the news even in the US. That day 15 miles north of our apartment, 75,000 people were swept off the mountainside into the ocean and died. Before the flooding and landsides, this coastal area had been largely slums. Now those who survived found themselves even without their slums. I helped truck large water storage tanks into the area, so that the people would have something to hold water when the government water trucks came by.

The flooded area north of Caracas was a case where their hard life had become harder. In my time in Venezuela, this was the only area in Spanish speaking Venezuela (not counting indigenous tribes) where Christianity really took off, people becoming Christians, and churches starting in any kind of numbers. Again, I think these people were faced with a stark choice between Jesus and hopelessness. In that context, people are much more likely to choose Jesus as their hope. In the US, we don't see that we really have the same stark choice.

During our time in Venezuela, Diane and I independently and simultaneously began sensing this wasn’t the mission field for us for the long term. It wasn't just Venezuela, it was any place like Venezuela - any place where mission work had already been done for some time and there had been some results. In the Bible, in the book of Acts, the missionary Apollo’s was excited about and good at building on the foundation laid by other missionaries, the apostle Paul and his team. Paul, on the other hand, wanted to go where Jesus had not been named. Diane and I realized that we are more the Paul type than the Apollo’s type. We communicated this to our leadership and, as we headed back to the US, we knew we might not be returning to Venezuela.

We spent the 2002-2003 school year in Lincoln, Nebraska, in large part trying to understand where God wanted us to go next. We dabbled in dialogue with various regions around the world but nothing clicked. The last region to respond to us was south Asia. Soon after we began conversations with them, Diane and I looked at each other one day and I said, "You sense it, don't you? It's going to be south Asia." She did. As of this writing we are moving to south Asia in a matter of weeks.

My role in south Asia will be to develop a strategy for effectively, in a way that is culturally and linguistically accessible, offering a Muslim tribe the option to choose Christianity. I've never done anything like this before. In my times of daydreaming, looking ahead to actually being in south Asia and doing that work, one phrase keeps rolling through my mind: doomed to fail. This is doomed to fail. The handwriting is on the wall. There is no way I can do this. The next thought that follows is, "Okay, let's go."

The Bible teaches that we see God's strength most readily when we are weak. I can't think of anything weaker than "doomed to fail," so I am excited to see how God is going to make it work, and amazed that I get to be a part of it. The sensation that accompanies these thoughts is the sensation of hope. To me hope is the central experience of the Christian life. The Bible as well as the Christian experience tells us that we have much to be hopeful about during this short life on earth, as we follow God as disciples of Jesus. And 1 Cor. 15:19 says that if for this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. I find that in following Jesus there is hope always available to me during this life, such as when I look ahead of my new doomed assignment in south Asia, and there is hope for my eternity after this life.

When I think of hope and compare it to other central experiences of the Christian life namely love, joy, peace, forgiveness, and faith-I find that hope is the most fundamental of them all, not theologically, but as experience. If I don't have joy now, but have hope, I have the hope of joy later. If I don't have peace now, but have hope, I have the hope of peace later. That hope gets me out of bed in the morning. Hope is the only one of these experiences that is at the same time a fully present and a fully future experience. I haven't been a Christian all my life so one might think that I could, sitting here right now, identify with or somehow get in touch with what it felt like in the years before becoming a Christian, not living with this kind of hope in my life. But I can't. For the life of me, I can't imagine what it is that gets people out of bed in the morning day after day, year after year if not this hope in Jesus.

Thank you to Jesus for this hope and thank you to God for raising Him from the dead.