Unlikely fighter, p.13
Unlikely Fighter, page 13
Still, I felt unsettled—mostly because I was still processing the news about my biological father. I’d known about him for a couple of months now, and the more I thought about him, the more I wanted to know. If Ma wouldn’t tell me more, I’d have to find out more some other way.
Maybe Grandma would know something about him. Since she was a natural-born storyteller, if I could just get her alone and get her talking, it was possible she would tell me more.
It wasn’t long before I got my chance.
Grandma was cutting up vegetables for dinner when I walked into the kitchen looking for an after-school snack. As I cut myself a generous piece of apple pie, I was still considering how best to bring up the subject of my dad. But before I could muster my courage, Grandma surprised me by initiating the topic herself. “Greg, I never really heard how your meeting with Tess went awhile back. Tell me about it.”
“Well,” I said, “I found out that my dad was a war hero and all, but not much more than that.”
“Did Tess or Shirley tell you how Toney and your ma met?” Grandma asked.
“Nope.”
Turning from the cutting board, knife still in hand, she nodded toward the kitchen table and said, “Let’s have a seat over there and I’ll fill in some of the blanks for you.”
“Okay, Grandma,” I said, eagerly grabbing my pie and the glass of milk I’d poured. I could hardly believe my good luck.
“Before I tell you this, I need you to swear that you’ll never tell your mama what I’m about to tell you,” she whispered in a low voice, her steely eyes piercing into me.
“I swear, Grandma,” I promised. “I won’t say a thing.”
“Tess was Shirley’s friend and Toney’s sister-in-law, and she played matchmaker,” Grandma began. “They partied, and your mother got pregnant.”
“What did he do when he found out?” I asked.
“He got himself transferred to Atlanta or something. I guess he was pretty high up in the army, so he had a lot of pull,” Grandma said.
“He was a sergeant major,” I said proudly.
“Well, sergeant major or not, he skipped town because he didn’t want to be responsible for a kid,” Grandma lamented. “That’s what I’m guessin’, anyway.”
“So what did Ma do?” I asked.
“For several months, she kept her pregnancy a secret from us,” Grandma admitted.
“Why?” I asked.
“Guess she was ashamed,” Grandma said.
“Ma lived a pretty wild life, didn’t she, Grandma?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah,” she affirmed. “From the time she was a teenager, we just couldn’t get a handle on her. She used to leave the house in the middle of the night and go who knows where. And she had such a hair-trigger temper—just like Jack. We didn’t really know how to deal with her. The stricter Grandpa got with her, the more she rebelled. So after a while, we just let her be. There was no stoppin’ her. She’s got Mathias blood.
“Anyway, back to the story. So one day, she tells us out of the blue that she’s gonna take Doug on a trip to Boston to visit your Uncle Tommy and Aunt Carol. And she just packed up, got in the car, and left with Doug. He was around seven years old at the time.”
Grandma paused and got a far-off look in her eyes as she remembered back across the years.
“I didn’t find out until months later that she’d actually driven to Atlanta to try to find Toney and beg him to make her baby legitimate. She didn’t want to have a child out of wedlock and disappoint me and your grandpa again. I just wish she would have told us.”
“Why didn’t she, do you think?” I asked.
“Your ma may act tough, but she’s really soft underneath. She always felt like she fell short of what your grandpa and I wanted for her—and she did. Your ma was raised going to Bethany Baptist Church, but she never could see past the list of dos and don’ts to the love that God really has for her.”
As Grandma was talking, I knew deep down that this was true. Ma thought Christianity was about cleaning up your life so God would let you into heaven. She just didn’t get it that God loved her no matter what she did or didn’t do. It was starting to click now why she thought of herself as a bum and why across all those years that we’d lived in small apartments with thin walls, I had often heard her crying herself to sleep.
“She called your Uncle Tommy and Aunt Carol and told them her situation,” Grandma continued. “Your ma told them she was pregnant and that the guy wanted nothing to do with her. She was at the end of her rope. She told Carol she didn’t think she was going to keep the baby. She said she couldn’t afford another kid.”
Grandma was so caught up in her story, it was almost like she was oblivious to the fact that the baby she was talking about Ma aborting was me. But I wasn’t oblivious. This felt like a bombshell had blown up in my face.
“Carol, being a blunt former Catholic from Boston, told her to come stay with them and they’d figure it out. That was Carol’s way of stalling so that she could talk her out of an abortion,” Grandma said.
“When Tommy was young, he was in the navy reserves but got called up to active duty during the Korean War. He was one of the cooks on a minesweeping ship. He was the calmest and steadiest of all our kids. Not that he was a wimp—he got into bodybuilding as a teenager, which burned off a lot of energy for him. He won second place for Mr. Colorado and several other bodybuilder awards. When he went off to the navy, he avoided a lot of the trouble that your other uncles got caught up in. He just always had a calmer way about him.”
Grandma continued, “Tommy met Carol during his two-year stint in the navy. Eventually they got married. That’s when your mother contacted them from Georgia, where she had been looking for your biological father—without any luck. Of course, all the while she was keeping this whole mess a secret from me and your grandfather.
“Out of all our kids, Tommy was the one who really stuck with church. After his two-year hitch with the navy, he eventually landed a good job just outside of Boston. Both he and Carol got involved with the local Baptist church,” Grandma explained.
Pulling Grandma back to the story I actually cared about, I asked, “Why did Ma want to abort me anyway?”
“It wasn’t really you she wanted to abort. It was her shame. She felt guilty from the time she was a teenager and started rebelling, and it has just gotten worse over the years,” Grandma explained. “To make matters worse, this was all before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal, so your ma was trying to get as far away as possible from us and figure out some way to get it done.”
“So what happened?” I asked in a quiet voice, still stunned by the news that I had been so unwanted that my ma had thought seriously about killing me. It seems my series of close brushes with death started before I was even born.
“Your ma and Doug moved in with Tommy and Carol for six months. During those months, Tommy and Carol kept encouraging her to have the baby and talked her into going to church with them a few times. But she felt as comfortable in church as a cow at the butcher shop.”
“How did you and Grandpa find out about all this?” I wondered out loud.
“Tommy and Carol eventually convinced your ma to call us, and she finally did. She was a mess,” Grandma confided. “But we told her to come back and have the baby here—to have you.” Grandma paused to look directly at me and smile. “She left her car with Tommy and Carol as a kind of six-months’-rent payment and bought two bus tickets. She was eight months pregnant by the time she got back home to Denver.”
“I guess you guys all saved my life ’cause you talked Ma out of aborting me,” I said, finally ready to express my hurt aloud to Grandma.
Patting me on the hand, Grandma said, “I guess we did.” Tears welled up in her eyes.
Seeing Grandma’s sadness triggered a new emotion inside me. My own hurt over this unfolding story abruptly shifted to anger, like a sudden storm blowing in after a calm sea. “Why in the world would my father abandon my ma?” I demanded.
“I don’t know, Greg. I don’t know much about Toney other than what I just told you. I just know that he broke your ma’s heart and that he didn’t want to have anything to do with being your father.”
The more I thought about it, the madder I got. How dare this guy have sex with my ma and then skip town because he didn’t want to live with the consequences!
I pictured my ma driving from Denver to Atlanta, trying to figure out where Toney was stationed. I imagined her driving through the night with tears in her eyes and fears in her heart. She could barely afford taking care of herself, let alone two boys. And she did it all without child support or government assistance.
Something I’d never felt before started to well up in my heart: hate.
I hate Toney. I hate him for abandoning me. I hate him even more for abandoning my ma. He’s the reason she cries herself to sleep at night.
Ma lost not only love, but also hope.
If Tess had lied to me about him being dead and he was still alive, I would kill him. I knew where my grandparents kept their guns. Heck, they taught me how to shoot to kill someone when I was five years old.
“Grandma,” I said, looking straight at her, “I hate my dad, but I love my ma. And I’m not going to let her die a bitter, broken woman. Doug and me and Uncle Jack and Uncle Bob, we’ve all been trying to lead her to Christ for years. We’ve invited her to church. We’ve tried to turn conversations toward Jesus over and over. But Ma just shuts all of us down before we hardly get started by saying stuff like ‘I’m too much of a bum for God to forgive me’ and ‘You don’t know the things I’ve done wrong. God could never forgive me.’”
But now I did know.
Maybe this will help me reach her, I thought. While I promised Grandma I would never mention this story to Ma, I thought maybe knowing this would help me explain the gospel to her in a way she would connect with.
“Greg,” Grandma said, interrupting my thoughts, “I’ve been praying for that for years. I will pray God gives you the right words to say.”
But the right words are sometimes tough to come by. I wondered if I had it in me to find them.
CHAPTER 18
TIMBER!
THE LOUD BUZZ OF THE SCHOOL BELL interrupted my dark thoughts. I’d been stewing in the bile of bitterness toward my biological father all day. To me, he was not my dad—he was a sperm donor. To me, he wasn’t a war hero—he was a deserter. He abandoned my ma after she’d gotten pregnant and ran away like a coward. Every time I thought about it, an anger I didn’t know I was capable of, a Mathias-level fury, would turn my face beet red, raise my pulse rate beyond the safety zone, and fill the veins in my neck with red-hot rage. His abandonment of my ma infuriated me. I hated him.
But I’d grown adept at compartmentalizing my hatred for my dad away from the rest of my “kind and loving, good Christian boy” life, so I quickly shut down my dark thoughts, ready to move on to the next exciting thing.
Even though the school bell marked the end of the day, most of us students weren’t actually headed home. Instead, we milled around outside the front of the school next to the line of waiting school buses. Once one of the teachers signaled it was time to board, we packed into the yellow buses like sardines in a can for the ride down to the Denver Coliseum to attend The Basic Seminar—or as our teachers called it, “The Bill Gothard Seminar.”
While attendance at the seminar wasn’t a school requirement, it was “strongly encouraged” by our teachers. “Strongly encouraged” was their way of saying, “If you want to stay on our good side, you should really try to be there.” That’s why most of the kids were going.
I sat next to my new friend, Rick Long, during the noisy, bumpy thirty-minute ride. Rick had started at Arvada Christian School just a few months earlier, at the beginning of the school year. Even though I was a freshman and he was a seventh grader, I saw something special in him. He was more serious about loving the Lord and reaching the lost than a lot of the kids at school.
Although Rick was raised in the suburbs and I was raised in the highest crime-rate area of Denver, the Long family had a gospel grittiness about them that attracted me. His parents ran a halfway house for wayward girls, and over the years, as they shared the love of Jesus with them, they had led many of them to Christ. Rick had learned from his parents’ example what it meant to have a passion for God and compassion for the hurting.
“Do you know what this seminar is actually about?” Rick asked.
“Some kind of training to help us spiritually,” I answered.
Attending extracurricular events like this wasn’t drudgery for me. I’d seen how the power of the gospel had been transforming my family one by one, and I wanted to be the best witness for Christ I could possibly be. There were still two lost souls in my family I desperately wanted to reach—my still-too-guilty-for-Jesus ma, who I had been consistently trying to share the gospel with, and my out-of-state Uncle Richard. My other uncles had repeatedly tried to share the gospel with him over the phone, but he shut them down every time.
Maybe I’d discover some keys to getting the conversation going with Richard and breaking through to my ma. Plus, I’d heard the buzz about how transformational this seminar was for many of our teachers who had previously experienced it. It was supposedly a game changer, and I wanted to be changed.
Mr. Gothard had been an icon in the fundamentalist, home school, and Christian school underground for decades. Over the years, millions had attended his events. He routinely packed arenas, coliseums, and auditoriums across the nation with thousands of young people, filling young minds with his 1-2-3 easy brand of simple-answers fundamentalism.
Once our line of buses pulled into the Denver Coliseum parking lot, Rick and I parted ways. In strict, regimented order, all of us sorted ourselves into our class groupings and lined up alphabetically.
Even though I wanted to sit next to Rick, I realized it was probably a good thing we were divided into our class years. Rick and I were both full of adrenaline and jokes, which would have made us like nitro and glycerin in a conference setting. We loved the Lord, but we loved to joke around, too.
Once assembled in alphabetical lines, we marched to the arena for check-in. Along with thousands of other young people, we received a large red book called Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts. The King James Bible may have been our official divinely inspired playbook, but this giant red book would soon become our unofficial pretribulational, premillennial, all-things-fundamental rule book.
The excitement was palpable as we made our way down the steep gray concrete stairs of the Denver Coliseum to find our seats. Thousands of young people filled the packed room. I sat down between Stephanie and Shawna, two of my fellow very-serious-for-the-Lord classmates whose last names bookended mine alphabetically.
The crowd hushed and the conference started, but to my surprise, the famous Mr. Gothard wasn’t actually present to speak. Instead, a prerecorded video of him appeared on a big screen at the front of the hall as his voice boomed from the giant speakers on the stage.
“Seriously?” I said, turning to Shawna. “We’re watching a video?”
In reality, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this was no rock concert. We were fundamentalists, and fundies had no rhythm. My music teacher, Miss Widgren, had quoted Mr. Gothard in music class just a few weeks ago. “There’s ‘edifying music’ and ‘non-edifying music,’” she’d explained. “If you take a plant and expose it to classical music, it will grow. If you take a plant and expose it to rock ’n’ roll music, it will die. Music is not amoral. The music itself is either spiritual or unspiritual. That’s why you can’t mix Christian lyrics and a rock ’n’ roll beat. Some musical beats are from the devil, and some are from the Lord. The ones from the devil go against the natural beat of your heart.” Her implication was that it was somehow physically dangerous to listen to rock music.
Even as a freshman, this seemed kind of stupid to me. Shooting my hand up in class, I’d said, “Well, if you time it right, Miss Widgren, it could be like heart aerobics.” Everyone erupted in laughter—except Miss Widgren. Narrowing her eyes, she’d looked at me and said, “Greg, I need to talk to you after class.” Since I’d developed a reputation as the “spiritual leader of the class,” a ripple of “ewwws” and “uh-ohs” spread around the room.
That episode in music class had actually made me a little suspicious of where this whole seminar was going to go. Adding to my own skepticism about Bill Gothard’s take on rock ’n’ roll was an encounter I’d had with one of the new leaders at Youth Ranch, Mark Schweitzer. Mark and his wife, Kim, had come from the Youth Ranch movement’s mother ship, Florida Bible College, just six months earlier. He had a whole different take on Christian music and, in a way, on what it meant to live a Christian life. Mark was a kind of “grace dealer” in the midst of Arvada Christian School’s rule-heavy approach to the Christian faith.
Mark had taken me under his wing and was helping me to grow spiritually. As a fatherless teen, I was eager to have an older Christian male invest in me and help me grow in my walk with Christ, so I respected Mark and carefully considered everything he shared with me. Mark’s views on “non-edifying” Christian music diverged dramatically from Mr. Gothard’s. Mark avidly listened to all sorts of Christian rock, back in the fledgling days of the Christian music industry. He’d secretly introduced me to groups like Petra and DeGarmo and Key and to singers like Dallas Holm, Wayne Watson, and Randy Stonehill. He even sneaked me into a David Meece concert once to give me an up-close-and-personal view of the burgeoning Christian music scene of the early ’80s. I fell in love with Christian rock from that moment on.
“Don’t tell Yankee that I took you to this concert,” he warned, “or I’ll get fired.” It had all felt deliciously rebellious to me without actually being sinful.
