Related articles and links |  1 of 4

The truth is, I'd rather do things my way. I thought the confusion I felt growing up without a father was just part of life, and there seemed to be benefits. Life was an open range. I disliked authority figures, because they represented boundaries. And the worst were older men. For reasons I didn't understand, I resented them. I felt as though they wanted me to submit to their authority because they wanted to feel powerful. But I also wanted their respect and approval. And if I sensed disapproval, I belittled them in my mind. I was a split person: Half of me wanted to be mentored through life — the side, I suppose, who wanted a father — and the other half would rather not answer to anybody. I started realizing this several years ago when I moved in with a family, the family of a man who taught a college class at a church I was attending.

I met John MacMurray at a strange time in my life. I had left my home in Houston and was traveling around the country when I ran out of money in Oregon. I got an apartment in the suburbs of Portland where housing was cheap, and I started going to a church in a town called Boring, Oregon. The town lived up to its name. It had one stoplight, a convenience store, and a burger place. It was very beautiful, mind you, with views of Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens, river valleys and all, but once you were over that stuff, you were out of luck. The church I started attending was in the middle of a shrub farm — landscape shrubs and flowers and Christmas trees. Every November, the Christmas trees would be hauled down to schmucks in Florida who paid fifty bucks to hang lights on them, sing some songs, then watch them dry up and get pine tar all over the wicker furniture. This church was crowded with tree farmers, hunters, fishermen, that sort of thing—men's men.

I was born going to church, raised going to church, and church had been a significant part of my life. I confess it's been comforting to me, at dark times, to know there is a God in the cosmos who is paying attention. I had walked away from a lot of it, but when I moved to Oregon, I was feeling lonely so I decided to plug back in to a church. They had a college group that met at a guy's house way out in the sticks, this guy I was telling you about, and I started driving out there once a week.

At first, I didn't know what to think of the group. Or of John MacMurray, the guy who led it. We would sit around in his big living room, on the floor, because even though he seemed to have money, he was too cheap to buy his wife furniture. After we made small talk for a while, John would sit down in a chair, the only chair in the room, and everybody would get quiet. The place fell to a hush. This took me a while to get used to, and I don't mean to make the guy sound like a strange guru or something — it's just that when he sat down in the chair, everybody shut up, waiting for him to speak. And the first thing John would say is, "What do you guys want to talk about?" He wasn't being weird or anything, and these people really respected the guy, so I paid attention.

The hush made me wonder what kind of guy I was dealing with, and I half expected him to lay his Bible across his lap, press his palms together, nod slowly, and say something like, "In order for us to become great, we must make ourselves small" — and everybody would respond with a worshipful sigh, to which I would have laughed out loud. Thank heavens, nothing like this happened. He turned out to be pretty normal, and the hush that came over the group was mostly because people didn't want to miss anything. This guy was that smart. Basically, apart from retreats where all we did was play Scrabble or cards and watch movies, the church's college program involved sitting around with John leading us in studying and talking about the Bible.

next page... |  1 of 4

share this page

June (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50