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Calling 911

Pursuing God's call to ministry has been anything but easy.

In the late summer of 2005, I returned to my parents' home in rural Oregon. I'd graduated college a few months earlier with absolutely no idea what I would do with my life. Well, really I had too many ideas. I'd gotten a degree in History and Creative Writing and was considering graduate programs in anything from Journalism to History to an MFA.

But after graduation, before I made my way back west, I moved to a Christian camp a couple hours away from Atlanta to work as a cabin counselor. During the handful of months I lived at camp I was immersed in Scripture and surrounded by kids who had grown up just like me, in fundamentalist Christianity.

They were a pretty broken lot. Beset by the usual buffet of adolescent angst, insecurity, and hormones, the guys in my cabin, week after week, were often on the verge of falling apart. They were misunderstood by their parents, misdiagnosed by their pastors, lost in their own religious heritage, floundering on Guilt Sea in nothing ...

May/June
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