Category Archives: Growing up

The Surprising Loss of My Virginity

30 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Death, Events, Faith, Growing up, Gullibility, Health, Innocence, Learning from mistakes, Suffering

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The fall of my sophomore year at Illinois Wesleyan began with high expectations. I had finished my freshman year with straight A’s. I had a steady girlfriend.  I was newly elected president of the Methodist Student Movement. I was enjoying my classes including “Greek II,” “Creative Writing,” and “Biology,” which I hadn’t gotten to take in high school. And I was preparing for the next summer to be spent in Mexico with a Catholic student work project. But after the first few weeks I began to suffer sharp pains in my back, which only grew worse as I grew weaker every day. Finally, early on one weekday morning in October, I made it into the dormitory bathroom with severe pain in my bladder and penis, pouring bloody urine into the toilet until I passed out. When I awoke and the blood was just oozing, I dressed and headed for the campus health service. I thought I was dying.

Nurse Velma Arnold looked at me knowingly as I explained what had happened. “You have VD,” she said. It took a minute for that to soak in, before I said, “But that is impossible.” And she said, “That’s what they all say. Obviously I can’t help you. You will have to see Dr. Cunningham. I will need to know who your sexual partners have been.” It was hard to make her believe that I couldn’t answer the last question, since I hadn’t had any. She finally let me go anyway.

Later that day, still in misery, I saw Dr. Cunningham, who seemed to take a broader view of the matter. He recommended that I drink as much beer as I could while I was waiting to see Dr. Killough, the urologist. He suspected that I was experiencing kidney stones or a urinary tract infection or both, which is what it turned out to be. Having never drunk an alcoholic beverage, and being 19, under the legal drinking age, on a campus where possession of alcohol was considered cause for expulsion, I was not inclined to take his advice about the beer. He didn’t give me a prescription for beer, but he did give me an antibiotic sulfa drug. By the time I saw Dr. Killough, a day or two later, and he confirmed the double diagnosis with a cystoscope, I was also beginning to show the hives of an allergic reaction to the sulfa drug. The cystoscope, experienced regularly during the next several months, along with a few days in the hospital over Christmas break, removed every ounce of false modesty that I had developed in my 19 years. I had discovered more about my own genitalia than I ever wanted to know.

 

 

I was not completely clear of infection or signs of kidney stones until the next summer. The plans for a Mexican work trip cancelled, I wished my Catholic friends and girlfriend farewell, took a summer course in the history of Christianity, and looked for something else to do.

Responding to the Kerner Commission Report

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by in Caring, Citizenship, Events, Faith, Growing up, Gullibility, Learning from mistakes, Racial Prejudice, Small town life

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hot-owl-southern-white-faced-owl-in-botswana-trying-to-keep-coolAgain in the last semester of my senior year, the Illinois Wesleyan Political Science Department gave two other students and me another opportunity to represent the school at a special gathering, the annual Public Affairs Conference at Principia College. (By that time I was also taking the first political science course of my college career.) The conference theme was “Combatting Racism.”

 

The agenda of the conference included a variety of experts. The immediate background of the theme was the February 29,1968, release of the Kerner Commission Report, formally called the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which branded racism as the primary cause of the surge of riots that had recently swept several major American cities. It was the conference objective to consider and design programs and laws that would reverse the separation of America into two racial cultures that were separate and unequal. It was an ambitious undertaking, especially considering that minority groups were barely represented among the participants.

 

With the division into working groups, I found that my group had one young eloquent black man. He dispensed with the group assignment with the observation that we could imagine many fine ideas for state and federal action that would go nowhere. Instead, we could design goals for ourselves working in the families and communities in which we lived, and these might have some chance of accomplishing something if we were courageous enough to follow through. I was hooked, and so were the other members of the group. Around the circle we considered the actions and processes that would disturb the racism that prevailed where we lived. It was not comfortable, but it was real.

 

I had grown up in a northern community that was thoroughly segregated, even though it was only a few miles from Chanute Air Force Base. Air Force families of many racial backgrounds lived off-base, but only white families lived in Paxton, where people still boasted a “sunset law” that threatened any darker-skinned person who might be caught there after sunset. I had spoken about racial justice in the few sermons I was invited to preach in my home church, but I had not approached the members of the Paxton City Council that I knew, who had it in their power to renounce the “sunset” idea and prepare the town to be open to all.

 

Black friends lived in neighboring towns, but they would not risk coming to Paxton, even to take part in such common activities as bowling, seeing a movie, swimming, or roller-skating. I was welcome in their homes to eat meals and enjoy their company, and they were welcome in my home, which was miles from town in the countryside. The town’s segregating attitude had to change. That would change, I was confident, as the months went by.

 

We resolved to implement the plans we made.  The other groups reported ambitious government programs that would take large scale political action. Our group’s report seemed pale and meager in comparison. In hindsight, few of the ambitious goals that were formulated there, or in the Kerner Report, came to be embodied in actions in the decades that followed.

 

I returned to my home town and approached the public officials that I knew. To a one, they thought it was “too soon” or “too radical” to do what I was suggesting. Furthermore, the time for me to do the organizing that was needed even to accomplish such a modest goal was short, as I was preparing to marry and begin my graduate education in Chicago. There, in Chicago, I would learn what life in an integrated community was like, and how deprived my own background had been.

 

Fifty years later, returning to Paxton, finding a mix of people in the school system, working in the businesses, and living in the town, I wonder why it took us so long, and why we still have so far to go. There is still a lot of room for both large-scale and meager goals and the courage to embody them.

 

Those Poor Dead Rabbits

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Caring, Farm, Growing up, Learning from mistakes

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Raising rabbits was the occupation and 4-H project that was handed down from brother to brother to brother in my family, like the outgrown clothes. I was the third in line, and around the age of nine or ten I inherited the population of twenty to thirty New Zealand white rabbits.  With them came the hutches that my oldest brother had made—a single hutch, a double hutch, and a dandy triple decker with three pens on each level. The triple decker not only had woven “wire cloth” floors like the others; underneath the wire, it also had a tin slanted floor that allowed rabbit feces to roll down the ramp and out the rear to form a nice pile behind the hutch, handy for carrying to the garden that was next to it.

Every couple of years we went down to the Okaw Valley Rabbitary and bought a couple more to keep our population from getting too inbred. We had two or three breeding seasons a year, and most of the rabbits became dinner for our neighbors, although once in while someone bought live rabbits for their own breeding programs or pets.

Taking care of rabbits was relatively simple. I fed them morning before school and after school with Purina Rabbit Chow and occasionally hay and green leafy vegetables, put water in their coffee can waterers, refreshed the salt block in each pen occasionally and some fresh wood to chew on, so they’d leave their bed boxes and the hutch itself alone, kept the hutch clean, and provided shelter, straw, heat lamps, and unfrozen water in winter. When the time was right I put a male into the hutch with a female and watched them go at it, putting one and one together to get more than two, as farm kids learned more than math in those days. Then when the female started to nest with her own fur, I prepared to count the babies, because there wasn’t much else to do but watch the mother care for her brood or not.

When the cute  little rabbits ate their way into being big rabbits, I learned to slit their throats quickly, skin them and hang their pelts to dry, and butcher those rabbits for the fine meat our neighbors and we enjoyed. I don’t remember what we sold them for—maybe a couple of bucks apiece, about as much as the rabbit chow cost to feed them probably. I kept records for the 4-H project book every year, and I don’t think we ever made a profit that would match the amount of work involved.

When the weather was good, of course I played with them, took them out one by one and played in the grass or the garden. As I enjoyed the stories of Peter Rabbit and all of his kin, I never considered that I was the mean old farmer who would mercilessly put them to death. It was just the expected cycle of things.

My most embarrassing rabbit moment came in the last 4-H Fair where I exhibited a pair of rabbits as usual. I had always gotten a first place blue ribbon. Only my pair in that last year was two females, because I had sold or butchered all my young males. I figured two sisters was as much a pair as a male and female, but the judge did not agree. I had to be satisfied with a red ribbon, and face my competitors who thought I could not tell the difference.

Why did the rabbits come back to haunt me in my dreams years later, after I had given up raising rabbits and moved on to theology and philosophy? I would dream that I had forgotten to feed and water them, neglected to put up the corrugated sheet shelter that protected them from ice and snow, starved them to death, let them freeze, and the dreams would not just come once; they recurred. Not night after night, but every few weeks the rabbit dream recurred. If I was not the irresponsible, neglectful person while I had the rabbits, I certainly was when I got rid of them. They came back to haunt me, and remind me that diligence and attentiveness were required if I was to care for living beings. I was about sixteen when I gave up rabbit culture. The last time I dreamed of rabbits was about fifty years later.

Celebrating Pierre Trudeau’s Election

14 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by in Citizenship, Events, Growing up, People

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When Pierre Trudeau was elected Prime Minister of Canada in the winter of 1968, Rick Kelsey and I were at Ann Arbor, Michigan, at a Canadian-American Conference, representing the Illinois Wesleyan political science department. I had never taken a poli-sci course at IWU, but Rick was the star student, my friend, and he persuaded Dr. Brown to take me along. Trudeau’s election electrified the conference. The status of Quebec and the possibility of its independence was one of the issues tackled by the conference, against the background of increasing division over the war in Vietnam in the USA. Trudeau was a French Canadian and an intellectual, committed to a united Canada as fully as he was to a multilingual nation. Quebec’s separatists were seeking a vote and sure to get one. Trudeau would seek to bridge the gap and keep Canada whole (which he did when four years later the vote for separation was defeated).

Canadian and US academics, students, and politicians joined in presentations and debates about the future, made murky by the hostility and polarization disturbing each of the neighbor countries. We might not be able to help each other find solutions, but at least we could commiserate and share our concerns.

A philosophical voice belonged to the leading American politician present there, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.  He was both realistic about the severity of the problems and optimistic about the likelihood of resolving them, uniting Canada with the new leadership provided by Trudeau, and finding a way out of quagmire war in Vietnam, with the growing awareness that US efforts could not accomplish what the Vietnamese people themselves did not support.  During that year he would become the Democratic Party vice-presidential candidate, and, as doubtful as I was about Humphrey, I felt hopeful about the man Muskie I met in a small group that evening. The Labatt ale tasted good, too.

The confidence in Trudeau was well-placed, as his leadership became an inspiration to many people around the world, providing major improvements in Canada’s welfare and economy. The political divisions continued in both countries, but persistence did resolve the issues that seemed intractable for the next generation at least.

I learned that a young man of my age, with my same name, would soon be residing in Toronto, seeking Canadian citizenship and avoiding the draft. I was in no danger from the draft, but his actions would place my name on a suspicious list for a few years. Other US citizens would trade their citizenship for the that status in Canada, and somewhat more rarely some would come south.

Fifty years can give some perspective, and make us pause and ponder. Justin Trudeau now serves in his father’s office, and Canadian separatism appears quiet for the time being. Partisan division in the US has returned with a vengeance as war and fear again provoke American reactions, and the newly elected US President brings baggage in corruption and questionable motives that remind us of the President elected in 1968. The University of Michigan still sponsors forums for commiserating with each other’s problems, and Labatt ale is still good.

A Panegyric Upon Plymouth

24 Thursday Nov 2016

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The only time I have been invited to preach at a college chapel service was for Illinois Wesleyan University just before Thanksgiving in 1969. I chose the presumptuous title of “A Panegyric Upon Plymouth” as my sermon title, drawing from Soren Kierkegaard’s “A Panegyric Upon Abraham” and the historical fictions surrounding the founding of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

A panegyric is supposed to be an oration or public address in praise of something or someone. By using the scripture of the Pharisee and the publican as the scripture text for the sermon, my praise was reserved for the publican who approached God humbly and with repentance, in contrast with the Pharisee who proudly thanked God that he was not like other people because he was so much better. With no small amount of sarcasm, I compared the Pharisee to the usual message of thanksgiving in America and expressed the hope that we would learn to use the publican as a model instead.

My delivery was not so good that evening. I recall that my wife compared it to a dirge, since it was slow and halting. I was nervous and had never preached to a college audience in such a formal setting. My mentor, Chaplain Bill White, gave me the benefit of the doubt and said that sometimes it takes a while for a message to sink in and later people come it understand it better. Probably they would understand it from someone else who spoke it more effectively.

Maybe no one else understands that message better, but I do. If the legend of Thanksgiving bears any truth, it is in the generosity and good will of the Wampanoag people in helping the pilgrims to survive, even though the Wampanoag themselves had suffered the worst decade of their own existence as a people. As a result of the pilgrims and the actions of later puritans, we can attest that “no good deed goes unpunished.”

When President Barack Obama addressed the Arab nations in Egypt early in his presidency, expressing regret for some of the actions and attitudes represented in United States’ interventions in the Middle East (never using the word ‘apology’ although that was later used by Obama’s critics), my thoughts returned to my earlier diagnosis of American pride. We have not learned to be humble supplicants to a gracious and merciful God. Our ideas of American greatness are distorted and deadly to the future of the earth. We need to appreciate the humanity that we share with people everywhere, and realize the failures that also come with that humanity. We need to learn humbly from each other. We can only be grateful that God has given much more, much more than we deserve, and perhaps we will have more chances to do some good with what we have received.    

The Group Called ‘Us’

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Caring, Events, Growing up, People, Racial Prejudice, Small town life, Volunteering

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I didn’t learn how the group got started. When I joined them in the fall of my senior year in college, in 1967, they included a mixed racial group from Bloomington and Normal, several men and women, working a variety of jobs, laborers and professionals, a few Illinois State University professors, never more than a dozen people at any meeting. They met to talk about the issues of race and class in those Twin Cities and to identify and participate in actions that might improve those relationships. The era of street demonstrations seemed to be ending, and some of these people clearly had been involved in that kind of action, but they were looking for other things to do.

I had first met some of them when we demonstrated against a dentist at the edge of campus, who would not serve an African-American client. At the edge of campus yet! The obvious place for students to go if they were having a toothache! She invited me to come to a meeting of ‘us.’

They never had a name. They didn’t seem to have or be an organization. As usual some people were more vocal than others, and they spoke respectfully to each other, even when they disagreed about what they should do. When they decided to do something, they went ahead with those who were ready, even though not everyone ever took part in everything they did. They were simply ‘us.’

They talked about education and they placed books and articles in accessible places and took part in forums. They talked about legal actions and involved some lawyers. They talked about electoral politics and recruited a candidate for alderman. That’s where I found a place, canvassing neighborhoods for the candidate for alderman. Bloomington had never had a black alderman. They didn’t succeed in that campaign, but it set the stage for another try, which was successful.

I remember going house to house, having the door slammed in my face by some white folks, given a respectful but distant hearing by some, and welcomed by a few. (It was good experience for ‘cold calling’ on behalf of a church and its message.) Mostly I remember the houses of black and Hispanic folks. In those days, when we came to their doors, my fellow-canvasser and I were welcomed. So much so, that often we were invited inside to sit at table, and our hosts offered us something to eat. At noontime, instead of a reprimand for interrupting their meal, we were offered a dinner, and such a dinner it was! Stereotypical as it may sound, fried chicken, greens, home-baked bread, applesauce, and hominy were on the menu that day, and I didn’t mind any stereotypes at all as I enjoyed it.

When I think of Thanksgiving, a number of such events come to mind, but none more gracious than that one, nor as promising of a better future.

The Four-Square House

24 Monday Oct 2016

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The four-square farmhouse sits on a rise above the broad sweep of rich land bisected by the Middlefork of the Vermilion River. In the center of Ford County, the last county to be formed in the state of Illinois, the glacial swales are not prominent here, but sufficiently high to see every other rise in the area, including the town of Paxton, the highest point between Chicago and Cairo on the Illinois Central Railroad. Along that ridge a native trail wound above the surrounding marshland, known in historic times as the Ottawa Trail, with respect to the travels of the tribe that used it before and after the battles of Pontiac and later Tippecanoe. We found a variety of projectile points and tools along that ridge, dating from different centuries, unusual because no water source on that land provided the locale for village sites, as were common two miles lower along the riverbanks.

Why is this land so important to me? Fifty-four years ago it saved my family, my hopes for the future, and my sense of a secure place in the world. My father had lost the lease on the 320 acres on which we had lived for twelve years. I was sixteen years old.

For months he had searched for another farm or another job, without any encouraging possibilities. The college funds that my father had guided me to save went into the family budget. The prospective homes that we toured, that we could afford to live in, were depressing in their poor condition. The sale of the Angus herd and the excess farm equipment raised just enough to pay off accumulated indebtedness, leaving nothing to live on or secure someplace to farm.

Then this house and the hundred acres on which it sat came up for sale, owned by the elderly Bonnen couple who had lived there for many years, until his health began to fail, and she needed to move to Gibson City to continue her studio teaching of piano students. My father put together the down payment, based on the cash value of his life insurance, knowing that the farm would ordinarily pay for itself, and he and Mother would have to find other work to provide their livelihood, although the land itself would provide most of what we needed to eat. My mother would continue for many years working as a cook at the county nursing home. My father would get work at the post office and the broom factory, before assembling rental land year by year for the next fifteen years to nearly a thousand acres eventually. This was our home, and to it we returned for family gatherings and for respite for 37 years until Mother died here, and Dad continued to live here for another ten years until he couldn’t farm or drive any more, and he “retired” at the age of 89.

The land and the house, rented to two young families during the past thirteen years, along with Social Security, provided the money needed for assisted living and nursing home care for my father until he died a few months shy of 94. After that, the rental and farm income paid for home maintenance and provided enough to buy some of the land, eight acres, from my brothers. That made a remnant farm of 34 acres. Here we will live for a while, restoring the 101-year-old house to serve the next generation that will live here. We will try to pay this old house back for the happiness it has given us and enjoy it and the serenity of its location for a while longer.

 

The Call and the Calls

23 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in Church, Faith, Growing up, Innocence, Prayer

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Methodist Bishop Edwin Voight sponsored a Convocation on the Ministry at First Methodist Church in Springfield, Illinois, in 1961. The aim was to inform and recruit young men for the ministry; no women attended. My pastor, Glen Sims, aware that I had completed the God and Country Award in Scouting and was serving as a de facto chaplain for the local Boy Scout troop on our monthly outings, thought that I might be interested and shared the invitation to attend. Families of the Springfield churches generously provided accommodations and hospitality.

Fifteen years old, I was the youngest in attendance. Most were older high school or college students. I knew I was out of my league. The program consisted of young adults and older ministers recounting their calls to ministry and their formative years in ministry, as well as prayers and worship around the theme of vocation. Their stories were impressive and elaborate, though fifty-five years later I cannot remember a single one of them.

What I do remember was my inadequacy and youth in the face of the experiences shared. The personal experience that I had to share, when in small groups we were asked to share our own stories, was the fact that I walked regularly four blocks to my home church, after school when I had to stay for some extra-curricular activity, in order to use the church telephone to call home. Then, while waiting for my mother or father to pick me up, I would stand in front of the impressive stained glass window or the great Last Supper carving and pray, while I waited twenty to thirty minutes for a ride (Our home was five miles away.). During those times I came to think of the church as my second home. I prayed about my future and how I could use the talents that people around me told me that I had, though I wasn’t at all sure.

When I had finished recounting ‘my calling’ in this way, the group leader noted appropriately that not everyone had a call to the ministry, which I took as a direct response to my story. That stung a little. Later in the gathering, the call of Moses, who was not an effective speaker at the time, and Jeremiah, who was just a boy at the time, gave me a little courage to think that I might yet be in the right place. I was not convinced, but the thought was effectively planted.

Called to Account

07 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Pentecostal bannerEarly in 1974 I sent my paperwork to the Central Association “Church and Ministry Committee” requesting consideration as a candidate for ordination in the United Church of Christ. By doing this I bypassed the usual procedure of becoming “In Care” of an Association for at least a year before being considered for ordination. I had served the United Church of Tilton full-time since receiving a Doctor of Ministry degree a year earlier, and I “voluntarily located” at that Methodist-UCC merged congregation, instead of entering the United Methodist itinerant ministry and be subject to appointment by the bishop. For that year I had been living between denominations. Toward the end of it I surrendered my credentials as a United Methodist deacon.

I was grateful that the area UCC committee was willing to give me a hearing; they were not obligated to do so. Although I had studied the UCC for the five years of graduate education, and organized the Chicago Theological Seminary archives, which required a growing familiarity with UCC polity, I did not know what to expect when facing that committee. My essays on personal experience, theology, Christology, ecclesiology, ministry, and church history and polity were rooted in biblical study but far from traditional. If I were to be rejected by the committee, I had no back-up plan. I expected that at best they would delay my request while I developed longer relationships and more trust with UCC people in the area.

The committee, equally divided between clergy and laypeople, heard my presentation and asked perceptive questions that revealed that they had read my papers. They also explored the particular needs and background of the ministry at Tilton. Most of the time the group seemed to be interested and agreeable, and I sensed no areas of disagreement or serious challenge, until one of the members, a senior minister at one of the leading area congregations, wanted to know more about my Christology. It appeared to be “low” in comparison to his “high Christology.” I had already spoken at some length about the mediating and representational character of Jesus’ ministry. He pursued the weakness of my positions relentlessly. Finally, I admitted that he was probably right. I was closer to being a Modalist than an Athanasian Trinitarian. I did not have a philosophical position that enabled me to know the internal being of the divine. That did not please him. I retired to another room while the committee deliberated for the next hour.

The new minister of the Association, Robert Sandman, came out for a minute to reassure me that they were dealing with each other’s different positions as much as dealing with my case. That did not encourage me at the time, but I realized that they were giving more attention to serious matters of Christian life and belief than any church-related group I had faced before.

At the end, they called me back into the room, congratulated me for my ministry, and asked that I proceed with preparations for ordination as soon as practical with the aid and advice of a couple members of the committee.

I had passed their scrutiny, and they were willing to approve my ordination. They had seriously considered many concerns that I thought were important, including some of the social issues of the day, but, equally important to them and me, theological questions in depth. I was impressed. They were living up to their reputation of considering creeds as “testimonies but not tests of faith.” They were willing to suspend their own rules in order to recognize the validity of a ministry that they valued. It was a high point in my journey into ministry, and it would be followed by many more.

And What About Your Wife?

03 Saturday Sep 2016

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In June of 1970 I asked to be considered for ordination as a deacon in the United Methodist Church. At that time ordination to the office of deacon was a step toward ordination as an elder for Methodists. I had completed two years of graduate theological and professional studies, and I had served as a “licensed local preacher” for seven years in a variety of church-related positions. The Conference to which I belonged was Central Illinois, where I had lived all of my life before moving to Chicago in 1968, but my two years in Chicago had stretched my ties to the Methodists in central Illinois. My original mentor in ministry, Glen Sims, had died suddenly with a brain tumor. Controversies surrounding racial justice, the War in Vietnam, and other social issues had alienated some ministers who had been part of my formation, and they had left the conference or found themselves in vocational jeopardy.

The times were changing, but I wanted to persist in a path toward ministry and knew that I had to submit my credentials and my ideas to the judgment of those who made the decisions regarding whom the church would ordain. There were two dozen men who were candidates for deacon that year, a large class. Women were just beginning to request consideration; I do not remember any that year, although I knew several excellent candidates who were coming in the years ahead. Just to help us feel more insecure, the leaders of our assembly made it clear that the church had a lot more candidates for ministry than they had congregations to employ us, so we should be ready to be disappointed.

The panel called us in one by one. Several ministers sat around the table with questions. Mentally I reviewed the theological and social controversies that wracked the church and challenged us all to deeper faith and extensive preparation. So the questions came. “Do you smoke or use tobacco?” No, I found that I am allergic to tobacco, I responded. “Do you drink alcoholic beverages?” Very little, I said. (I don’t have money to waste, I could have added, but didn’t.) “Do you expect to have an appointment to serve a local church?” No, I have secured an internship in a Methodist Church in Danville and Tilton, and afterwards I will return to seminary to complete my studies. “What about your wife?” I explained that she loved the church as I did, but she was raised a Lutheran and a Presbyterian, so she was just getting acquainted with Methodism, and where we lived in Chicago, we worshipped at a Disciples congregation near our home. This coming year would be her first opportunity to worship regularly with Methodists, since we had left Illinois Wesleyan and its ecumenical chapel services. Responding to me, there were some comments that wives could help or hinder one’s ministry, and I should resolve this situation before seeking an appointment. That was it. That was my ordination interview. My answers to their questions disappointed my interviewers. They appeared to be mostly relieved that I wasn’t seeking an appointment to a parish anytime soon.

Later I learned that the panel had approved my ordination as a deacon. Bishop Lance Webb appeared before our class before the service itself, letting us know that some of us were not likely to be ordained as elders unless several matters were resolved. He would not ordain anyone who accepted smoking and drinking. Our families had to be as committed to the Methodist ministry as we were. He was looking at me as he spoke, or he seemed to be. What about other issues? What about our faith formation and life in prayer and the extensive problems facing our society? They were not mentioned that day, except that he wanted us to read his books. I recognized that these were tests that I would not seek to pass when the time came, not because I couldn’t, but because there were other tests that were more important to me and to the church I wanted to serve.