reflections on a Christian life

Part 2 High School

High School was a spiritual battleground – in which faith was tested and young minds were tempted.  For me, one of the biggest daily challenges was finding a restroom that was not a smoker’s hangout and still had some TP available in the stall.  As I tell my kids, I went to an “urban high school”.  We didn’t do homecoming floats- those would have been burned well before any parade.  The school fence was locked after homeroom and “open campus” was only for those kids who would dash out the front door and sprint to the Acme across the street during the switch to first period.

It was the early 70s.  Neil Armstrong was about to step on the moon and Hal Lindsay’s, The Late Great Planet Earth, was screaming that Armageddon was near and we had a good idea which world powers would bring it about.  I was just hoping that the rapture didn’t take place before I had had sex (married sex of course- which meant the world better hold together for at least 10-15 years).  1984 was still a way’s off so George Orwell’s future could be reality.

I was busy being sometimes a jerk, sometimes a Pharisee, sometimes naïve and once in a while getting things right.  Events like “rally round the flag” hadn’t been invented yet so I knew only a few other Christians at my school outside of the kids from my church and the total was maybe 10, definitely less than 20.  So the likelihood that any of them would actually be in a class with me was pretty slim.  Of course there was no such thing as a “born again Catholic” that I had heard of yet.

Union County, New Jersey must have been written off by most of the big high school para-church ministries because they were only rumors were I lived- probably thriving out by the Short Hills mall (our dentist moved out there from Newark- and if the Brady Bunch lived in Jersey, they’d live there).    Anyway, there was this ministry that we hooked up with called Hi-BA – an acronym for “High School Born Againers”.  It was my link to normal Christian kids who actually went to other high schools and churches in my area.  I guess Hillside just made it into the fringe of their coverage area.  The attraction was primarily meeting and mingling with other Christians- and in the meantime I was getting tons of inductive Bible Study and being pushed to do evangelism.  The Bible study was great and seeing as it appears that most sermons and Bible lessons seem to have now latched on to the “Think and Do” model of pedagogy, it is sorely missed (“Think-and–Do” books were these fill in the blank primers which were the standard curriculum in my elementary school days up through at least fourth grade- complementary workbooks for anyone who was devouring the Dick, Jane, Sally and Spot dramas).  The evangelism part was forced and awkward.  My Catholic and Jewish classmates politely tolerated my proselytizing.  I was mostly relieved that I could report that I dutifully performed and still had friends (even if they now were aware that I might turn “Jesus salesman” on them in a one on one situation).  One guy in my grade became a Christian through a Jesus People or other type of charismatic event- not through anything I had done.  He was amazing to observe- he really felt changed and would talk about it with others just like he was talking about sports, cars or girls- that wasn’t me- I had too many interests to balance and risks to weigh.

The other BIG threat in High School was Biology class and evolution. Creationism was just breaking on the scene and not yet debunked as Seventh Day Adventist rationalization (Oh- you didn’t know?), intelligent design was still thirty years off.  I had to make a stand in the classroom and began rattling off challenges (which I had carefully digested and practiced) based the Piltdown man, abnormalities in the progression of the horse and the second law of thermodynamics. With every eye in the class looking at me like I was from another planet (not just the quirky freshman in the sophomore bio class) or just enjoying the diversion, the teacher asked a follow-up on thermodynamics.  I was tapped out- all I knew was that this was supposed to be a perfect foil (after a full semester of thermodynamics in college there is no way I would introduce that to the debate). I beat a hasty retreat by mumbling about irregularities in Carbon 14 dating methods and survived the rest of the unit in stony silence planning a strategy for the upcoming test.  Was my teacher going to fail me if I just wrote down Genesis 1 on my test paper when asked to explain the evolutionary process?  I think I just spat out what he wanted while using the word “Theory” in every other sentence- after all – I needed to stay on the Honor Roll.