reflections on a Christian life

Christ went to Perea, Moses went to Midian, Luke Skywalker went to Dagobah and we went to South Florida.  Our wilderness experience may not have been thoroughly redemptive but certainly had an irreversible impact.  It also served as a great essay topic for our oldest two when it came time to fill out college applications.

They told us that once you get south of Lake Okeechobee, you are in the tropics- what they didn’t tell us was that you have left Americana and entered a bizzaro universe which is a blend of New York City and Latin America.  We first became suspicious when we were house hunting.  We would walk into a model home in the middle of a landfill that shoved aside the everglades to stare at a map of the planned community that would soon exist.  There were sites for gas stations, convenience marts and at least three protestant churches along with the Catholic church and synagogue.  The developer had already estimated the needs and religious makeup of the prospective population.  Maybe he was able to do it based on price range and floor plan.  The house that had the wife’s playboy bunny suit encased in plexiglas over the bed left us no doubt that we were not in Kansas anymore.

It was our first (and, Lord help me, last) experience living in a gated community with a strict architectural code.  We would get friendly reminders occasionally from the HOA that our house had a little too much orange mold on it, our flower beds needed sprucing up or our sidewalk was due for a power wash.  The reminder would close with an offer for the association to have it done and billed to our residence.  We even had a particular blend of Sherwin Williams off white paint required for our mailbox.

Gloria Estefan was the queen of the city and red lipstick and nail polish were always in style.  In the hot weather, you couldn’t get away with the typical upstate New York ensemble of bulky sweatshirts and sweatpants so the general practitioners did a brisk business in fen-phen and the ENTs were more interested in scheduling nose jobs than determining whether your kid needed tubes to combat her ear infections.  At one of my son’s little league games, one of the moms sat sprawled across the benches in a bikini top with her hot pants undone at the top to ensure that she had an adequate tan below her belly button.  Guess the Junior League had different standards down here.

Since the company relocation package paid for spouse education, my wife enrolled in seminary.  She sat in a room of mostly guys who would fall into discussions of the “anger that they felt in the city streets”.  Her prof pointed out to her that she didn’t need to deal with the anger in the city streets so much as her own smoldering bitterness.  It wasn’t easy being an educated woman in the church who wanted to serve in her field of Christian Education.   Somewhere during our time down there, we encountered a conservative seminary graduate who knew some of our friends and relatives who were associated with the school.  On hearing her background, he suggested to my wife that she would be qualified to serve coffee in his church.  The same guy had a contracting business power washing roofs and siding.   He wanted to be paid in cash, of course (After pointing out that there is only one reason I know that contractors want to be paid in cash, I wrote him a check).

Finding a church was torturous.  I think we went to somewhere between fifteen and twenty different churches.  After the service, the whole family would sort out their experience and what struck them as particularly good or bad.  There was the mega-church with the former youth pastor whose church was eclipsing his mentor’s in % growth and attendance.  It was OK, we even went to a new attender’s class there.  Once our son emerged bug eyed from a Saturday evening class to describe a fistfight that had broken out in the class room.  The pastors seemed sincere and charismatic- it just didn’t click as a place in which to serve and grow given it’s strong staff led model.  Closer to home was the Baptist church in our development (one of those preplanned sites of course).  They were in the middle of a fund raising drive and there were testimonials from the congregation on the blessings of giving to the building fund.  Our kids referred to that “the money church” in all subsequent conversations.  We had an office meeting with that pastor too.  He had big plans for that congregation- but it turns out those took a back seat to an internet relationship which he was cultivating on the side.

For a while we attended a conservative Presbyterian congregation that met in portables in the middle of an open field of palm trees- I was suspicious that they would try to serve Kook-Aid in the communion cups – something about the setting gave me the creeps- plus the kids thought the pastor always sounded angry and I was annoyed that they didn’t list both me and my spouse on the quarterly giving statements- we were both listed on the checking account so why couldn’t they list us both on the tax statement?

When we finally settled on a church to attend regularly, we were doing just fine until an adult Sunday school class that got into a discussion of the imputation of Adam’s sin.  After about 20 minutes of passionate discussion on the topic it dawned on us that we were the only ones there who held the view that Adam’s sin is imputed to all man.  They were holding to some doctrine of age of accountability and discussing whether it happened at 12 years old or any earlier.  Our response was, “Why bother with any Children’s Christian Education if that is your doctrine?” And since we had invested our lives in pointing our own children along with lots of others toward God, it was a little too much for us to swallow.

We finished out our time there attending a Calvary Chapel that was 20 minutes away up in Pompano Beach.  The Preaching was great and the alter call response reminded me of a Billy Graham Crusade.  Our kids enjoyed not only the preaching but also the comfortable airport lounge chairs.  I think we were too exhausted to keep looking and needed a rest.  While I appreciate the sermon that gets it’s point across in 20 minutes or less, this guy proved that if you have a Spirit filled message worth hearing, people will sit for nearly an hour or more in wrapped attention (if you are going nowhere with the message, dragging it out doesn’t help).

Toward the end of our time there we were pretty desperate.  Our friends were being transferred away and we were still looking for a community beyond our family in which to anchor our lives.  My wife and I often took nighttime walks around the neighborhood talking and praying and occasionally encountering a toad as big as a rabbit.  Along the way, I got a call for an open position and was transferred- As we drove along the beach, on a last weekend prior to our departure, my daughter stared out the window and declared, “ I won’t ever miss this place.”

We had survived.  We had each other, we had our faith, we would each sort out the meaning or value of the experience.  What was for sure was that we were changed.