Seventeen
Seventeen
On December 9, 1995, I turned seventeen.
It had been nearly two years since the accident that left my friend James paralyzed from the chest down. Childhood lost some of its cover after that. I had always been anxious, spiritually alert, emotionally curious, and what happened to James expanded something in me I did not yet know how to carry. I was more awake to life than I knew how to live.
That year is hard to describe with precision because nothing in it kept its place. Faith and friendship and longing and grief kept running together. Sometimes that closeness deepened things… friendships went farther than they would have otherwise, conversations mattered in ways I still carry. Other times it created distance. People who had been close withdrew. Some of that I still feel.
By the time summer came, I had not planned to go on the church youth trip at all. It was the night before they left. I was with a friend, a girl from our youth group, and when she realized I wasn’t going she stopped and said, What? You’re not going with us? Then she said she was disappointed in me.
Her words worked on me all the way home.
I told my mom I needed to go. She called the sponsors, and by the next morning I was on a bus to Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
I remember the top bunk in that Tahlequah cabin. The ceiling was closer than it should have been. I turned onto my side and watched the grain of the wood just inches from my face. I can still see it if I try.
I did not sleep that first night. Or the second.
The room was full of the sounds you only notice when everyone else is sleeping. Someone shifting below me. The steady rhythm of breathing. The occasional creak of the frame. I tried to sleep, tried to think about other things. I couldn’t shake God’s nearness.
I had heard about moments like this. I had not expected to be inside one. God was present in that room in a way that was neither frightening nor comfortable, only undeniable.
I did not go gentle into that good “yes.”
I could feel the strain between the life I was living and the life asking to be lived. I knew enough to feel the cost of that. By the second night something in me had loosened. I said yes to God, and I meant it. It felt like recognition, as if I were stepping toward something that had been waiting for me for a long time.
When I got home, the streets were the same. My room was the same. The faces were the same.
My attention was not.
I began praying out loud when I was alone. Something changed when I gave it voice. The scriptures changed too, or I changed in their presence. They no longer lay flat on the page. I would sit with a Bible and a notebook and with what I did not yet understand. I wasn’t trying to master anything. I was trying to stay awake to what I’d started to see.
When my senior year began, something in me had shifted enough that other people were starting to notice. A few students came to me and said we should start meeting, have a Bible study…try to make sense of things. They asked if I would lead it.
I hesitated. I was still unsure of myself in most rooms.
Once I began, something steadied in me. I remember those first moments in my body, hands unsure where to rest, voice catching at the start, the inward wish to disappear. Then somewhere in the middle of speaking my inner life and outer life would stop pulling against each other. I would find myself saying things I had not prepared, as if I had stepped into a current already moving.
That was the year I stood to preach for the first time.
Looking back, it feels like a hinge in the house of my life, a door that began to move before I understood how much would pass through it.
I’ve been thinking about that year again.
Today marks seventeen years since our family joined Second Baptist Church in Liberty.
We came on Easter Sunday—Christy, baby Jackson, and me. The day before there had been an egg hunt, children scattering across the grass, laughter rising without effort. We joined in worship that Easter morning and came forward at the end.
A week later I stood to preach for the first time.
That afternoon my mom called. My dad had suffered a stroke after surgery. I was a few states away, newly arrived among people I barely knew. In the weeks that followed I kept up with them by phone, waiting until my dad was home from rehab. When the time came to go, a church member named Harvey Thomas gave us his reward points so I could fly. I had been here only a matter of weeks and did not yet know what it meant that someone would do that.
Seventeen years have passed since then. When I try to hold them all at once they blur. When I think of them in days they return. Sundays. Hospital rooms. Weddings. Funerals. Laughter that came easily. Losses that did not. People who came and stayed. People who came close and then moved on.
Today was Student Sunday. The teenagers led worship. There were students up front this morning who were not yet born when I arrived. Some I dedicated as infants. Some I later baptized.
My oldest son was six months old on our first Sunday here, being carried. This morning he stood and read scripture, all six feet of him. I found myself trying to hold together the baby we carried into that sanctuary and the seventeen-year-old standing there with the word in his mouth.
Seventeen.
Time, which usually passes without showing itself, was standing there in plain sight.
This place continues to change me. I can hear it in the way I listen now, in the way I hold people’s stories more slowly. The theories thin out over time. What remains are faces, names, rooms, grief, joy.
There is a steadiness to my life here that I could not have imagined at seventeen. And still, I can feel a breeze under the door. A settled life is not a finished one. I recognize the feeling from a long time ago, something sacred drawing near and refusing to be ignored.
Perhaps I’m standing in the middle of another turning and don’t know it yet.
Thank you.
Beautiful.