what's your story? (pt. 2)

Last week, I shared how around age 13 I became an atheist and that the intellectual justification for my de-conversion was the problem of suffering and evil. In early high school, I endured a traumatic experience, which gave me a deep emotional reason for rejecting God—but I won’t go into that here. As I also shared, music (and especially the pursuit of a successful musical career) was my god. One reason for this (if René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire carries any weight) is that I was surrounded by nascent greatness.

Many of my classmates at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts’ jazz program are now “living the dream.” In this photo from my senior year (with yours truly in the back near the clock) are a five-time Grammy winner, the bassist for the Tonight Show band (the Roots), the chair of the woodwind department at the Berklee College of Music, and at least three other flourishing professional musicians:

Our band director, Robert “Doc” Morgan, is a legend (thankfully, not for throwing chairs at people), counting among his most notable students MacArthur Fellow and former Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts (2011–2015), Jason Moran.

Of equal influence on my trajectory was my private guitar teacher (I’ll call him “Joe”). Joe was a talented and big-hearted man who would frequently invite me to “sit in” with the band at his gigs and whose instruction enabled me to win a scholarship to study jazz at the University of North Texas. After I moved off to college, we stayed in touch and would jam whenever he played in Dallas or I visited Houston. So I was utterly devastated when I received the news that Joe had been murdered.

It was a drug deal gone wrong. My teacher had been an addict, and for some reason he and his dealer got into a heated argument, and the argument ended with the dealer shooting Joe in the chest. He was found dead the next morning.

Joe’s death was an enormous loss for the jazz community in Houston, and it was also my wake up call. Trauma had emboldened me to give God the finger (verbally—I can tell that story another time), and now a new trauma was causing me to reconsider this boldness. What was I doing with my life? Is all this really just an accident?

Soon, I was on a quest for answers. My freshman-year roommate was (and still is) a Christian, and a mutual friend of ours had had a conversion experience sometime during my sophomore year. I began reaching out to both of them for help. On August 12, 1999 while talking to the two of them on the phone (they were now housemates and were passing the phone back and forth between them, answering my questions and sharing their experiences), I found, like Wesley, my heart being “strangely warmed.” I began reading the New Testament (finishing it within six months or so), attending church, and reading all the CS Lewis I could find. Mere Christianity introduced me to the idea that the reason I had been angry about my teacher’s murder was that I have an innate sense of justice and that this sense is one signpost (among many—such as the Wesleyan warming of my heart) pointing to the goodness and beauty of God. And although the Cross and the Resurrection did not “solve” the “problem” of evil, God’s willingness to take on our pain in the Crucifixion made the “problem” less compelling.

Within a year I was determined to devote my life to Jesus’ on-going mission to the world. I had found meaning and hope, and I wanted to share it with others. By 2003, I had spent a summer on mission in Juarez, Mexico and had been on two shorter mission trips to Russia and South Korea. In 2004, I spent six months in Argentina, where I would eventually return after marrying Emily to serve as a missionary for four years (from 2007 – 2010). Here I am (center, near the door) in front of one of the Argentine churches that I served:

If you hadn’t heard (or guessed), at this stage, I was mildly fundamentalistic in my theology, and the church that sent me to Argentina was a non-denominational, evangelical “mega church” (of some 4,000 members—middling size by Texas standards).

I have also been asked: How did I go from being a non-denominational evangelical missionary to becoming a priest in the Episcopal Church? I’ll save that for Part 3 (the final part) of this series.

For now, I leave you with the following questions: In what ways has emotional (or physical) pain pushed you away from God? In what ways has it drawn you closer? When have you felt your heart “strangely warmed” by a glimpse of God’s goodness and beauty?

Read: what's your story? (pt. 1)

Read: what's your story? (pt. 3)