Reading: Chapter 3: My Journey

Chapter 3

MY JOURNEY

Life is a Story. Stories matter.

It was Sunday, October 27. Shortly after 12 noon. Vienna, Austria, time.

I was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. While completing the instrumental requirements for a double major—music education instrumental and music education vocal—at Fredonia State University College in New York, I had learned that the music conservatory in Vienna would be a great place to study voice. Plus it would look good on my résumé.

About 10 students from our college attended the conservatory that year. One in particular triggered my “inner rogue”; I was friendly but with ulterior motives in mind. Things were going well, I thought, until she disclosed that she was a Christian.

Disgust quickly turned to anger. At that point in my life, I had little respect for Christians, having encountered many who seemed hypocritical in their words and behaviors. (Of course, like many resisters to faith, I saw only what I wanted to see.) I classified them as “airheads.”

But still, I was curious. My path to Vienna had differed slightly from that of my classmates. I had toured Romania with a school choir for three weeks that summer. At the end of the tour, the choir flew back to the States, but I stayed and traveled through Europe. I took a train from Bucharest, Romania, through Bulgaria to Athens, Greece. Then I traveled by boat to the boot of Italy, from which point I hitchhiked and rode more trains along the eastern coast to Venice, and then on to Vienna, Austria.

The boat trip included a stop at the island of Corfu. This was a rustic paradise: For three days, I slept under the stars, gazed at the hypnotic blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea, and pondered my life. I remember staring at a cross, wondering if it might be time to revisit “that Christian thing.”

Perhaps that is why, after grumbling a bit, I asked the girl who had become the object of my disgust where she went to church while in Vienna. She said she attended an International Chapel. “International Chapel?” I said. “I’ve never been to one of those before.” And then, not waiting for an actual invitation, I added, “I think I’ll go.”

Sunday came, and I arrived early. This “chapel” did not meet in a traditional church building, but rather in what looked like the back of an old theatre. People were mingling prior to the Sunday School hour.

In addition to its unorthodox meeting place, the church was peculiar in two ways. The first was the people. This was an English-speaking church in the heart of a German-speaking city. Some of the attenders were folks like me: college students from universities around the world. There were also diplomats with their families. As the gateway to the Eastern Bloc countries, Vienna was a base city for missionaries serving the persecuted church in Eastern Europe, so there were also people in various stages of coming and going from numerous locations in that region.

These groups converged into what appeared to be a strange mixture of people. As they mingled, I overheard different languages: some English over here, some German over there, something that sounded Slovakian in yet another group. It was the most diverse crowd I had ever encountered. What was most striking was the way they related to each other. They seemed at ease in their diversity, unforced, conveying a natural camaraderie with one another.

The second peculiarity was the Sunday School teacher. He was a handsome, middle-aged man, physically fit, with a smile that, again, put people at ease. He stood while he taught, Bible in hand. I knew the Bible well enough to recognize the quotations laced throughout his talk. What was puzzling was that he never opened the book. He didn’t have to. His relationship to the Scriptures seemed more like that of an old friend than an interpreter or expositor. I could not separate the words from his life. His faith did not seem forced in any way; it simply was. As I watched and listened, I thought: This guy, these people—they’re not fitting my “airhead” definition of Christians! I left church confused. The next day I ran into the girl. “So what did you think?” she asked. I told her it had left me confused. She handed me a small Bible—the New Testament and Psalms—and departed.

I took that Bible back to my dorm and had a conversation with a God I wasn’t sure existed. It went something like this:

God, they say You are real and this book is true. Well, I have criticized Christians, put them down, and even done cruel things to people because they were Christians. But there’s one thing I’ve never done: I’ve never read the book for myself. So here’s the deal: I’m going to read this book, and I’m going to read it good. If it’s true, then I’m Yours. If it’s not true, I’ll never again consider Christianity to be a valid option for my life.

I spent the next two weeks reading that Bible. At first I expected discrepancies and fallacies to jump out at me. But none did. Instead, I found myself increasingly captivated by this person named Jesus. The more I read about Him, the more I wanted to know Him. Two weeks later, on October 27, I returned to that church.

Again the people were impressive in the way they loved one another. And once again I was amazed by the genuineness of the Sunday School teacher. This time, though, it was the preacher who sealed the deal. I don’t remember anything else he said, but at one point he held up his Bible and declared: “I’m not preaching . . .” and rattled off a list of denominational names. “I’m not preaching the Baptist religion or the Catholic religion. . . I’m preaching Jesus Christ as He is revealed in this book!”

I had never heard anyone play down their denomination and lift up Jesus Christ. “This is it,” I said to myself. “Jesus is for real!” I was excited, so much so that I thought I must be a Christian!

As soon as the service ended, I rushed over to the Sunday School teacher. “Bud! Bud! I think I’m a Christian!”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “No!” I shouted.

He sat me down and shared this verse:

And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life (1 John 5:11-13).

Bud said, “You pray, and then I’ll pray.”

I closed my eyes. The first thing out of my mouth was: “God, I’m a sinner.” I don’t know why I said that. It must have come from my reading of the Bible. But I said it and knew what it meant. “God, I’m a sinner. I’ve been living life on my own terms and in my own way. Thank You, Jesus, for dying for my sins. Please take my life now; make it what You want it to be.”

That was it. Bud said, “Amen,” and we opened our eyes.

Bud’s smile quickly turned to laughter. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Ted, as a brother in Christ, I love you. If there’s anything I can do for you, you let me know.”

He introduced me to his wife. She greeted me warmly, shaking my hand. She glanced at her husband, who was still smiling broadly. Still shaking my hand, she glanced at him a second time, and a third. Then, realizing what had happened, she threw her arms around me. She was crying! “Just wait,” she said. “You’ll see, you’ll see.”

Me? I was happy to have made a decision. I walked through the crowd, shaking people’s hands. “I’m a Christian now. Isn’t that wonderful?” I spent the afternoon with my newfound Christian friends. I did not really fathom what had happened until that night.

I was lying in bed, thinking about the day’s events, when I sensed that something was different. How to describe it? It was as if I had been studying for a long time, building a natural tension I did not know was there, until someone snuck up from behind and gave me a back rub—“Ooh, I didn’t realize I was so tense!”

In a much more profound way than that, the tension, the anxiety, the fears and the turmoil—those things that had been a natural part of my non-Christian life—faded away. I had not been aware that they were there until that moment, when I realized they were gone. That’s when I knew with certainty that God had entered my life and was already making changes from the inside out.

I began talking to a God I now knew existed, baring my soul with an openness and freedom I had never thought possible. My first words were about my dad: how I missed him, how growing up without him had been such a struggle. “This is a void in my life, Lord, but it’s one You’re going to fill,” I said tearfully. “In fact, You’re going to fill all the voids in my life, because You are my heavenly Father.”

Days later I read: “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling” (Psalm 68:5).

Anywhere but There!

My new faith opened a new perspective on life. My aspirations shifted from leading a high school music department to entering full-time missionary service. With great zeal I prayed: “God, I will go anywhere in the world You want me to go, except the kind of place I grew up in.” I could not fathom going back to the old neighborhood. Surely God would deem such a caveat inconsequential in light of my eagerness to follow Him anywhere (except there) in the world! Perhaps a bit of context would be helpful here. Bellport is a small town located 60 miles east of New York City. Nestled on Long Island’s south shore, its colonial-style architecture and laid-back pace made it an almost idyllic place to live. Middle- to upper-class families enjoyed the pleasant experience of calling it home.

But like many of the coastal towns along the southern strip of Long Island, the railroad ran right through Bellport. And for those who lived on the north side of them, those tracks divided more than the town’s geography. They became a metaphor for a far deeper divide between black and white, rich and poor.

I was six years old when we moved into North Bellport. My younger sister (the historian of the family) believes we were the first African Americans to move into this newly formed hamlet. Demographics changed rapidly: Within five short years, the community became predominantly black, with some Puerto Ricans and Caucasians.

In many ways, my childhood was a happy experience. Food was cheap and bountiful: Cheerios or fried eggs for breakfast; peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch; ham hock stew, creamed tuna over bread, or fried chicken necks at dinner—I have many fond memories of food (my mother fed me steak at six months!). Who could forget the Sunday after-church family visits to the Ponderosa and its all-you-can-eat buffet!

I have fond people memories as well: Saturday family outings at Heckscher State Park; visits to my cousins (one family, 10 kids) in Glen Cove; and playing games with other children in the neighborhood. Favorites were Running Bases (a friend and I played catch near “bases”—large rocks or wooden planks—as other kids tried to run the bases without getting tagged), Marbles (our dirt driveway was perfect for carving out terrain), and Bottle Caps (this was the granddaddy of them all! We’d use drywall ripped from a nearby abandoned house to draw a game board with numbered squares on the street pavement. Then we’d find used bottle caps, scrape them on the ground until they were smooth and shiny, and compete to see who’d be the first to run the board by flicking the caps in and out of the squares).

Life changed dramatically in the seventh grade. I left the safety and familiarity of elementary school for the uncertain world of middle school. Adjusting to a new environment made my middle-school experience uncomfortable. The presence of gangs made it dangerous.

I remember being confronted one time in the hallway by a group from my neighborhood:

“Hey Ted, you gonna join our gang?” they asked ominously. “No,” I replied. “I’ve already joined the music department.” Before they could process my response, I scurried off to the music room! The music department became a safe haven in a hostile world. During free periods, and often also during the short breaks between classes, I was there: singing, practicing my trombone or just hanging out. I became a music nerd, with musicians as my closest friends, to the exclusion of almost everyone else.

That pattern continued in high school, where I emerged as a leader in the music department. There were times, walking through the halls, when I would hear shouts of “Nigger” and “Uncle Tom” in the same day! I ignored them. Music was my life; my goal was to graduate college and direct a high school music department.

When the time came to leave for college, the message was loud and clear: “You’re leaving North Bellport. You made it. Don’t come back.” To me, the caveat in my prayer—I will go anywhere in the world except. . . —made perfect sense.

The Identity Button

After my conversion experience in Vienna, Pastor Mathews quickly became my mentor and confidant. We met on Tuesday mornings at his apartment, located on the edge of the city at the foot of the Vienna Woods. We walked those woods often. He was a wonderful listener; I shared my thoughts and concerns, and also asked a multitude of questions. He always responded with wise, loving counsel.

But in the second year, he picked up on my caveat. Over time, his gentle probing turned into a direct challenge: “Ted, you should consider serving in the inner city. City ministry could use someone like you.”

My response was irrational yet consistent: “I just can’t go back [to an inner-city environment].”

One fateful Tuesday morning, my pastor again brought up the possibility of my serving God in the inner city. Again I resisted. As I stood at the front door, saying my goodbyes, I noticed a puzzled look on his face.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m just wondering,” he replied, “if you realize you are black?” I immediately broke down. Pastor Mathews rushed me to his living room, trying frantically to console me. At first what spewed out of me seemed to be raw emotion, irrational and unintelligible.

It was clear that a great conflict had been bottled up for a long time, and now it was pouring out of me.

In his probing, Pastor Mathews had pushed my identity button, unleashing a flood of unresolved questions. Who was I? Nigger? Uncle Tom? An African American with an operatic voice, a black musician who was lousy at improvisation but could sightread atonal music—what kind of anomaly was that? “Definitions” coming out of the Black Power movement had horrified me. I did not want to “shuffle,” I preferred Standard English to Ebonics, and ethnic differences fascinated me.

Over the years, such discrepancies had caused some of my hue to question my “blackness.” Secretly I sometimes questioned it as well.

I had an identity problem. Questions, and the shame and guilt that accompanied them, had remained bottled up inside, until Pastor Mathews pushed the button and unleashed the flood.

As the initial wave of emotion subsided, a new reality came into focus: To truly serve God, I could run from this no longer, because God made me in His image, and He made me black. I had not linked the image of God to personal identity before, but at that moment I realized that only the former could bring true meaning to the latter.

Eventually I calmed down and declared in prayer an openness to serving God anywhere. “God, if You want me to go to the inner city, I will.”

A Gift Named John Peyton

Anxious to begin the next chapter of my life, I dropped the double major, graduated college with a B.A. Degree in Music, and enrolled in Denver Theological Seminary. Not that I had any intention of graduating from seminary; I simply thought it would be a good place to learn a few things about “American” Christianity. I still had my sights set on ministry overseas.

That is, until I met John Peyton.

Against the backdrop of a predominantly white school, John Peyton stood out as larger than life. He was a tall, lean, dark-skinned African American. He was charismatic; he could be loud at times, but even when silent his presence would fill a room. His testimony was similar to that of another dynamic Chris- tian leader: Tom Skinner. For Skinner, it was from the jaws of the Harlem Lords street gang that God had rescued him from certain death; for John, it was from the clutches of the Black Panther Party.

I remember being introduced to John in the student center.  I watched as he sized me up and, predictably, found me wanting. He mumbled something dismissive, like “You just another educated white n---.” I sized him up as well: He was a gift. This man of similar hue but different background; this gritty, dynamic leader within the black community; this man of strong convictions and deep devotion to Christ—he didn’t know it yet, but we were about to become good friends.

As I had done with Bud and Pastor Mathews, I “hung on to his coat sleeves.” I followed John around, meeting with him whenever I could. At first we argued, challenging more the caricatures we had of each other than the real people. Gradually argument gave way to great, substantive discussions.

“If you’re black, you belong in the city,” he would assert. 

“Blackness does not bind me to the city,” I retorted. “We as a people are bigger than that. God may lead me to the city, but I don’t have to be there.”

From divergent points of view, we tackled the issues of our day: race, culture, the black church, white people, and how we might make a difference in our world. Often we’d go to his house in the suburbs and debate while devouring a pot of chit’lins. (Chitterlings have a strong, distinct smell. They repel most people, but for chit’lin lovers like John and me, they are mouth-watering. One day while visiting in his home, we heard a knock. Standing at the door was a black man. He held out an empty bowl. “I smell wrinkle steak!” he cried. Of course we had to share.)

As we talked, our admiration for each other grew. As the time came for him to graduate and move on, he shared something I have always cherished: “Ted, I think we are ahead of our time.”

John went on to lead a large multi-ethnic church in Virginia. Shortly after John left seminary, I began working with youth in Denver, first as a Sunday School teacher at a storefront mission, and later on staff with Youth for Christ. It was strange: I had won the argument, but lost the war. The more I argued that I did not have to go to the city, the more I was drawn there. John’s perspective had enriched my own, and in the process changed my life and the entire course of my ministry.

Questions for Thought

1. Are there caveats to your willingness to serve God any- where He may call you to go? What might your next step be in opening your heart to challenging things God may want you to do for His Kingdom?
2. Do you struggle with questions about your own ethnic identity or other aspects of how God has made you? Have you considered whether these struggles may be hinder- ing you from saying an unequivocal yes to God’s call on your life?
3. Is there someone in your life who comes at things from a completely different perspective than your own? Do you try to avoid this person and the disagreements you have with him or her, or do you embrace the opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from each other?