Recently I came across a list of “getting to know each other” questions. One of them asked about one’s first memory. I do have memories of sitting at the table in a highchair, a bib tied around my neck, insisting that I be read to (remember Golden Books?) before I would take the next bite of food. My mother tells me that I demanded so many pages per spoonful eaten. I suspect that is part of why I learned to read so early in my life. I’ve had a lifelong fascination with books. Not necessarily in paper format—I am more comfortable with electronic books, than paper—but fascinated by the written word. It’s like I took in words like the air I breathe. I wanted to know about everything. I wanted to understand the how and why, not just the “what” of how it’s all put together. And reading and thinking and experimenting was the road to that knowledge.

There is another early memory, though, that haunted me for years. I remember running down the street, as a young child, trying to catch the car that my father was driving. I remember being left behind and feeling a profound despair and hopelessness. I felt alone. My father was driving to the other side of town to see, I believe, how the work was going on the house that he and his friends were building for our family to live in. Somehow, I had it in my head that he and my mother were going to the new house to stay, and I was being left behind. And the feeling didn’t go away. My mother recounts the time when I came home from a day at school during my first year, and neither she nor my father was there to greet me. I’d opened all the dresser drawers to see if their clothes were still there, and they found me in a corner, hysterical. I can clearly recall hiding food in the back of my clothes closet, so I would have something to eat, should they leave again.

I’m sure it didn’t help that the first book I read that wasn’t a picture book, was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I remember especially Helen’s dying at school during the epidemic, and the fire that burned down the house. I was frightened for years of becoming ill, as well as being burned to death, buried alive, or some other all too imaginable horror. Still, reading was a good defense against fear, and I read lots of books and magazines, encyclopedia articles and plays.

I spent a good part of my life, until age 17, reading or walking through the farm and pasture lands near our home or sitting on a tree branch, where I’d read a book or talk with myself about what I’d been reading or make up stories. I was very solitary, and I think that a lot of that was due to a quite groundless fear of being abandoned. I steeled myself against loss by denying the need. That people noticed me came as a surprise. I worked hard at ignoring them. 

Meeting Jesus was such a change, it took me a long time to sort out what was happening and what it meant in terms of who I was and am. I’m not talking about the Bible or religious studies. I’d done that, gone through the motions and talked the talk without having the foggiest notion of the reality that should have been the source of the talk and actions. The camouflage that kids who are really different develop to protect themselves. Playacting one’s way through life in order to avoid being identified as “other” and getting hurt.

I think that the people who are most desperately in need of the Good News are the ones who truly understand it and fight back when the Gospel is appropriated and redefined by others so as to obscure or reverse its message and render the Gospel ineffective. The Good News is about risk and truth and honesty with oneself and doing good without counting the cost. It certainly isn’t about becoming like other people. It isn’t ceasing to be different. It is about growing in a different direction, multiplying objectives and perspectives, and reworking values and priorities. 

And so, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (2 Cor. 5:17). The old self isn’t exactly gone, but rather, reworked, recreated, renewed—redeemed. I enjoy people, now, and have for a long time, which I’d never expected I would. Not that I’ve become an extrovert! On the contrary, I now value my time alone even more, now that it is a treasured resource and not an escape. It’s a whole different life.