The Unlikely Disciple Part 20

The last time I met with Pastor Seth for our usual breakfast disciples.h.i.+p session, I told him that I wasn't planning to come back to Liberty next year. He didn't take the news well. We spent most of that hour talking through my reasons for leaving, with him trying to convince me that I would fall into sin if I left and me trying to change the subject. Since then, I think he's accepted the fact that I'm not going to reverse my decision, but he's been calling me all week with offers to hold a special prayer session on my behalf.

Today, I take him up on it. After my New Testament review session, I go to Pastor Seth's office, where we spend half an hour in prayer. We pray for all kinds of things--my summer, my future job, my future family, my final exams next week, his upcoming hunting trip--and as always, it's a good feeling to be prayed for. Then, after the final amen, he rolls his office chair a few feet closer to me.

"So, Kevin," he says. "We've been doing disciples.h.i.+p for a while now, but I'm still not really sure where you are with G.o.d. Talk to me, man. Tell me where you are."

People's reactions to my departure seem to be coming in two waves. First, they either accept it or they try to convince me out of it. Then, after the news sinks in, people start wondering if I'm leaving because I haven't totally bought in to Christianity. That's when the interrogation starts. This morning at convocation, Paul Maddox asked me how my prayer life was going and if there was anything I needed help with. Then, at lunch, Zipper offered to pray with me over the phone this summer. It's the most pa.s.sive-aggressive Inquisition trial in history.

Similar questions are also beginning to trickle in from secular friends and family members who want to know what my semester at Bible Boot Camp has done to me. Yesterday, I got an e-mail from my friend Janine. She wrote: "Are you a Bible-thumper now?"

The short answer, as you might guess, is no. I'm not a Bible-thumper, and I'm not a conservative evangelical. There were moments this semester when I felt myself being pulled in that direction, sometimes quite strongly, but in the end, there's still a rather large gap between my beliefs and the beliefs of my Liberty friends. Am I glad that they hold those beliefs? Yes, for the most part. Do I find their faith compelling and beautiful? When it's not being used to offend or exclude people, sure. But I'm not where they are.

Coming into this semester, my family's biggest concern was that I'd develop an evangelical persona that would compete with, and eventually overtake, my secular persona. And in a sense, that has happened. When you're at Liberty full-time, immersed in this spiritual environment, it's impossible to keep your objective reference points intact. Everyone around you is talking about how G.o.d changes their lives, all the wors.h.i.+p songs are about G.o.d "completing" and "filling" and "renewing," and after a four-month fusillade of that stuff, it sinks in. You start to see your old secular self as incomplete. You wonder if maybe accepting Christ would be worth it just so you could be as happy and bright-eyed and earnest as everyone around you.

What holds me back, ultimately, are all the disappointingly predictable things. As I said a while back, the all-or-nothing approach to salvation is prohibitive for me. I could never become an evangelical if it meant condemning h.o.m.os.e.xuals or proselytizing aggressively to non-Christians or believing that the Bible is infallible. And although I know that many, many evangelicals don't condemn gays or go "fis.h.i.+ng" in Daytona Beach, that's the way Christianity has been presented to me this semester, and I haven't been convinced by it.

That said, this semester has definitely changed the way I think about G.o.d. I've always gone through brief phases of belief, but now, I find myself believing in some sort of divine presence more often than not--maybe 70 or 75 percent of the time instead of 30 or 35 percent. Part of this is wishful thinking, I'm sure. I hope there's a G.o.d so that all the praying and Bible reading and spiritual struggling my Liberty friends do isn't pointed toward an empty sky. I hope Jesus was truly resurrected from the dead because I have a couple hundred friends who have oriented their lives around that story. I hope there's a G.o.d so that all the good deeds being done in this world are being recorded somewhere--and, if I'm being perfectly honest, so that the bad deeds are being punished. My G.o.d is still much more similar to the inner light G.o.d of Quakerism than a G.o.d who answers prayers and heals sicknesses and helps football players catch pa.s.ses. But there's something there, some belief in a divine caretaker, and I'm okay with that.

Pastor Seth wouldn't be okay with that, of course. In his eyes, and in the eyes of most Liberty students, it's all about Christ. Over and over this semester, I've heard it said, "There are only two types of people in the world: saved and unsaved." And if that's true, all my personal changes this semester have amounted to squat. If the only things that matter about a person are whether he's prayed the Sinner's Prayer and accepted Christ as his savior, I suppose I'm no better off than I was in January.

Here's the thing: I don't believe it. I know what the Bible says, but I don't believe the world is arranged according to a two-category binary. It can't be. Just look inside the saved category, for example. All semester, I've been exposed to the vast range of personalities at Liberty, and I've seen the complexity of what I used to think was a unified whole. For every Zipper who fits neatly into the norms of evangelical culture, there's a Jersey Joey carving his own path. For every Liberty student growing in faith, there's another one lying in bed at night wondering if all this G.o.d stuff is just made up. Once you dig under the surface, Liberty is every bit as messy and diverse as any secular college, and lumping everyone on this campus into a single category seems irrational and simplistic.

In the same way, lumping me into the unsaved category along with the Rational Response Squad atheists also seems overly reductive. I'm not an evangelical, it's true, but I've found that I have a lot in common with Liberty students. This semester, I've learned to interpret the world the same way Liberty students do. I've learned to think about love and grace the way they do. I've learned to call bad things "sin" and good things "blessed" and to expect that there's a cosmic difference between the two. Most of all, I've learned that faith, worn correctly, can be amazing and life-changing. Having met Liberty students who use their faith to improve their lives and the lives of the people around them, I can say with relative certainty that although I don't always believe in G.o.d, I believe in belief.

Back in Pastor Seth's office, he's still waiting for an answer to his question: where am I with G.o.d? I decide, for the sake of brevity, to keep it simple.

"Honestly," I say, "I'm struggling. I don't know where I am. I wish I did, but I don't."

Seth laughs.

"That's weird, because I I know where you are." know where you are."

"You do?" I say.

"Of course I do. Kevin, I remember you on the first day we met. You were skittish and nervous, and you couldn't look me in the eye without flinching. But now you're being genuine with me. You tell me that you're struggling with faith, and I believe you."

"And you don't think you wasted your time on me?" I ask.

"No!" he says. "Not at all. Listen, you're in a period of transition. You're still struggling to find your spiritual ident.i.ty, and there's no shame in that. G.o.d doesn't make everything clear for us right away. We have to engage our faith, wrestle with it, make it ours. Otherwise, it's dead."

I'm not sure if Pastor Seth meant what he said, but I hope he was being genuine. It's not every day you meet a conservative evangelical pastor who tells you that being a Christian is more about doubt than dogma. It might not have been completely orthodox, and it certainly wasn't typical of Falwell-style fundamentalism, but today it was exactly what I needed to hear.

On the Friday night before exams, Liberty holds its annual Junior/Senior Banquet, which is sort of like prom, except no dancing is allowed. All around campus, couples are getting dolled up in dresses and tuxes, taking group photos on the steps of DeMoss Hall, and speculating about the particulars of this year's banquet.

I'm not going to the banquet. For one, I'm not a junior or a senior, which means I'd have to find an older girl willing to take me as her date. For another, the only girl I'd really want to take is also a soph.o.m.ore, and even if I could ask her, I'm not sure whether she'd say yes.

That girl, of course, is Anna, the brunette from Bible study. I still haven't been able to get her off my mind. We see each other in pa.s.sing a few times a week, and every time, there's a weird, elephant-in-the-room tension that revolves around our relations.h.i.+p's past. Since I was never able to explain the real reason we aren't dating, things between us are still unsettled. A week or so ago, during lunch at the dining hall, I told a few of Anna's hallmates that I still had a thing for her, hoping that they'd relay the message back to her, but I'm not sure if they ever did.

Tonight, watching all the uppercla.s.smen in Dorm 22 don their tuxes and take their corsages out of their mini-fridges, I knew how I had to spend my last pre-exam weekend at Liberty. Sat.u.r.day morning, I find Anna on my cell phone's contact list and hit the green b.u.t.ton.

"It's Kevin."

"Kevin . . . hmm . . . ," she says. "Rings a bell."

"Can we talk?" I say.

"In person?"

"Yeah."

"Sure!" she says. "My dorm in five minutes?"

Two and a half minutes later, I'm sitting in my car outside Anna's dorm, and she emerges wearing slim-fit khakis and a ruffled top. She's smiling.

"Hey there," she says. "Want to go up to the monogram?"

Last week, a construction crew finally finished building Dr. Falwell's mountain monogram, the enormous LU emblazoned on the side of Liberty Mountain. It's still accessible only by climbing the mountain, but Liberty placed a small white gazebo at the top, where students can sit and take in a panoptic view of the Blue Ridge mountains. I haven't been there yet and neither has Anna, so we decide to take a little hike.

On the way up the mountain, Anna and I catch each other up on the developments in our lives. I tell her about my exams, my Falwell interview, and the fact that I'm leaving Liberty after next week. She tells me that she's spending the summer as a counselor at a Christian camp in Maryland and that she's thinking about transferring, too.

"I don't think I can handle four years of this place," she says. "It's great for some people, but I think I need a change."

By the time we reach the top of the monogram, we've reverted to our old levels of flirtatious mockery. (Me: "You sure you can keep going?" Her: "Shut up, you're the one breathing heavy over there, Darth Vader.") And maybe I'm delusional, but I think our chemistry is bubbling up again. Lots of coy smiles being pa.s.sed back and forth. I brush up against her side by accident, and she playfully returns it a few seconds later.

From up on the mountain, Liberty's campus looks like something out of The Sims The Sims. The cars in the parking lot are just little colored dots arranged in rows, and the dome of the Vines Center is no bigger than a golf ball. The soccer team scrimmaging on the varsity field looks like a human version of foosball. The Blue Ridge mountains form a spectacular, Kodak-ready panorama in the background.

After spending a few minutes sitting on the gazebo bench, looking upon this scene, I turn to Anna.

"Listen, I'm sorry about what happened a while back. I really wanted to keep seeing you, but I couldn't, and it was totally my fault. Please don't think it was about you."

She laughs. "I mean, it was pretty obviously not about me. I'm perfect!"

Slowly, she puts her hand on top of mine.

"It's okay. Really. Things happen, and I know you didn't mean any harm."

She keeps gazing off into the distance, smiling, while her hand sits gently on top of mine. I sort of forgot how it feels to touch a girl, even if it's only our hands touching. It's electric. All the energy in my body has been transferred to those five fingers.

"I should go soon," she says. "My dad's coming to pick me up in twenty minutes, and I haven't finished packing."

"Yeah," I say. "We should go."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, let's go."

"Okay, let's go."

We stare at each other for five, ten, fifteen seconds. All of a sudden, I get a surging adrenaline rush, and I hear a voice in my head. Kiss her. This is your last chance. Kiss her. Kiss her. This is your last chance. Kiss her.

Without giving myself time to hesitate, I lean over and kiss her-- a quick peck in the middle of her left cheek. Her face flushes bright red. She smiles, showing every one of her teeth. We both look behind us, making sure no RAs are around to give us the four reprimands we just earned, and then we look back at each other.

"Now we really should go," she says.

"Yeah, we should."

We stand up from our bench. She runs her fingers through her hair, and I tie my shoe. I take her hand in mine, and we head back down the mountain, saying nothing the whole way.

Beauty for Ashes

Four months to the day after arriving at Liberty, I take my New Testament final, the second-to-last exam of my semester. It goes well. I stumble on a few questions about the book of Revelation, but I breeze through a section on the letters of Paul, and everything else is fairly straightforward. After I plunk my completed test down on the professor's desk, I feel a sort of nerdy euphoria. I did it! I pa.s.sed a course on a very important book I used to know nothing about. As I walk out of the cla.s.sroom, my step has a little more spring than usual.

After the exam, I spend an hour or two tying up loose ends--paying outstanding parking tickets, putting in my official withdrawal forms with the registrar, buying Liberty memorabilia at the bookstore. Then, after checking off everything on my to-do list, I head back to Dorm 22 to finish packing my bags.

I'm met at the door by a worried-looking Stubbs.

"Hall meeting in my room," he says. "Right now."

"What happened?" I ask.

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. "Just go to my room . . . now."

Confused, I put my backpack down and walk down the hall to his room. Inside, fifteen of my hallmates are seated on the floor. After a few more file in, Stubbs turns to James Powell.

"Powell has something to say, guys."

Dabbing a film of sweat from his forehead, Powell begins to speak: "I was sitting on the Mansion lawn with friends just now, hanging out and talking," he says. "All of a sudden, Jonathan Falwell walked into the Mansion really fast, talking on his phone. He looked terribly panicked. Right after that, some other administrators sprinted in. A couple of campus police officers went in, then the rescue squad, then an ambulance pulled up, and then a fire truck. We had no idea what was going on, so we just watched. Jonathan Falwell ran out of the Mansion screaming, "Get everybody out of here!" I asked a police officer what we could do. And he said, 'Pray. Pray really hard. It's really serious.' "

"He didn't say what it was?" asks Brad Miller.

"No."

"But we're a.s.suming it's Jerry?"

"Yeah. What else could it be?"

Everyone looks at each other in taut silence.

"Guys, let's pray for this situation," says Stubbs. "Even if it's not Dr. Falwell who's in trouble."

Powell begins the prayers. "We have no idea how to pray, Lord, but help us to realize that your hand is over this. Give the doctors wisdom if it's a medical problem. Be with Dr. Falwell if he's involved. Give him strength, Lord."

Brad prays next. "We're a.s.suming that it's Dr. Falwell, Father, but we don't know. We submit ourselves to you as creator to work a miracle today. I know, G.o.d, that you will do what you will do, but I also know that you listen to the hearts and the words of your people. If it is Dr. Falwell and if his life is at stake, please leave him here with us."

Stubbs speaks up, his voice cracking slightly. "As a group of brothers, we pray on behalf of this situation, in the holy and precious name of Jesus Christ."

We glance around the room. Should we go on with our lives? What else is there to do?

"Guys, let's go to lunch," Stubbs says. "As a hall."

We all file down the hall and out the doors in silence. Outside, we pa.s.s a male student holding his phone a few inches away from his ear.

"It's him!" he yells to everyone in earshot. "Dr. Falwell's in the hospital! My mom just saw it on the news! They found him unconscious in his office!"

"Is he dead?" someone yells back from across the street.

"No! Just unconscious! They're . . . trying to . . . it doesn't look good!"

By the time we get to the dining hall, hundreds of Liberty students have already a.s.sembled a corporate prayer session for Dr. Falwell. They're clasping hands around the long tables while the dining-hall manager prays out loud.

"Dear G.o.d, please help Dr. Falwell. Please, G.o.d, please help him, please, G.o.d."

Dr. Falwell's health has always been an issue of concern at Liberty. Two years ago, he was admitted to the hospital in critical condition for breathing problems stemming from a bout of viral pneumonia. He recovered and was quickly discharged, but ever since then, the prospect of another death scare has haunted this campus.

Much breath is spent arguing about what will happen to Liberty when Dr. Falwell dies. Some of my friends think cla.s.ses will be cancelled for a month. Others think the university will go into a tailspin. Donations will dry up, they say, and without the draw of a celebrity leader, enrollment will plummet and the school will eventually be forced to fold. I've heard some people say that without its founder, Liberty is doomed.

Dr. Falwell has always rea.s.sured Liberty students that he has no plans to leave the school hanging. He often speaks about a biblical prophet named Hezekiah who prayed to G.o.d for fifteen more years of life. G.o.d granted Hezekiah's prayer, and Dr. Falwell expects an even bigger measure of grace. "I'm going to live to be 115," he said in one interview. "And I'll be giving the ACLU the devil when I'm a hundred. So just mark it down. I'm here to stay."

On my way back to the dorm after lunch, I pa.s.s the prayer garden, a small, hedged-in area in front of Dr. Falwell's office. A group of Liberty maintenance workers are gathered in a circle in their work uniforms, holding hands and praying, their bodies rocking back and forth. One worker, a stout, mustachioed man, wipes his eye with his sleeve.

I climb the steps to my hall, walk to my room, and open the door. Eric is standing in the middle of the room in his gym clothes, blanched and wide-eyed.

"He's dead, dude."

Three of my hallmates are crowded around Eric's TV, watching the news reports pour in. Luke clutches his head with both hands as Eric clicks through the channels.

". . . A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, Falwell started the Thomas Road Baptist Church there in 1956 and Liberty University in 1971. When he founded the Moral Majority eight years later, it marked the first concerted campaign in the media age to enshrine the tenets of evangelical . . ."

". . . A preacher by trade, Rev. Falwell used television as his pulpit and the Moral Majority as his vehicle to spread the evangelical gospel to voters, but also to lawmakers. Aides found Falwell in his office at Liberty University this morning."

"This can't be happening," Luke says. "This is a joke."

Eric navigates over to CNN.com. A bright yellow banner at the top of the page announces: REV. JERRY FALWELL DEAD AT 73. REV. JERRY FALWELL DEAD AT 73.

He clicks to other websites looking for something that corrects the mistake. But every site reads alike: AP-REV. JERRY FALWELL HAS DIEDREV. JERRY FALWELL, MORAL MAJORITY FOUNDER, DIES.

"Are you kidding me?" Luke says, his voice climbing an octave. "You're freaking kidding me!"

From outside my window comes a piercing yell: "Jerry's dead!!! Jerry Falwell is dead!!!"

In a panic, I race out of the dorm. The chaos outside is unlike anything I've ever seen. Students are sprinting between buildings, shrieking hysterically into their cell phones, huddling in place to pray. Two female professors stand next to a lamppost, crying into the crooks of their arms.

In front of the bookstore, I spot a girl from my New Testament cla.s.s, a curly-haired senior named Jessica. She's slumped against the wall, one hand holding back her hair, the other clutching a cell phone, head bobbing with each sob.

"Mom!" she wails. "He's not going to be at my graduation! I've been waiting to shake his hand since I was a little girl!"