"Under God's Umbrella"- from Chapter 7, the Amazing Indian Land Years

We lived in Indian Land Community, Lancaster, SC and our beloved home there for most of the thirty-one years of my career Duke Power Company and Duke Energy, Charlotte, NC.  This was the home in which our sons, Rob and Jimmy, grew into adulthood.

In our early years in Indian Land, my focus was on my career and providing for our family.  It became a rather self-focused and myopic time for me. It was in 1980 that the Lord changed all that. 

We were attending Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fort Mill, although we later attended Christ Church in Lancaster. One Fall Sunday morning I was in Saint Paul’s churchyard awaiting the start of the adult Sunday school.  It was a beautiful morning with the large oak trees of the churchyard full of color.  Nancy was off doing one of her ministries, and the boys were already in Sunday school. 

God and I had a talk about things that morning.  Our conversation (don’t worry—no audible voices) that morning was about the convenient form of deism that I had adopted which had kept God compartmentalized and uninvolved in most corners of my life.  As a lifelong Christian, I knew that was not what my faith was supposed to look like.  I knew His place was at the center of my life, and He was supposed to be Lord over all of my life.  That was where I had placed myself, and I figured it would get a bit crowded if God also moved in.  

In my arrogance, I made a deal with the Lord about a trial period to see how things went.  If one could make a deal with the devil, then I guess I thought I could make a deal with God. Looking back, I’m astounded at my condescension before God.  Perhaps the towering oak trees protected me from a much-deserved lightning strike at that time.  But it was, nonetheless, a surrender of sorts, and God used it.  From that point on, the Holy Spirit began to set my feet on a proper Christian path.  I would have never guessed what that was going to be like.

This conversation with God was not happening in isolation. Nancy’s brother, Jim, and our dear friends and fellow parishioners Tom and Gail shepherded Nancy and me during this time. I would describe this as my born-again moment, as Jesus describes it to Nicodemus in John 3.

This is the time in my life when Christianity began to make sense of this nonsensical world in which I was living.  Christianity offered me the answers to the first-order questions of life such as:

·         Who am I?

·         Whose am I?

·         From what (or from whom) do I derive my identity?

·         For what purpose was I created?

·        What does real human prospering and thriving look like? ( i.e. What’s really important in life?)

·         What is my ultimate telos and destiny of my life?

I was coming to understand that Christianity is about turning this upside-down world right-side up, and this changed the trajectory of Nancy’s and my life:  My career was blessed by it; my marriage was blessed by it; my being a father to Rob and Jimmy was blessed by it.  I was brought joy, peace, and purpose in a newer and fuller way.  I began the long journey from self-absorption to self-giving, a journey I’m still on to this day.  

Let me add that Nancy and I made and are this journey together into a more mature Christian faith, but my sense is that she has always been out front and leading the way. I am hugely grateful to her for that.

The 1980s were, therefore, a time of remarkable growth in my knowledge, love, and service to God. Tithing became an honor as I began to learn how to give back to God. Cursillo (a three-day weekend retreat) taught me about being intentional and disciplined in my pursuit of God and about the indispensable aspects of Christian community in that endeavor.  My Cursillo small group, a small clutch of men at Christ Church, Lancaster, were center stage to this spiritual growth.   This small group, of which I was a part of for twelve years, taught me the value of mutual support and accountability with my fellow pilgrims.

This Cursillo men’s group eventually became involved in Kairos Prison Ministry in the South Carolina state prison system from which I learned an enormous amount about working in the power of the Holy Spirit and that The Holy Spirit was the key to making a difference in people’s lives.

After a few years I was asked to be the lay rector of a Kairos weekend at Manning Correctional Institution.  There were thirty inmates and fourteen volunteers as part of that weekend, and I found it to be one of the most challenging yet rewarding undertakings of my life. That weekend taught me immeasurably about trusting God by simply stepping out and doing what He was calling me to do.

In the early 1990s, a soon-to-be close friend, Doyle, was released from state prison, and he returned to Lancaster County where he had grown up.  Doyle had a rocky upbringing which led to his being incarcerated in the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) in Columbia and again later as an adult in the South Carolina Department of Corrections.  Doyle had attended Kairos in the Department of Corrections and through one of our Cursillo group members at Christ Church he was invited to be part of our men’s group.  

Doyle wanted things to be different in his life, and God helped him do just that.  He became a solid and mature Christian in those years, eventually becoming part of the core leadership at Christ Church.  He sought ways to give back to his community, to his new church family, and, most of all, to the incarcerated youth in the Department of Juvenile Justice where he had once been a resident.

Doyle, along with a few others in the state, had a vision of starting a ministry in DJJ modeled on the Kairo ministry in the adult prisons.  It was called "Epiphany." On the first Epiphany weekend in the DJJ, Doyle was the lay rector, and I was his coordinator (the person who took care of logistics and other details).  I was the lay rector of the next Epiphany weekend a few months later.

What was extraordinarily special about that second Epiphany Weekend was that my sons, Rob and Jimmy, and a group of their friends from across our diocese, all college age or above at that time, joined us to minister to these incarcerated and street-hardened boys of DJJ.  

The effectiveness of my sons’ and their friends was enhanced by their being only a few years older than these incarcerated teenagers.  The greatest gift they conveyed to the residents of DJJ was hope—that is, the reality their lives were not over but just beginning.  Their lives could be different from what they had experienced in their young lives through a relationship with the God who created them.  It was an amazing thing to watch. ...