I grew up in the 70's in a burnt orange world, chewing on Bazooka bubble gum with shag carpet between my toes. Sonny and Cher, Captain and Tennille, and Donnie and Marie, were on my black and white television, transistor radio, and record player. The numbers on my alarm clock didn't blink, they flipped. That was when "flipping" wasn't an adjective. It was something people did. And Dorothy Hammell did it so well they named a hair-cut after her, and I got one. This was also back when home-computers weren't yet conceived of by the general public, and the closest thing to a cell phone was a touch-tone with a really long cord.
Prayer had already been removed from my school by the time I came along, but we did stand every morning and pledge our allegiance to the flag. Even as a 5th grader, reciting this every day with my hand over my heart, I knew this country was great somehow because of God. That was when liberty was afforded us and we bought it. And when we didn't have the money, we put it on plastic. And Hugh Heffner, afforded the same liberty, was busy changing the world one brown paper-wrapped home delivery at a time.
The world invited us to "have it your way," from ordering burgers to getting abortions. And we did. And then we sang "I did it my way," as families were being torn to shreds. Mommies were leaving home in droves to go to work, and daddies were disappearing for one reason or another. Divorce rose above its humble beginnings as "The 'D' word" to normal everyday conversation. And the children who made it through delivery in this country were born into an increasingly unsympathetic harsh reality, where the security of growing up in a home with a father and a mother was becoming statistically less likely with each passing year.
I grew up in church. It was the glue of our family. I didn't question whether it was holding us together. It just did. I also didn't question whether Jesus loved me. Red and yellow, black and white, all were precious in His sight, even a freckle-face like girl me. I was more like a starry summer night on a snow covered winter's day—beautiful to Him in my own way.
I was too young to understand all the dynamics at play in our culture the day I was plunged beneath the surface of its darkness. I was just a child. My thoughts were no grander than getting my sister's bike out of the shed before the next commercial break while she was watching Walt Disney. So when the teenage boy next door stopped me on the street, I had just made my clean get-away. He told me that if I would come to his house, he would give me candy and I said "yes."
I didn't know what he was really offering. I hadn't been exposed to anything like that. He ushered me into a back room that was neat as a pin with a stack of Hugh Heffner's magazines on the headboard. Within an hour, I walked back out his house, leaving my sister's bike in his driveway and my childhood in the back room. I went home with a handful of candy and Satan's claim on my life.
Security was now stripped away and I was awakened to things I had never seen; things I was shielded from up to this point. Until that day, I was carefree, making up songs about life as I went along, singing them loud and proud. I was protected from growing up any faster than my own pace.
And then, as thoroughly as innocence was there the day before, it was now gone. I couldn't sing or be fascinated with the little things anymore. I couldn't even play in my backyard without being aware of the world around me, and thinking the neighbor boy was peering at me through his windows, waiting for another opportunity to take me back into his darkness, where I lost contact with everything except the green walls and the light fixture above me.
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Hope is My Middle name
Non-FictionYears before I began recklessly pursuing God, I hung a poster on my bedroom wall. Its words were a lifeline dangling into the abyss of my sin. “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not se...