A Small Voice

Chapter Two

"For whatsoever things were written aforetime, were written for ourlearning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might havehope."Romans 15:4

In 1995 I worked in a downtown coffee shop called Charlie's. It was an old house from the 1940s, with real wooden siding and gables. The place catered to the Gen-X crowd: fifteen to twenty-somethings dressed in plaid and Doc Marten shoes. The owners renovated the bottom floor with a coffee bar and service area, but it still retained its rustic look with soft, whitewashed walls, wooden floors, and a creaky staircase leading to bedrooms-turned-lounges. Each area was decked out in oversized sofas, cushioned chairs, and garage sale coffee tables. Our idealistic patrons would sit for hours chilling to Pearl Jam and Nirvana, dreaming of a different world than the one they currently lived in. The atmosphere appealed to them; this was the generation that rebelled against the materialism and selfishness of their boomer parents and the blinged-out millennials to come.

Working at Charlie's was a welcome change from the three to four church meetings I attended every week, and not a bad gig for a young man of seventeen. But working there also made me aware of how different I was from other kids my age. My religious upbringing had cut me off from worldly things like the current fashions and latest rock music. I liked the music I heard at work, but I had no idea who the bands were. I felt awkward; my dress wasn't quite right, and when my fellow baristas talked about popular culture or opinion, I thought it was safer to nod and smile than to risk saying something stupid. If cornered, I would keep my answers as short as possible.

"Hey Dan, do you think Timothy McVeigh was making a political statement with that bomb, or was he just crazy?"

"Maybe a little of both."

I became an expert at vague answers. If they had asked me about what James meant when he wrote, "Faith without works is dead," I could've slayed the conversation.

I'd been working there for about a year when one day as I was fiddling with the espresso machine. I heard my manager, Sandy, coming toward me. I could always tell it was her because she wore wooden clogs; the clattering on the floor echoed through the entire shop.

Sandy was a true peach of the sixties. She always wore her black and grey hair braided and constantly had an earthy aroma about her, not feminine like a women's perfume, just earthy and at times skunky. I was taking out the trash, a couple of days after being hired, and while struggling to get an overfilled bag into the dumpster, I heard her laugh at my pathetic attempts. She was on her smoke break, leaning against the shop wall, smoking the funniest looking (and smelling) cigarette I had ever seen. It was my first exposure to marijuana. In my classic naiveté, it took me some time to put two and two together. My first instinct was religious indignation, but after awhile, I stopped caring. She was too cool.

She told me wild stories about travelling around the country following the Grateful Dead (who after a couple of months, I realized was a band) and how she had once communicated with a snake in Arizona. Ironically, I could relate to Sandy more than I could with the staff my own age. The mind-altering trips she told me about were not too different from some of the religious experiences I'd witnessed in Christian circles. God spoke to me. God told me. The Holy Spirit revealed to me in a dream... Change a few words from these stories I'd heard at church, and they could easily be Sandy's stories.

The thing I really liked about her was that unlike my parents or the messages I heard from the pulpit, she never judged or made me feel guilty. When I screwed up, she'd just say, 'no problem, Sweetie,' and if a customer was angry, she always came to my rescue. I'd never had an adult stand up for me quite the way she did.

My parents belonged to a Pentecostal church that enforced strict rules, one of them being tardiness. When I came in late one evening because I had helped a neighbor finish cutting his winter wood pile, the guest Minister stopped the service and pointed me out in front of the whole congregation while my parents looked on, expressionless. I spent the next few days dreaming of how I could have responded and put that man in his place. If Sandy was in the congregation that day, I know she would have stood up for me; that's the type of personality she had, and I admired her for it. She was always talking about sticking it to the 'man' or not being controlled by the 'man.' I began to picture the face of that elusive 'man' as the guest Minister. It made me enjoy her rants all the more.