As my path grew increasingly narrow as I was coming out of high school, it led me to a specific point so confined it was easy to hoard all the oxygen in the room. And with the Bible I had committed to memory and the mastery of the Pentecostal doctrine, I breathed easy, while others gasped for air. What I lacked in physical height, when compared to my classmates, I made up for in the spiritual girth I projected. It is amazing that anyone tolerated my inflated and entitled sense of self. Sometimes, I come across pictures of me and them as we were then. One of my classmates from those moments at Christian Life College in Stockton, California, will post an old picture of all of us together as we were. Before the advent of social media, when pictures took time to circulate, and weren’t as quickly dismissed or scrolled past. Then, unlike now, pictures weren’t ubiquitous or nearly as disposable. Neither were the people in them, or so it seemed.
The pictures captured time and on occasion, eternity. The snapshots are of me and my roommates along with a few others lost to memory. Tony, Jim, Troy. Later David would join us, and Dwight, Ron, and Freddie frequented our room with such regularity that they might as well have slept and showered there. I was so eager to get there that I arrived in Stockton, a full month before classes started. On my first full day on campus, I was reprimanded for wearing a short sleeve tee shirt by the groundskeeper. “You might as well get used to the rules” he barked. I complied gladly. It made sense that if I was moving to a higher level of apostolic education that the rigors governing my behavior and my dress would be even more demanding. This wasn’t local church holiness; this was Bible school holiness. I met Tony on my second full day on campus in the prayer room. We became quick friends and shortly thereafter he declared his loyalty by pledging to be my roommate. We planted our flag in Room 23 of the newly opened men’s dormitory on the second level campus facing. Jim, a gregarious New Englander, and Troy, and reclusive electric guitarist would join us. As the school year progressed, we had our fair share of typical roommate fights, involving bathroom scheduling, cleaning responsibilities, food replenishments.
But because we were at Bible school, we also fought over more than our fair share of theological conundrums. “There is no way my Lord and Savior could sin! Bottom line!” The unusually quiet Troy shouted. “Dude, if he couldn’t sin then he wasn’t fully human, and if not fully human, he’s unqualified to be our savior!” Jim would retort. “He was tempted in every way like we are yet without sin.” I would quote the Bible, in my mind settling the issue. “Jim we’re out of soda man!” Tony would redirect. If Ron, Dwight, or Freddie were there, these debates would last for hours. Dwight was sure to lose his temper, “Ronnie, it’s not right!” Ron would suggest we have a prayer meeting. Freddie would pass gas. We’d call it a night around 2 am.
Because I proved to be dogmatic about the room temperature, preferring it be maintained at a comfortable hellish hot, my roommates conveniently robbed me of the means to do so by removing the knobs from the combination heating/cooling unit. One night, things escalated resulting in a series of events that haunt me to this day. I got caught standing near the door of our four cubical, one bathroom suite, in my sleeping attire which was typically a pair of moderately white briefs and a pair of argyle socks. I wore socks to keep my extremities warm in defense against the freakishly cold temperatures insisted on and maniacally maintained by Jim. In a flash of righteous indignation, I railed against the draconian methods of temperature regulation employed by my roommates.
In response to my eloquent diatribe, my roommates quickly expelled me from the room. I didn’t have a chance to put on pants. It was like Jesus had returned, raptured me, and mid flight changed his mind, leaving me exposed to the world in my underwear and socks. I ran up and down the second story walkway of our dorm, looking for refuge, but finding only locked doors. Imagine Larry Norman singing soulfully, “There’s no time to change your mind, the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.” That was me, awaiting the apocalypse, in my underwear and argyles. Thankfully it was in the early hours of the morning and there were few awake to witness my embarrassment. Subsequently, I no longer complained about the temperature in the room.
Upon reflection, it is amazing to me that we found moments of frivolity amongst the theological sobriety and apocalyptic urgency that motivated all of us to invest our youth in gaining more knowledge of the Bible and becoming better preachers or preacher’s wives. I should have spent more time running outside in my underwear. Had the world not been better for it, my life certainly would have been.
My pursuits of Apostolic fidelity had a way of whittling away at my world and any ounce of imaginative ambition that I had once possessed was reduced to a singularity of ambiguity that we called revival. It’s what we prayed for, worshiped for, preached for, and lived for – Revival. Like the obscenities none of us were willing to confess to viewing, revival was similarly undefinable. We’d know when we saw it. A few of us, very few, went on to live lives of service to churches chasing the unattainable. Cyclical patterns etched in the calendars of seasons marked by spiritual famine or feast, discernable only by the tempo of our music or the volume of our pulpit. A life exchanged for the afterlife. With most content to experience a poor reflection of it in the here and now. Entire songs were composed to capture what couldn’t be obtained, with sermon after hackneyed sermon being proclaimed year after predictable year.
Melodramatic conformity without substance and without any evidence of reality – “A form of godliness but denying the power thereof.”
Scot Loyd 