Oh, What A Foolish Boy I Was

It unfortunately cannot be overemphasized how naïve I was as I entered college. The embarrassingly best example was my belief that after having had a few fun tag skirmishes during the summer that occasionally involved some “tackling” I would be equipped to play football at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Mind you, I had not played any ball prior to this delusional decision made on the assumption that because NWU was a Methodist school it would be just as collegial as the games played with friends in the park. My idiocy was further compounded by my desire to join my family in a final vacation trip to South Carolina which led me to inform the coach that I would arrive two weeks late for practice. Upon settling into the freshman dorm I was spared practice the next morning by a typical Lincoln rain, but the sun shone on my afternoon massacre. After spending a grueling half-hour or so in the locker room with my fellow victims Paul and Rob trying to figure out where things such as knee pads are supposed to go, I sprinted out onto the practice field to get personally acquainted with the coach. When asked what position I played I had to respond that I honestly didn’t know, and the look on Coach Chaffee’s face should have been my first clue that I was making a horrible mistake. He bemusedly instructed me to take a crack at defensive back. The real football players saw me coming and must have been gratified at the pummeling they gave me. There was really no choice about whether I went to practice the next morning or not. I simply could not even get out of bed. The final insult was that Wesleyan’s team didn’t win even one game that season, so I was pounded senseless by the weakest and the worst.

I’ve gone to great length here to detail the authenticity of my naiveté as a way to illustrate how it affected my worldview in general. It affected the way I perceived what college was all about. And it most certainly affected my understanding of the way my “calling” was going to be assimilated into the United Methodist church. Lowell Jorgenson and I (I haven’t thought of him in a long, long time) discovered one Sunday morning that we were the only two out of the entire freshman dorm that were headed for church, and what we experienced was very foreign to both of us. My need for a place to conduct my “good” churchmanship prompted a search of over a half-dozen UM congregations before I finally found my spiritual “home” at Westminster Presbyterian (this encompassed a whole range of other issues that I will not bore the reader with now). Just as I thought because I had had fun playing football with friends would qualify me for a college team, I was still under the delusion that being a regular churchgoer would eventually result in my being ordained into the ministry.