I ended the first installment of “My Faith Journey” with the following:
“My response was, “If that’s what this church teaches, then maybe I don’t belong here.”
His response to me was, “Maybe you don’t.”
To quote newsman, Paul Harvey, “the rest of the story” will come next week in the Devils Lake Journal, so “stay tuned!”
Therefore, here it is, “The rest of the story,” or at least part of it, because I am still on that journey and will be until I am face to face with my Savior.
I wish I could tell you that I had a holy life all 73 years (so far) but that would not be the truth. Like lots of people, including many in the Bible, my journey has been filled with joy and sorrow, great heights and deep lows. I have loved the Lord my whole life, but I haven’t always lived that out in all my life choices. I still struggle with that and I’m guessing, I always will.
When people ask me “When did you become a Christian?” my answer varies because it’s not about me. Not really. Oh, I figure out what they are really asking me about my faith walk and depending on the circumstances I know how to respond to answer the question they appear to be asking me. Phrases come to me like “asking Jesus to come into my life/heart to be the Lord of my life” or acknowledging a date along the way as the day I “became” a Christian but that doesn’t always fit the situation.
Through the years I have had some of the best training possible for this Christian life of mine.
I worked for a number of years as a bartender at The River Queen in Grand Forks. It was a great place to work and Bea and Mac McGarry who owned “The Queen” got some of the best bands in the country to play our little, busy bar on 3rd Street in downtown Grand Forks. We had bands like Fat City and Mighty Joe Young from Chicago and beyond. They were our favorites and we all partied hard with those guys in the bands. I believe The Guess Who from Canada played there a number of times, as well, but perhaps my memory is a bit faulty on that. It happens, I accept that.
When I was working as a campus minister 1983 – 2003 in Minot and Dickinson my boss, the late Bishop John Kinney, once asked me what one thing in my life prepared me the most for the ministry. I answered without hesitation, “Being a bartender in a biker bar.” I learned to take people as they are and to appreciate them – no matter where they came from.”
Once on a retreat we were asked to draw a picture of our guardian angel and while everyone else was reaching for the pastels to draw blonde-haired angels with feathery wings and haloes, I drew a big, burly dude on a Harley Davidson with a tatoo. The Catholic priest who was leading the retreat had us turn our drawings in and because one was so different from all the others, he called out, “who belongs to this one?” I figured it was me so I explained to them.
“When I was in college working at the Queen in downtown Grand Forks we had a lot of bikers who hung out there all the time. I lived out by the University and each night would walk home with my ears ringing from the loud music from the bands. But I could hear that distinctive rumble of the Harley Davidsons as the guys I knew from the bar rode past me as I hoofed along University Avenue. At first I wondered if they all lived out near the U. but when I asked they told me, “No, we just like to make sure you made it home safely.”
That choked me up.
I had guardian angels who wore leather jackets with biker patches on them.
I always made it home safely.
Like my experience on Lake Oahe in South Dakota, that was another “mountaintop moment” for me. Recalling the love, care and concern those guys, many of them Vietnam Veterans who had seen terrible things happen in their lifetimes yet they did their best to help keep me safe each and every night on my long walk home. Talking about that, like writing about it here and now, years later, gives me a lump in my throat and warmth in my heart for all who find ourselves on the fringe and on our own, alone in this world. Now you have a share in this “mountaintop moment.”
To be continued in the DLJ 032626.
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