| Gene's Story |
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| If you've ever seen Monet's series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, each one reflecting a different time in the day, with light falling on the surface from different angles, you probably have a heightened consciousness of the differences that time makes on impressions. Life for me as a kid growing up in a Christian & Missionary Alliance's preacher's home meant working very hard at every job I could find to help make ends meet - paper routes, shoveling snow all around the neighborhood in winter and mowing grass in summer. There was also a lot of free time, and in the days before computers occupied adolescents, we rode bikes in the hills of West Virginia, fished and trapped and hunted, and played a lot of pick up basketball in backyards and driveways. |
| Noting that most of the adults I knew in the quiet towns my dad served as a pastor lived relatively uneventful lives of routine and repetition, I thirsted for a more colorful and exciting life. There were a lot of programs on T.V. in those days in which the main characters kept "moving on" (Route 66, The Fugitive, I Spy, Bronson, Maverick . . . ) As I daydreamed about adulthood, it nearly always had traveling and picking up and moving on, seeing new sights and meeting new people, as the backdrop. Many missionaries sat at our table through the years, and told adventurous stories of their lives in far away places. In addition to the frequent appeals and "calls" I heard issued in church and camp and conference settings for young people to "go to the ends of the earth" with the gospel, the idea naturally suited my growing itch to see other places and live with other peoples. I was one of only two people in my high school graduating class who went "out of state" (outside West Virginia) to college . Wheaton College, a 30 minute train ride from downtown Chicago, was a whole different world. Brilliant, talented peers amazed me (and humbled me) with their already-honed gifts and abilities. Professors stimulated my thinking and catapulted my analytical skills far beyond what I'd ever been challenged to do before. I worked several years in Christian coffee houses in Chicago and the western suburbs, sitting at cable spool tables with nonbelievers and seekers and beatniks and left-moving intellectually-oriented Christians, drinking coffee and Russian tea and dialoguing for hours about social values and music and the arts and politics and Christianity. After my sophomore year of college I was able to go to Medellin, Colombia for a year, where a Canadian CMA missionary, Arnold Cook, and a Brethren university professor, Paul Goring, had rented a little shop as a meeting place for university students from the nearby Universidad d'Antioquia. I found a room with a bunch of Colombian university students, quickly learned Spanish, and basically immersed in Colombian culture. I only spoke English a few minutes a week. It was a wonderful, formative experience. Upon my return to Wheaton College after a year and half away, I found I had become far too restless to do much good. After completing my junior year, I withdrew and, like many of my generation, hitchhiked to San Francisco. The next 5 years were spent wandering around America with a backpack , trying to figure out what life is about, "interviewing" nearly everybody I met and drawing them into what many remarked were the most profound, if not the weirdest, conversations they'd ever had. I'd stop and work for a few days, or as long as a few months, at some simple labor job to make enough money to hold me, and then I'd hit the road again. I go so used to falling asleep on the ground, looking up at the stars, with cool breezes and fresh air caressing my face, that when I moved "indoors" at age 27 I simply could not sleep in a bed. Had to sleep on a nice hard floor. At age 27 it was as if a veil dropped off my face and I could perceive what a wreck I was making of my own life and that of others. It was a shock - I'd always thought of myself as sort of a wandering do-gooder, a person who, though not committed to any one group of people or any one place or any one set of responsibilities, nevertheless was a "helper" to anyone with whom I came in contact. It was devastating to recognize that at heart I was, instead, an incorrigible sinner . . . like everyone else. I remembered what I had heard as a child, a youth, that Jesus Christ died in my place precisely for that reason - because we are incapable of either saving ourselves or of doing real good - and humbly repented of my independence and began to follow God. He led me to Nyack, New York where my uncle Maurice Irvin pastored a church full of the leaders of the very church denomination in which I'd been raised. Over 6 months Uncle Maurice and that church body gently discipled me back into the Kingdom of God. I took an intensive Biblical Greek course at the seminary, did extremely well in it, and was encouraged to think maybe the Lord had given me my mind back. I went back to Wheaton College, applied to finish my Bachelor's degree in Literature there, was admitted, and went straight on through a Masters program there as well. By the time I'd studied for three years, it was clear that God was preparing me to teach his Word to others. I'd been involved in several local Alliance churches teaching home Bible studies or Sunday school classes, etc. and my 2nd year at Wheaton Graduate School the chairman of the Bible and Religion department at Wheaton, Morris Inch, asked me to be his assistant. He gave me all kinds of opportunities to try out my wings, teaching theology classes, grading exams and term papers, even editing and interacting with manuscripts of books he was writing. It was a life-changing year in my life: God could use me in this way. Coupled with my earlier and continuing restless spirit, the new-found academic prowess seemed to be pointing towards cross-cultural ministry. Yet I knew that I still had a fragmented, ad hoc kind of theological and Biblical knowledge: I needed a solid foundation. |