Vicky's Story - Appendix H
He was the Son of a Preacher Man
I was the oldest girl in a family of seven children. And it was not under circumstances that I enjoyed. Due to the fact that my parents couldn't seem to keep their hands off each other, my mother was always pregnant or had a baby on her hip. And somehow, I was responsible for the care and maintenance of my five younger siblings. So, if I wasn't in school, I was expected to supervise the kids, keep them entertained, change diapers as needed, bathe them, and sometimes even put them to bed.
My older brother was curiously exempt from most of these duties, as was my dad. Even though they never actually said it, the inference was that such tasks were women's work. Now that's not to say that my brother got off scot-free, for he certainly had his share of household duties also, but for changing a dirty diaper, well, if my mother was too busy to do it, guess whose job it was.
My dad was originally from Minnesota and joined the Air Force right out of high school. He served six years in the Security Force. In other words, an Air Force cop. His last duty station was Luke AFB, and when his enlistment was up, he decided to remain in the Phoenix area. And I guess for someone born and raised in Minnesota, I can understand that.
My dad had been brought up in an evangelical family to begin with, and his six years in the Air Force only deepened that conviction. He attended one of those
Mega Churches
in Phoenix. In fact, that's where he met my mother. And besides the weather, the main reason he didn't re-up when his enlistment concluded was to marry my mom. It must have been a match made in heaven, for my older brother was born about seven months after they were married. And for the next eighteen years, another baby came about every two or three years after that. My parents always said, "Another gift from God," but I always felt God had very little to do with it. For I think the source of our bountiful family lay in my parent's bed.
After the Air Force, my dad got a job as a Deputy with the Maricopa Sheriff's Office. And I'm sure the seven years spent dealing with the less fortunate citizens of Phoenix and Maricopa County only served to strengthen his commitment to what I now consider right-wing conservative evangelicalism.
When I was about five or six years old, my dad left the Sheriff's department and started selling real estate, as he couldn't afford to send us all to private school on a deputy's salary. I attended the church's school from pre-school all the way through twelfth grade, as did all six of my brothers and sisters. It was
Total Immersion
into the evangelical lifestyle. And I pretty much accepted it, at least through sixth or seventh grade. By that time, I was getting old enough to think for myself, and I began to see the utter hypocrisy of the entire culture.
When Christians turn a faith of healing and forgiveness into an excuse to hate others, they are hypocrites. When a church leader tells you to give money to help the work of God and puts it in his own pocket, he is a hypocrite. And when Christians see the sins of others as worse than their own, they are hypocrites. The Pastor of our church never seemed to shy away from the name of Jesus Christ, yet his understanding of peace, tolerance, and justice for all, totally escaped him. He may have read the Bible, but he clearly did not understand its message.
About that same time, maybe seventh or eighth grade, I became closer friends with the Pastor's son, Robert, or Rob, as we all called him. Rob was a year older than me, and we had actually known each other probably from birth. But we didn't really connect with each other until at least my seventh grade year. I think that was about the time I started to become disillusioned with the church, and Rob became my unlikely confederate. Every year we went to church camp in the Arizona mountains near Prescott. And a small group of us dissenters gathered when the opportunity arose to express our frustration with the church's dogma. Now that's not to say any of us were atheists. At age eleven or twelve, probably none of us were. But we were all seriously questioning how the
Word of God
was being crammed down our throats.
Probably by the time I was a Freshman and Rob would have been a Sophomore, we had become a little more than just malcontents. We actually began to form a romantic interest in each other. And I think our respective parents were cool with it. Little did they know what mutiny lay in our hearts. However, I can say with all honesty that our physical intimacy never moved past kissing and maybe occasional necking. That much of my evangelical upbringing did seem to hold. Rob never got past
First Base,
that is, until my eighteenth birthday.
As luck would have it, my birthday fell on a Sunday. And as was the custom in our church, everyone that arrived early would gather in the fellowship hall for a cup of coffee and well,
fellowship.
Then, when it was time for the service to begin, they would all transition to the Auditorium. Yes, we had an
Auditorium
instead of a
Sanctuary,
just one more peculiarity of America's Mega Churches.