Excerpt
Finding God in the Waves
Chapter 1
Dinosaurs in Sunday School
I was a fat kid.
I had no discernible athletic talent. I wore my hair in a bowl cut and had an odd appreciation for Hawaiian shirts. The shelves in my bedroom were full of computer magazines, spare parts from robots, and toys from science fiction movies arranged in scenes of battle.
Here’s how deep my “nerdery” ran: When I was eight, I took apart a VCR and reassembled its parts in a lunch box. I put the lunch box in a backpack and then ran some cabling from the backpack to a roughly cylindrical mechanical assemblage that I had scavenged (OK, stolen) from my grandparents’ farm in rural North Florida. The end result was a homemade proton pack, which allowed me to start an unlicensed Ghostbusters franchise in my neighborhood. I convinced my friends to build packs of their own, and we would roam the streets of our neighborhood at night, catching ghosts. I had no idea how prophetic this would be, my fixation with a movie in which humans dominated the supernatural with science and technology. But that’s a story for later.
For now, all you need to understand is that, in the 1980s, a passionate love for science, an overactive imagination, and a chubby physique were not exactly the recipe for popularity. I was a round peg (a very round one) for a too-small square hole, and this made my grade-school days a living hell.
My elementary school in Tallahassee, Florida, was like a John Hughes “Brat Pack” film gone horribly wrong. Ever since I could remember, an unofficial but strict hierarchy had dominated our social world. Everyone knew who our leaders were: a small collection of boys who were the funniest, the fastest runners, and the first picked when we played team sports. I both idolized and feared them.
The rest of the social pecking order was indecipherable to me. But I knew I was at the very bottom, the nerdiest of the nerds. Time spent in my company was damaging to anyone’s reputation—and, in fairness to the other children, it’s not as if I hadn’t earned my social standing. People usually picture nerds as introverted, maybe even antisocial. Certainly many are, but I think some are like me: extroverts of such intensity that it makes others uncomfortable.
I once told my classmates that I was a werewolf—a fact about which I was absolutely convinced.
Then there’s the fact that I cried at the drop of a hat, something other grade-school boys take in with the excitement of a shark smelling blood.
At recess, tag was the worst. I ran like someone wading through molasses, and my classmates knew that once I was “it,” there was no way for me to transfer that dishonor to anyone else. When the alpha kids discovered this, they began running backward and chanting, “water tank, water tank,” making fun of the way my belly made waves when I ran. I was easy prey—a fat, ginger gazelle in “husky” jeans.
By second grade, every recess had come to represent a choice: I could try to play with other kids and be bullied, or I could seek solitude and make it through without tears or having to call for teacher intervention.
So I chose solitude. Each day when the recess bell rang, I would make a beeline for the woods at the edge of our playground, where I would pass the time inventing stories to tell myself. This strategy wasn’t 100 percent effective. Occasionally a teacher would fetch me from my hiding place because I’d ventured too far afield; other times, a bored bully would actively hunt me down. But more often than not, I was out of sight and out of mind, and they left me alone.
Alone.
And lonely.
I became a Christian when I was seven.
My family comes from the largest denomination of the conservative Evangelical movement: the Southern Baptist Convention. Southern Baptists believe that people become reconciled to God when they believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for the sins of all of humankind, and when they state that belief in a prayer.
That prayer is called the Sinner’s Prayer, a name that says a lot about what it’s like to grow up in that wing of the church. Southern Baptists believe that all people are born sinners. Humans are in love with pleasure, power, and prestige, and our natural inclination is to follow our sinful natures into all sorts of trouble. This isn’t too far-fetched an idea. I carry 40 pounds of evidence of this tendency around my midsection.
But most Southern Baptists take it further, believing that people are completely hopeless without God, and that anyone who isn’t saved through faith in Jesus goes to hell—an actual, physical place of eternal, fiery torment and suffering. This concept can do a number on the imagination of a seven-year-old kid, which was the age my friends and I were when we heard it. Many children express interest in salvation right around the time they’re old enough to grasp this concept of eternal torment. Some of my friends remember having nightmares in which their “unsaved” friends roasted in fiery pits while they looked down from heaven’s paradise.
I’m thankful to report that this wasn’t my experience. I was fortunate to grow up in a congregation that focused on the hope of salvation—a message that was more carrot than stick. People at my family’s church talked about having Jesus in your heart and the Holy Spirit in your life. God was someone who helped you make the right decisions, understand the Bible, and find peace no matter what was happening around you. That sounded wonderful to my small ears.
One night after coming home from church, I interrogated my parents about salvation. Even as a kid, I was never the kind of person who accepts information without scrutiny, and I wanted to see if I could find or poke any holes in this salvation concept. I don’t remember this conversation, but my mother tells me it was remarkably businesslike. I wanted to know how, exactly, the process worked. What words did I say to be saved? What did God do, exactly, when I said those words? How would I know that God was doing His part? After nearly an hour, my curiosity was sated, and I went to get ready for bed.
I usually fall asleep quickly, but I couldn’t that night. I felt a sense of urgency, an energy pulsing through my bones. I knew I needed to ask Jesus into my heart, so I grabbed my mom and told her it was time—that I was ready to know Him. Mom asked a few questions and then led me in that Sinner’s Prayer as we knelt beside my bed—an altar covered with Snoopy sheets.
A few weeks later, the congregation baptized me, my teeth chattering in a baptismal pool with a broken heater. My feet didn’t reach the bottom of the tank, so I dog-paddled to the pastor and stood on his boot. Moments later, after I was dunked under that frosty surface in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, the preacher said I was a new creation, and I felt it. I was inspired, and I couldn’t wait to share the good news.
So I didn’t. The next day, I went to school and told every one of my classmates that I loved them. Every one of them. Every last boy and every girl—all of them so equally horrified by my pronouncements of love that I found myself in the principal’s office.
My faithful walk with Christ wasn’t helping my social standing at school. Maybe I took that “ye are . . . a peculiar people” thing too literally.
But my faith did help me in other ways. When I felt lonely hiding in the woods to escape bullies, I would talk to Jesus. I talked to him about feeling fat, slow, and stupid. Sometimes I would ask him why, if he truly loved me, he had made me the way he did. Other times, I asked Jesus to make me able to hit a home run or run a mile without stopping, and I would imagine the admiration and accolades that would come from the other kids when such a miracle happened. I didn’t think it was too much to ask. Jesus was God, after all, and God had parted a sea for His people. All I was asking for was one lousy home run.
I never got that home run, but at least Jesus was a good listener. He never made fun of me, either.
Our talks weren’t all lament and pleading. We had a lot of fun, too. We’d talk about how the world worked and all the things in nature that amazed me. I didn’t have any friends at school, but that was OK. My best friend lived in my heart.
These days, people often tell me I’m smart. Every time I hear it, I’m amazed, because no one made that assumption during my first few years of school.
I had a hard time learning to write and spell. Around the time my classmates were forming legible letterforms, my scrawl still looked like preschool graffiti. And even though I loved to read, my spelling was atrocious—bad enough, in fact, that I was put in a special class for a few hours each week. It was a strange class, one that housed both the smartest kids and the kids who had trouble learning.
My parents kept having to come to school to talk with my teachers about my unrealized potential. The teachers would tell them that I needed to work harder and apply myself. A couple of them said I was smart but lazy. I believed them. I hated myself for being so lazy.
At the end of each school year, my grades were usually good enough for me to advance to the next level but bad enough to initiate a serious talk about holding me back. Each year this talk got a little more serious. I’d probably still be in the third grade had it not been for a miracle that saved my academic career.
My school got computers. And computers changed everything.
In those days, computers were expensive and unproven, and they weren’t kept in every classroom. They had their own special domain—a small room where the Apple IIs, with their green-on-black screens and giant floppy disks, were kept in two rows.
Computers and I became fast friends. You could press a key, and a letter would appear on the screen as if by magic. I felt none of the frustration I usually experienced when forming handwritten letters. Before long, I was crafting words and sentences with ease. This didn’t free me from the tyranny of penmanship, but it at least helped my teachers see that I wasn’t a hopeless case.
Before long, I had taught myself the basics of programming by modifying the educational video games the teachers gave us to play. I would figure out how to name fish after myself in a game called Odell Lake or get extra money in The Oregon Trail. One day, I created a program that would write my name on the screen over and over again. Everything about the machines made sense to me, because their abstract, procedural way of thinking resembled my own.
