HOW I SAW IT - "Looking Back in Time ..."
A Personal Testimony given at the Worship in a New Key service
The Small Town and High School, 1969
My family moved back to our “hometown,” Reidsville, a small rural town, a tobacco farm/factory town, in North Carolina, the place where my parents had met 25 years earlier. My dad was retired as an Air Force Officer and my older brother had just graduated from high school and had left home, off to serve in the Air Force. So, in the summer of 1969 my parents, my younger brother and I moved back “home” so we could be near my aging grandparents.
1969. I was 15, smack in the middle of adolescence! We had lived all over the USA and also abroad, 9 different homes prior to this move. For the first time my mom and I now went together to the same high school, she was the new English teacher and I was the new skinny 10th grader, an awkward kid with long hair, bellbottoms, liberal ideas from that high school in the North, and a Yankee accent. Several students remembered me, as that kid who played piano during the first grade recital at the end of the school year. Ten years earlier, I attended the final weeks of first grade, as my father transferred from Mississippi to Germany. In the spring of 1961, my mom, younger brother and I moved in with my grandparents as we waited for the “orders” to move to Germany. My southern classmates simply couldn’t believe my stories about life in the north, “They really teach sex education in high school? Really? Well, do you know the answer to ….? And the questions went on…..”
Reidsville was sloooow to integrate. The opening of school in the fall of 1969 was Reidsville’s first year of integration. Black and white kids for the first time were going to the same schools. There were two of everything that year, one black and one white – in efforts to make sure that everything was properly balanced. My marching band had a black drum major and a white drum major, the high school had a white principal and a black principal, and we had a white quarterback and a black quarterback.
The Church and the Air Force
I had grown up loving the Church. I loved Sunday School. Two of my earliest memories as a 5 year old.
One: Waking up in the emergency room, with doctors all over me. I woke up to the worried faces of my mom and dad standing in the doorway. I had broken a big rule, “Don’t cross that busy road!” Well I did, following my older brother and I was struck by a truck. The truck driver got out and picked up my limp body and sped off to the hospital. My younger brother had watched the whole thing and ran in house, “Mommy the man took David away!” My parents rushed to the hospital. I woke up on a table and I remember the frightened faces of my parents in the doorway.
Two: My being introduced to the Bible in nursery Sunday school. I just remember that it was exciting. I remember being upset because I was not given a Bible to take home. Years later on November 17, 1963, in Sunday School in Germany, I received my first Bible. I was 9 years old. Church became my “home” early in life, at times a sanctuary from the harshness and stresses of school, home, and culture. My parents had brought us up in the church and my Methodist grandfather baptized my brother and I when we were babies. On the Air Force Bases, I only knew Protestant: Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, whatever, all worshipped together in chapel as Protestants.
At Reidsville Senior High, a group of black girls sought me out so they could question me about the Church in the Air Force. “Yes”, I said, “in fact, black and white folks do worship together.” They walked away in disbelief and utter amazement.
It was the late 60’s. Vietnam, hippies, long hair, music, and liberation movements, nothing was static, even in the South. Adolescence, the difference between me and others was becoming increasingly apparent to me. Not just the North/South thing, but in other ways. I was different from my brothers. I was different from others in school, not in any one particular thing, but in the overall scope of my being. I played the piano and clarinet, I had one or two close friends, but overall, I was an introvert and preferred to be alone. I studied, and I thought, I felt deeply about issues. I had my own bedroom, where I watched alone on my black and white TV, that I had purchased with my newspaperboy money. I was not antisocial, but TV was my escape from the world. I stayed up all night watching the 1968 Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention. I watched men walk on the moon. I remember watching Regis walk off for good, on the Joey Bishop Show late one night, much to the dismay of Joey. I was becoming increasingly private, introspective, and secretive.
My younger brother and dad told me years later, that they were concerned about me in high school, “You never talked at home.” I was alone in my bedroom, yet I knew that I was not quite alone. I talked to God, every night I talked to God. Most of the time, it was comforting to be alone in my own room, in my own world. I felt shame in the outside world. The shame began to take over my being. That year in Reidsville, there was one particular Saturday afternoon where my haunting “secret” of identity bubbled up within me and overwhelmed me with fear, shame and emotion. I locked myself in my room. I pushed the chest of drawers in front of the door, I locked the windows. I fell on my bed and I cried and cried and cried. I cried so hard that it hurt. My head hurt, my eyes hurt, my soul hurt. My dad, mother and brother were trying desparately to get into the room. Yet I refused to let them in. I could not bear it any longer, I remember thinking. Yet I did bear it. For many years I carried the secret alone. No, I never let my parents or brother in. No one, absolutely no one would know me fully. Not my parents, my brothers, my best friend, no one, no one except for one: God. My parents finally did make their way into my room that day, and held me, asking me over and over again “What’s wrong? What is the matter?” Yet still I could not let them in. I stopped crying outloud, but the crying within continued for years.
Back North
My dad was unable to find a job in Reidsville, so we moved back north to Bucks County and I continued my education at Council Rock High School where I had begun high school. I grew older, 17, 18, 19. I thought this thing would just go away, I would outgrow it. “Please God, please God”, I would pray, “Take it away!” But God did not take it away. In 11th and 12th grades, I cried myself to sleep many times, secretly in my bedroom. After turning off the lights, turning off my TV, and after talking to God, I cried.
Going to church, to Sunday School, to MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship), was fun. There I did not worry too much. Praying, talking about God’s love made it better. I felt safer there. When I was a senior in high school, I remember overhearing my dad talking to my mom about me, “The only time that he will talk with me or spend time with me, is when I go to St. John’s Church.” (To check on the progress of the new sanctuary. My dad was chairman of the church building committee and campaign “Mission Possible.”) He was right. I did not feel comfortable at all around my dad, except when we were together in church.
Fast Forward – College
In college, I heard it over and over and over again. I heard it. Jesus loves you. God loves you. Still no one knew, but it felt better. I found comfort in memorizing scripture. Psalm 139 to this day is my favorite, I memorized it and said it to myself, over and over and over again, day after day.
“For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb, I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, that I know very well. …Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there be any wicked ways in me and lead me in the way everlasting.”
God saved me in college. They told me that I was born again. I know that God saved me. God saved me from a lot of things in college, including my own suicidal thoughts. Psalm 139 saved me. Who am I? What am I supposed to do with my life? I explored my personal faith and practiced new forms of personal piety. Although much of the campus para-church theology clashed with what I had been taught (as Horace Bushnell would say, my “deeply nurtured Christian upbringing,”) I felt in many ways that in college I simply recovered parts of my own deeply rooted Christian heritage. My Preacher grandfather told me that we are born again, and again, and again, and again. My younger brother, called me a Jesus Freak. I had a bumper sticker on my car, my grandmother’s old ‘64 Oldsmobile that read, “Honk if you Love Jesus!” This was Good news! It kept my younger brother from ever wanting to borrow my car.
A few years later, in the summer of 1977, on August 13, 1977 God broke into my life with a new intensity of thought, feelings and words. I had what many would call a transforming experience. This was a deeply felt experience of God’s love. I remember arriving home that night, at 2:00 a.m. and being so high on this religious experience that I woke up the entire household. I was talking to my mom and my dad and my brother. Something changed within me that night, and I was free, freer that I ever was before, because I knew that God truly really loved me. And loved me, all of me. It was 3:00 a.m. in the morning and we were laughing, crying and hugging one another. My young brother even hugged me. I did not tell them my secret, but that night, I didn’t have to. God loved me! It was an incredible night, one that I am so grateful, for only a few months later my mother died, after battling with breast cancer.
Fast Forward to 1989.
March 1989. It happened. All fears gone. No more secrets. My dad knew, my brother knew, all of my friends knew, everyone knew, and it was ok. My dream comes true. I was free. I became a dad that year and it was a girl. A beautiful 9 pound baby girl, born on March 30, 1989. At 5 days old, she came home. I held her in my arms and I fed her her bottle. I looked into her face, and I said to myself,
“For it was you, God, who formed her inward parts; you knit her together in her mother’s womb, I praise you for she is fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, that I know very well.”
This is my testimony. I thank God for my life, for my family, my partner Bob of 30 years and for our daughter Elizabeth, born 20 years ago. I thank God for the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville, the church that opens its arms to all and says over and over, what a frightened young boy heard so many years ago, and what I know today to be true, ”God loves you!”
October 18, 2009
David Wall
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