The Third Decade: 1968 - 1978

(Third in a series of life-reflections in the week before my 60th birthday.)

As most people know, the third decade is where things begin to get settled out- adult plans, adult goals, the beginning of a career and marriage. Mine was no different. In fact, this may be one of the more "normal" decades of my six with only minimal unusual ups and downs.

I guess it can best be summed up as War, Marriage, and Ministry

• Watching Chicago 1968 on TV. I remember being so angry at Mayor Daley and the establishment that I could hardly speak. It had a significant impact, on top of everything else that was soon to happen, that would lead me to a certain frustration(!) with the political process that didn't let up for about 40 years.
  


• Draft Lottery and Conscientious Objection. #149. That meant that in 1970, when I graduated from college and lost my student deferment I would be drafted. They went to #190 that year. This was perhaps my first real wrestling match with my faith. I knew people who knew people who knew people that might have helped. Some thought about going to Canada. I had to be honest to myself.
  
  I applied for CO status as a pacifist which was not part of my former Baptist tradition. I came out the other end of the wrestling match feeling positive about myself. I was given the status and spent the next two years doing my alternative service, first at a home for the handicapped and then as a youth worker for the city of Bethlehem.
  


• Protests. Ah, yes. The cornerstone of the late 60s. The Moratoriums in '69 and '70. The Invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent and Jackson States. Going to May Day in 1971- and turning around before it came to arrests. Involvement in draft and military counseling through the local peace agency. (Did I say my life was average? I guess maybe it wasn't as average as I thought.)
  


• Atlantic City and Woodstock. The Atlantic City Pop Festival was two weeks before Woodstock and attracted over 100,000 people, my roommate, some friends, and myself among them. Throughout my college years I had the opportunity to see many great rock concerts including Cream. This was a great weekend. It was not Woodstock. But for those of us who were there it was a lot less messy, and was still in the culture.

There were more deaths...

• Ruth, my Dad's sister and our guardian died a few months after I graduated from college. We never knew the circumstances but it was an auto accident caused either by a malfunction or her having a medical problem. That left my 19-year old brother and myself (at 22) on our own. He stayed living in the house. I stayed in Bethlehem where I was working.


• GW, my college roommate. GW got sick with a rare cancer and died in the mid-'70s. My Dad's cousin's husband and her son-in-law also died in this decade. That was really the last for quite a few years.
  

A Life Together Starts

• Meeting and Marrying Val. Yes, we met as part of the peace and protest group in Bethlehem. She was not as out in public about it as I was. That made her more effective of course.


• Hurricane Agnes stranding us for days. We had gone to my hometown to help my brother clean up the house for sale. Along came this Tropical Storm that just wouldn't stop dropping the rain. The result was the 1,000 year flood. To see the river and Pine Creek rampage like that was a scary proposition. To have one of my brother's friends walk into gthe house carrying a dresser drawer and say, "This is all that's left" was humbling.

Ministry gets off the ground...

• Hearing the call to Ministry. Now the call came- after I was doing my alternative service, not earlier when I could have a deferment. God's plans, not mine. Actually I had rejected the idea of ministry as a way out of the military. I guess that was the right choice. The call came at the Moravian Senior High Camp at Hope, NJ in August 1971. I had been invited by a friend to help him teach a course at camp on the church and war. That would probably not have happened had I sought an easier way a year earlier. God's ways of hooking you are as varied as the millennia.
  


• A Trip to Israel- this one to get in touch with my Jewish roots in a real and deep way. In the summer between my middler and senior year in seminary my wife and I took this month-long trip to Israel. While there was a lot of Christian stuff there, I was finally connecting and beginning to understand my Jewish roots. It also helped us get to know each other better after a year of marriage.


• My first congregation in Center Valley, outside Bethlehem, PA where I served one year as a student and then three years after being ordained in September 1974.


• Cursillo saves my ministry. Most first ministries end up hitting some kind of wall after a couple years. I once described it as entering the ministry expecting the church I was serving to explode with excitement. After all, the only reason it happened before was that I hadn't been the pastor there before. Well, needless to say, it doesn't tend to happen that way very often.
  
  Meanwhile the Moravian Church was getting involved in the spiritual renewal movement, Cursillo, which I had introduced to the church my last year in seminary and then stopped being involved. Well, what goes around--- just as I was about to give up on ministry, not long after I stopped hitting my head into the wall and said to God, "Okay, God. It's your church. You do it." here comes Cursillo to push me into a new depth of faith and spirituality. The result was almost 30 more years in the parish!


• Giving up on the hope of politics. And it all fell apart. Assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, conservative Christian politics. I did not get interested in-depth again for another couple decades.


• Moving to a new congregation in York, PA. I finally grew up. Val and I were on our own, away from Bethlehem putting life into practice. What a wonderful, caring supportive congregation to allow us to do that.

Thus ended thirty years. We were not yet parents, but we wanted to be. We both enjoyed what we were doing. (Val was being a pastor's wife and enjoying it and setting her own grounds for the future.) I was discovering my self and way of ministry. That would take a few more years to bloom a little more but we were enjoying ourselves. Just as it should be at 30.