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From the Pastor(Isaiah 54:13) |
Every month, the pastor or a member of our congregation shares reflections on religion, or what's going on around the community and the world.
From Pastor Ethan McCardell
May 1, 2009
My Story
I spent most of my early life in a small upper class suburban Midwest town. I had the typical early childhood experiences: I enjoyed school, my cousins, swimming, collecting baseball cards, and had a few close friends. I was a normal kid. I was pretty happy.
Ask anyone who knew me in my teenage years however and they would probably tell you I was a relatively angry kid. After leaving a private elementary school and entering a public jr. high and high school, life dramatically changed for me – and not for the better.
To provide you a sense of context for the challenges I would face, I should tell you I was born with Cerebral Palsy. (Technically “brain paralysis.” A portion of dead brain tissue caused by a brain stroke in utero). This affected my gait, balance, muscle control, dexterity, coordination, spacial orientation, and more. I had a mild case to be sure, but it was still noticeable – especially in those earlier years.
I wore a leg brace until I was 12, and my walk was awkward. I was tilted forward (due to a lack of pelvic muscle) and had a “step/drag” kind of gait that caused me to fall often and lose my balance. Albeit a mild case, it was enough to cause me to be noticed as “different.”
But I never felt different in elementary school. Between the support of my church congregation, family, and friends – the focus was on my spirit more than the limitations of my body. My self image – how I thought of myself, and how I felt about the experience of being “me” – was largely positive.
When I entered public school that all changed. That said, I would be the last person to “demonize” public school for anyone. I now have a son who attends one where we live in Washington State – who loves his class and is getting exactly the help he needs. For me, it was most likely the stage of life I was in, coupled with my own insecurities and those of students around me that created a “cocktail” of negative challenges.
First of all, I had very little fashion sense. Between unkempt hair and thick glasses with a sports band – I had it coming. I showed up on the first day and an older kid grabbed the back of my glasses and snapped the band on my head. I had someone “spitball” me in my first class. My first trip down the hall to my next class, I noticed a crowd of kids imitating how I walked (they “limped” after me down the hallway).
Then, on the way home on the bus – I sat in front of a kid who would dedicate himself to flicking my ears on the way home. Sometimes I would get beat up after departing the bus. One time, he took the industrial strength duct tape on the bus seat and stuck it in my hair. All in all, not a fun series of experiences. I had hardly any friends, I was constantly bullied and made fun of, and I began to hate the experience of being me.
Not long afterward, I entered the local high school in ninth grade - wounded and angry. I wasn’t going to let anyone in. They would hurt me.
I remember entering gym class (I couldn’t do over half the activities anyway so that made me feel vulnerable) – and there was another pretty flippant kid who was equally awkward in different ways (his challenge was more social). I began to turn my hurt on him. One day, as I hurled an insult – he surprised me! He turned and knocked me down. He started pummeling my face. No one stepped in. Eventually, it was over and there was blood on the gym floor. He had hit me hard enough to hurt his hand. “Serves him right,” I thought. Served me right.
We ended up in the principal’s office, and it was decided by my parents that I would do better home schooling that year. We did – and then I ended up going to the church school (you can find the link on this site for the “Academy of the New Church”). Despite all the wonderful lessons there for me to learn, I dug my heels in and remained bitter and unteachable. Life started to turn around though in my senior year. I found a good group of friends who helped me harness my good qualities, I began to develop an interest in my religion, and started to feel like I might just be lovable.
At the end of senior year, I ended up needing to have surgery on my foot. (It had grown increasingly crooked due to how I’d walked over the years – and would now throb with pain at night when I tried to sleep). We booked the surgery, and I had several months of recovery time. I went right back to the pity party. I felt desperately sorry for myself. I felt like I was falling into a black hole –and this time it was even bad enough that I struggled with wanting to take my own life.
For “some reason” I felt a knock on the door of my mind to reach out. What I ended up reaching for was this religion that I’d grown up in and had a general awareness of, but had never developed a relationship with on my own. I started reading the Bible (particularly Genesis and Exodus) and became hungry to understand the meaning of these stories for my life (creation, Noah’s ark, the Children of Israel’s escape from Egyptian bondage).
I reached for the work Arcana Coelestia (translated from Latin as “Secrets of Heaven”) – a Divinely inspired interpretation of the deeper symbolic meaning of these narratives for our spiritual journey. I call it that now – but its not as if my copies were wonderfully “dog-eared” from study. I’d grown up in this religion, but I hadn’t really taken it on for myself. I knew there were principles I valued from how I was raised (God is never angry with you – He only loves you and is working to lead you to heaven, a person has to overcome selfish and worldly desires to find spiritual meaning and purpose in their life, heaven and hell are real places – an extension of the life we’ve chosen here – what we’ve come to love, etc). But these principles didn’t have personal meaning for me, yet.
I started reading about the history of the human race in their relationship to God, how when charity reigns than it’s a person’s life that’s most important – not their theology. How Jehovah God came into the world in human form (as Jesus Christ) so we could begin to recognize fundamental truths about life that we’d lost sight of and develop a personal relationship with Him. These were truths like: there is a God, there is life after death, angels are just people who went through life dedicating themselves to selflessness and service and now can be guides for us on the same journey, we are always free to choose – and every choice we make has eternal consequences, and more…
I remember tearing up at the recognition that this was healing me. Then even more powerfully – that everyone needed to know these things about God. In fact, if they learned them and came to value them our lives would change, our world would change. We could experience and respond to Love. We didn’t have to hurt anymore, we didn’t have to feel so alone, we didn’t have to be angry. In fact, life didn’t have to be so hard (a principle I would find to be most powerful to me later when I studied the work “Heaven and Hell” where the title of one chapter reads: “It is not so difficult to get to heaven”).
That was the beginning of choosing a new direction for my life. I am now a minister in this church, have found the love of my life in my wife Jessica (after believing I would never be married), and have four children who constantly remind me that life is precious and God is Love. Praise the Lord!
“And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him and He will save us: this is the Lord; we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.” (Isaiah 25: 9)