Children of Refuge

"We believe in the premillennial second coming of Jesus. First, to resurrect the righteous dead and to catch away the living saints to Him in the air. Second, to reign on the earth a thousand years."

By 12, we were members. Baptized. My mom on the organ, returning to a skill she'd honed growing up in Jamaica. Grandma satisfied.

We'd become close with the pastor's family. When he and his wife went away, my mom would play nanny — his two kids, a boy of 8 and a girl of 6.

I cried one day because I missed my dad. He lived in England, and the silence from him was deafening. My mom thought the pastor could fill the void. The pastor agreed. I don't remember the conversation. I remember the result. He started introducing me at church functions as his other son, and I detested it. It made me feel like a bastard. A fatherless boy who was the charity case of his pastor.

He wasn't officially my father. He was something more awkward — surrogate, spiritual, unspecified. The most awkward part was when he asked why I didn't call him dad. I was afraid of being disrespectful, so I tried, feebly, letting the word fall out of my mouth. Never in front of his actual kids. That would have been even weirder. If he called the house, I'd tell them, YOUR dad called. Not ours.

He wasn't my dad and I didn't feel that kind of affection for him. But as far as male role models went, he was the best I had. In England I had a host of men. America took all of them. The few my mom dated, with one exception, were clowns. I never said it. I read them. They didn't want anything to do with me anyway.

The exception was Rex.

Rex was Ghanaian, which reminded me of my mom's friends back in England. He took me to the barber every Friday and got me McDonald's on the way home. Sometimes Toys R Us. Sometimes a new PlayStation game. He kept doing it for at least a year after he and my mom stopped dating. I ran into him recently. He was dating a woman my age. She had a daughter about 7 or 8 — the same age I was when he was around. He was in a loop, helping her with her fundraiser, introducing me as his son. I didn't mind.

By high school I was typing the pastor's sermons every weekend. These were no ordinary sermons. He'd grown up not knowing how to read, so he overcompensated by using all the big words. His messages ran two hours. He wrote and rehearsed constantly. He worked hard and cared hard. I didn't like not having a dad. Sometimes I didn't mind. This guy was the leader of our flock. Maybe there was something I could learn.

One thing I learned was faith. He gave a lot, often on faith. In 1999 the church moved from a funeral home on the east side to a synagogue on Main Street. It was a faith move. Before we gutted the new building we renovated the old one, and I watched that energy carry into the next. The lesson was: when you're getting ready to move, maximize your current place. Be grateful for it. Then your next will open up.

Academically I had everything a public school could offer, because we went to school two towns over in one of the richest towns in America. School in one zip code, church in another. Five days a week I crossed between them and didn't think much of it.

But because of church I didn't mix much after school. If I wasn't at home or in class, I was in the building. Sunday school, asking too many questions, acting too smart. Going to the store for chips. Recording the service, making copies. Waiting after service for three hours. Going out to eat. Going back to church to sleep in the back pews. Monday: ladies' meeting. Wednesday: prayer meeting. Thursday: choir. Friday: youth fellowship. Saturday: sermon typing.

I couldn't do anything else even if I wanted to. So I tried to make sense of it.

I had to.

The biggest hurdle was time — how this gospel was condemning all these people to hell who I thought didn't deserve it. I'd imagine some distant person who'd never heard of Christ and think it was crazy that they'd burn for the silence. I heard the rebuttals every week. I could plug all the holes.

So I gave up.

All I wanted was to make it far enough to have a girlfriend, have sex, and figure it out from there.

But I was deathly afraid of getting a girl pregnant. So I didn't have a problem waiting.

I wanted to be a good guy. I wanted a good girl. And the clock was ticking.