CHAPTER 18: TIMBER!

THE LOUD BUZZ OF THE SCHOOL BELL interrupted my dark thoughts. I’d been stewing in the bile of bitterness toward my biological father all day. To me, he was not my dad —he was a sperm donor. To me, he wasn’t a war hero —he was a deserter. He abandoned my ma after she’d gotten pregnant and ran away like a coward. Every time I thought about it, an anger I didn’t know I was capable of, a Mathias-level fury, would turn my face beet red, raise my pulse rate beyond the safety zone, and fill the veins in my neck with red-hot rage. His abandonment of my ma infuriated me. I hated him.

But I’d grown adept at compartmentalizing my hatred for my dad away from the rest of my “kind and loving, good Christian boy” life, so I quickly shut down my dark thoughts, ready to move on to the next exciting thing.

Even though the school bell marked the end of the day, most of us students weren’t actually headed home. Instead, we milled around outside the front of the school next to the line of waiting school buses. Once one of the teachers signaled it was time to board, we packed into the yellow buses like sardines in a can for the ride down to the Denver Coliseum to attend The Basic Seminar —or as our teachers called it, “The Bill Gothard Seminar.”

While attendance at the seminar wasn’t a school requirement, it was “strongly encouraged” by our teachers. “Strongly encouraged” was their way of saying, “If you want to stay on our good side, you should really try to be there.” That’s why most of the kids were going.

I sat next to my new friend, Rick Long, during the noisy, bumpy thirty-minute ride. Rick had started at Arvada Christian School just a few months earlier, at the beginning of the school year. Even though I was a freshman and he was a seventh grader, I saw something special in him. He was more serious about loving the Lord and reaching the lost than a lot of the kids at school.

Although Rick was raised in the suburbs and I was raised in the highest crime-rate area of Denver, the Long family had a gospel grittiness about them that attracted me. His parents ran a halfway house for wayward girls, and over the years, as they shared the love of Jesus with them, they had led many of them to Christ. Rick had learned from his parents’ example what it meant to have a passion for God and compassion for the hurting.

“Do you know what this seminar is actually about?” Rick asked.

“Some kind of training to help us spiritually,” I answered.

Attending extracurricular events like this wasn’t drudgery for me. I’d seen how the power of the gospel had been transforming my family one by one, and I wanted to be the best witness for Christ I could possibly be. There were still two lost souls in my family I desperately wanted to reach —my still-too-guilty-for-Jesus ma, who I had been consistently trying to share the gospel with, and my out-of-state Uncle Richard. My other uncles had repeatedly tried to share the gospel with him over the phone, but he shut them down every time.

Maybe I’d discover some keys to getting the conversation going with Richard and breaking through to my ma. Plus, I’d heard the buzz about how transformational this seminar was for many of our teachers who had previously experienced it. It was supposedly a game changer, and I wanted to be changed.

Mr. Gothard had been an icon in the fundamentalist, home school, and Christian school underground for decades. Over the years, millions had attended his events. He routinely packed arenas, coliseums, and auditoriums across the nation with thousands of young people, filling young minds with his 1-2-3 easy brand of simple-answers fundamentalism.

Once our line of buses pulled into the Denver Coliseum parking lot, Rick and I parted ways. In strict, regimented order, all of us sorted ourselves into our class groupings and lined up alphabetically.

Even though I wanted to sit next to Rick, I realized it was probably a good thing we were divided into our class years. Rick and I were both full of adrenaline and jokes, which would have made us like nitro and glycerin in a conference setting. We loved the Lord, but we loved to joke around, too.

Once assembled in alphabetical lines, we marched to the arena for check-in. Along with thousands of other young people, we received a large red book called Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts. The King James Bible may have been our official divinely inspired playbook, but this giant red book would soon become our unofficial pretribulational, premillennial, all-things-fundamental rule book.

The excitement was palpable as we made our way down the steep gray concrete stairs of the Denver Coliseum to find our seats. Thousands of young people filled the packed room. I sat down between Stephanie and Shawna, two of my fellow very-serious-for-the-Lord classmates whose last names bookended mine alphabetically.

The crowd hushed and the conference started, but to my surprise, the famous Mr. Gothard wasn’t actually present to speak. Instead, a prerecorded video of him appeared on a big screen at the front of the hall as his voice boomed from the giant speakers on the stage.

“Seriously?” I said, turning to Shawna. “We’re watching a video?”

In reality, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this was no rock concert. We were fundamentalists, and fundies had no rhythm. My music teacher, Miss Widgren, had quoted Mr. Gothard in music class just a few weeks ago. “There’s ‘edifying music’ and ‘non-edifying music,’” she’d explained. “If you take a plant and expose it to classical music, it will grow. If you take a plant and expose it to rock ’n’ roll music, it will die. Music is not amoral. The music itself is either spiritual or unspiritual. That’s why you can’t mix Christian lyrics and a rock ’n’ roll beat. Some musical beats are from the devil, and some are from the Lord. The ones from the devil go against the natural beat of your heart.” Her implication was that it was somehow physically dangerous to listen to rock music.

Even as a freshman, this seemed kind of stupid to me. Shooting my hand up in class, I’d said, “Well, if you time it right, Miss Widgren, it could be like heart aerobics.” Everyone erupted in laughter —except Miss Widgren. Narrowing her eyes, she’d looked at me and said, “Greg, I need to talk to you after class.” Since I’d developed a reputation as the “spiritual leader of the class,” a ripple of “ewwws” and “uh-ohs” spread around the room.

That episode in music class had actually made me a little suspicious of where this whole seminar was going to go. Adding to my own skepticism about Bill Gothard’s take on rock ’n’ roll was an encounter I’d had with one of the new leaders at Youth Ranch, Mark Schweitzer. Mark and his wife, Kim, had come from the Youth Ranch movement’s mother ship, Florida Bible College, just six months earlier. He had a whole different take on Christian music and, in a way, on what it meant to live a Christian life. Mark was a kind of “grace dealer” in the midst of Arvada Christian School’s rule-heavy approach to the Christian faith.

Mark had taken me under his wing and was helping me to grow spiritually. As a fatherless teen, I was eager to have an older Christian male invest in me and help me grow in my walk with Christ, so I respected Mark and carefully considered everything he shared with me. Mark’s views on “non-edifying” Christian music diverged dramatically from Mr. Gothard’s. Mark avidly listened to all sorts of Christian rock, back in the fledgling days of the Christian music industry. He’d secretly introduced me to groups like Petra and DeGarmo and Key and to singers like Dallas Holm, Wayne Watson, and Randy Stonehill. He even sneaked me into a David Meece concert once to give me an up-close-and-personal view of the burgeoning Christian music scene of the early ’80s. I fell in love with Christian rock from that moment on.

“Don’t tell Yankee that I took you to this concert,” he warned, “or I’ll get fired.” It had all felt deliciously rebellious to me without actually being sinful.

Maybe it was because I’d seen so much “real sin” growing up that this didn’t seem so bad. I’d witnessed more violence as a kid than most adults ever see in a lifetime. I’d seen heads and cars bashed in with baseball bats. I’d seen battle scars from countless street fights fueled by unbridled rage. I’d seen the devastating guilt that plagued my ma over a life of sexual immorality and being within a hair’s breadth of having me murdered in her womb.

Listening to God-honoring words set to a rock-n-roll beat just didn’t seem all that spiritually dangerous to me. When I listened to the songs Mark introduced me to, it didn’t make me feel like sinning against God, it made me feel like serving him all the more. Watching Mark’s life seemed proof enough for me that you could jam out with Christian music and live a life for God. And, contrary to what Miss Widgren said, his heart seemed to be beating just fine.

“What matters most,” Mark had told me, “is that you focus on your relationship with God, not all the rules around this place. The rules can’t make you holy. Just trust the Lord, keep your eyes on him, and refuse to allow a list of dos and don’ts to define you. Watch out for legalism.”

I wasn’t sure what legalism was, but Mark’s warning echoed in my head as Mr. Gothard’s opening words filled the Denver Coliseum.

Still, as the evening progressed, I found that the middle-aged Mr. Gothard had a pleasant way about him. Up there on the big screen, his crisp suit matched his slicked-back, jet-black hair. He’d mastered a very direct yet still very pastoral way of teaching. He sprinkled his talk with Scripture, stories, and lots and lots of graphs. He spoke with authority without sounding like an authoritarian. Unlike Yankee, Jack Hyles, Curtis Hudson, and the other fundamentalist preachers I’d been weaned on, Bill Gothard had a more gentle way about him that drew me and the rest of the crowd in to hang on his every word.

But the real attraction of the seminar for me was not Bill Gothard; it was the content he developed and put into the giant red textbooks thousands of us were holding in our hands. It seemed like this book had all the answers to life. It was that big. As I flipped through it, I saw session titles like “6 Basic Steps to Conquer Impurity” and “7 Steps of Action When Asked to Do Something You Think Is Wrong” or “5 Basic Steps toward Becoming a Whole Person.”

The simplicity of this approach appealed to me. Growing up in my wild family, much of my life had been a swirl of confusion, fear, longing, and searching. But this man and his giant red book seemed to have all the secrets, keys, and 1-2-3s.

My hand ached from all the note-taking. And I wasn’t alone. If you listened closely during each of Bill Gothard’s hour-and-twenty-minute talks, you could hear the scratching sound of pens meeting paper across the arena and, soon after, the simultaneous turning of numbered pages in our giant red handbooks for life.

Night after night that week, we came back. Night after night, I took copious notes. Night after night, Rick and I would talk about all we’d learned on the bus ride home. My head hurt from all the thoughts being crammed into my curious mind.

Gothard spoke with gentle authority on issues teens were interested in, including dating and “how far is too far” when it came to physical intimacy while dating. He also talked a lot about marriage, although he himself was single.

During one session I was challenged to begin thinking about and jotting down the attributes I wanted in a wife someday. I listed twenty-seven, and my list included “soul winner” twice. During another session, I learned about “the umbrella of authority” that everyone was under, especially wives and children.

I’d previously thought that living a Christian life was complicated, but while I was in the seminar eagerly listening to Bill Gothard’s every word, it seemed, well, simple and easy. All I had to do was apply the list, walk through the 1-2-3s, and everything would turn out just fine.

Once a session or so, he would say something in passing that would give me pause —something that sounded like the laundry list of dos and don’ts that Mark had warned me about. But soon, Mr. Gothard would be on to some other truth or graph or insight that would convict and convince me.

Then Thursday night rolled around and changed my life forever.

The evening started like every other night. Mr. Gothard gave some opening remarks and prayed. Then he dived into the topic for the evening —letting go of bitterness and choosing to forgive those who have wronged you.

I squirmed in my seat uncomfortably.

Working through another one of his 1-2-3 lists, Bill Gothard sounded like he was speaking directly to me and me alone. He was describing the depth of my bitterness and hatred toward my father like I was an open book.

“There’s a third reason that we can’t afford to be bitter,” he said, “and that is because we become like the one we’re bitter toward. One day a high school girl said to me in just real bitterness, ‘I hate my aunt.’ And I said, rather casually, ‘That’s too bad.’ She said, ‘Why’d you say it that way for?’ I said, ‘Within twenty years, you’re gonna be just like your aunt.’ She said, ‘Oh, no, oh horrors! I’ll forgive her then!’”

Mr. Gothard’s message was cutting deep. Like a lumberjack chopping down a large tree, he was relentless, and so was the Holy Spirit. Again and again, he swung his axe of spiritual truth.

“When you hate someone,” he explained, taking his first swing at me, “that person becomes the object of your ‘emotional focus.’” Using the example of a bad dad, he said, “When a son hates his father because the father was a drunk or unfaithful or whatever, even though the son may never become a drunk or unfaithful or whatever, he will begin to adopt the same ‘root attitudes’ that drive the father’s external behavior. Sons who are emotionally riveted to their father’s external sins will soon adopt the same underlying attitudes of pride, bitterness, or selfishness as their fathers. Years later, people will approach the sons and say, ‘You are just like your father,’ not because of the same external conduct, but because of the same root attitudes.”

The axe blow hit home. In my estimation, Toney was a drunk and a philanderer and everything I didn’t want to be as a man. But would I become just like him? Was this hatred in my heart going to conform me to his image?

I wasn’t ready to surrender yet. I clenched my fist and tightened my throat and waited for the conviction that had landed its first blow to pass. I hoped Gothard would change the illustration to forgiving a spouse or change the topic to dating or anything other than this “forgive your father” talk.

I stood my ground and fought hard not to give in.

But then he swung his axe again. “If God can forgive us for all the sins we’ve committed against him, then you can forgive anyone for any sins they may have committed against you.”

With another swing, he described in vivid detail how carrying bitterness could impact me physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Then with another swing, he talked about the futility of being offended on behalf of someone else, like I was for my abandoned mother.

With every point he made, every graph he drew, and every Scripture he quoted, wood chips flew.

Then with one mighty, last swing he told the story of the unforgiving servant from Matthew 18:23-35:

The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

At this the servant fell on his knees before him. “Be patient with me,” he begged, “and I will pay back everything.” The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. “Pay back what you owe me!” he demanded.

His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, “Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.”

But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.

Then the master called the servant in. “You wicked servant,” he said, “I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.

My last defenses fell.

I was the unforgiving servant. My master had forgiven me my great debt of sin. Jesus hung on a cross made of wood, saying, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.” He was the only innocent one, and he forgave those who sinned against him. He forgave me.

In that moment, the pen I had been taking notes with was no longer a writing instrument; it was the axe blade, chopping away at my stubborn heart. It was my sin that had nailed Jesus to the cross. The crimson red of my textbook reminded me of his blood poured out for me.

If Jesus could forgive me, then I could forgive anyone —even Toney.

But Mr. Gothard interrupted my thoughts again. “Let’s bow for prayer. It is so important that we conquer bitterness. I wonder if, just now, each one couldn’t think of those individuals who have offended us, wronged us, damaged us . . . would you right now be able to say, ‘God, you’ve forgiven me of so much, would you also forgive me now for having a temporal value system? Would you forgive me for an unloving spirit toward those who have offended me? . . . Right now, I do fully forgive those who offended me.’ Would you tell that to God and really mean it? ‘I fully release them.’”

God, will you forgive me?

Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting. I began to cry. Not just cry, but weep. Not just weep, but wail.

The moment had so overwhelmed me that for those several seconds, I was completely unaware that my crying was so loud and so obvious that my fellow students around me were reacting —some with whispering, most with giggling, and a few with sympathy. But my sole business in that moment was forgiveness, and with all the strength I had, I choked out the words that I’d resisted for so long. “Dad, I forgive you.”

Timber!

For the first time in my life, the chasm that had been created in my soul in the absence of an earthly father was flooded by the love of my heavenly Father. With every hot, salty tear that flowed down my cheeks and landed on the cold Coliseum concrete beneath my seat, I sensed the love of God flooding on me, in me, and over me.

God was my dad, and he would never leave me or forsake me. It didn’t matter whose physical DNA I carried. I was neither bodybuilder nor war hero; I was a child of my Papa in paradise, the King of the universe, God himself. Nothing else mattered to me in that life-defining moment.

After the seminar dismissed, I took my seat next to Rick on the bus. “What did you think of tonight’s session?” he asked me.

“I forgave my dad for the first time,” I said simply.

Not understanding the full impact of my statement, he said, “That’s cool!”

It was cool. But forgiving my father was just a start. There was someone else in my life who desperately needed to experience forgiveness. Not mine, but God’s.