4
Epiphanies

I was in the third grade when my parents moved my sisters and me from a small, pleasant town in Mississippi to the low-income, drug-ridden side of Fort Worth, Texas. The culture shock was staggering.

In Mississippi, my mom was a youth minister at the local Baptist church and my dad was a police officer. We lived within spitting distance from everyone who shared the same blood as us and spent most weekends with our extended family. My early childhood was whiled away roaming through the woods, playing under magnolia trees, and basking in the love of church ladies with sweet-tea accents. Life seemed simple and all figured out.

But one day my dad had an epiphany. Epiphanies, I have learned with age, are the root of all evil, because they lead to change. And I despise change. My dad, the police officer, felt like God was leading him away from the police force and into some type of full-time ministry. Like God was inviting him to change the entire course of his life to serve the church. But first he would need to go to seminary. That is the kind of epiphany that, if heeded, can change the trajectory of a man’s life.

When I was eight years old my dad decided to go to seminary. And my mom decided to attend alongside him. They listened to the disarming call to drop their nets, like Peter did in the Bible. Like Paul, Moses, Mary and Joseph, Abraham and Sarah, and a whole list of other normal people throughout history who have been divinely invited to change the entire course of their lives to follow God and live by faith. My parents’ decision wasn’t practical, easy, or safe. Living by faith rarely is. It certainly wasn’t too well accepted by an extended family who assumed we would all grow old within spitting distance of one another. But they did it anyway. Moving away from the only home they had ever known, arriving in a new state with no family, raising three small girls, working part-time jobs to put food on the table, and attending seminary. It was a costly epiphany from God.

“Being a living mystery,” Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard says of being a witness, “means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”1 We were officially a living mystery kind of family. We arrived in the foreign country of Texas two weeks before I entered the third grade. Three months later, I turned nine years old.

For the first time ever, my mom let me pick out party favors for the friends coming to my birthday celebration. We had always been conservative with money, and now there was never ever money, but here she was letting me pick out the most amazing gifts to give my new friends. I chose Lisa Frank gift bags with Lisa Frank stickers and Lisa Frank coloring books for everyone who would come. With a fancy homemade cake and gift bags lining the table and my cutest outfit on, I sat on the front steps of the house, anxiously waiting for the kids to arrive and the party to start.

After a short time and no arrivals, I went into the house and turned on music, because music draws people. And then I went back to the porch and waited for kids to come. After more time passed I grabbed the gift bags and brought them outside to the porch, because gift bags draw people. And I waited. Waited for the kids to come. Any kids. I didn’t care which ones.

Somewhere in the midst of the waiting, my optimism got the best of me.

Maybe my grandpa would surprise me! Maybe they were just driving in from Mississippi and waiting around the corner, the whole family here to surprise me! Maybe the girls from church were coming. The whole Sunday school class of nameless nine-year-olds I didn’t know yet. Or maybe the kids from my new school. Never mind that they spoke Spanish and I spoke English and we couldn’t even communicate. Maybe they were coming.

As the minutes ticked away and no one came, I remember my mom wiping tears off her face. I had moved back inside with my family. She was quietly slipping the party bags off the table while my dad took the few presents they were able to afford, unwrapped them, divided them up, and rewrapped them to make it look like there was more than there actually was. Like maybe I had a friend who had come and brought me a present. Like maybe someone was coming.

Mom, Dad, Melissa, and baby Sarah sang “Happy Birthday” to me. I blew out the candles and opened my presents. And it was still magical. My mom always finds a way to make magic.

At the last minute, a little girl from down the street knocked on the door. It’s funny that so many years later I don’t remember her name or anything about her, but I have a vivid memory of her face, giant brown eyes, and long, beautiful hair. She was shy and didn’t speak English. When she smiled, I saw myself in the silver reflection of her teeth.

She gave me a Barbie wrapped in construction paper.

It was a used Barbie.

With head lice.

In the back bedroom, my mom called her dad and sobbed.

No friends, a used Barbie, and three little girls who now had head lice. My mom still gets choked up when she remembers the absolute grief that filled her soul in those weeks to follow. Turns out, following God-sized epiphanies doesn’t guarantee instant happiness, and it might even cost your own children some pain.

In the early days my dad took a job as a security guard at the local hospital to make ends meet. After that he worked at a halfway house for men coming out of prison. Mom joined the staff at a small church and my parents attended seminary classes and studied the Bible. My sisters and I fought head lice and language barriers with the neighbor kids, and I spent the entire third grade convinced that I might be kidnapped as I walked home from school. I frequently bemoaned our tragic lot in life. Most nights I felt a strange sense of I-told-you-so pride when the police helicopters hovered their spotlights on our street, looking for some assailant in the dark. I assured my parents that my sisters and I would be kidnapped and it would be their fault.

Three years later Mom and Dad graduated from seminary. Mom immediately found the perfect job as a student pastor at a church in Duncanville, Texas, the church that ended up being our home for many years. We moved away from police helicopters and drug busts, and into our suburban future. Mom loved her job and we loved not living in fear.

But my dad’s future career remained unclear because he couldn’t find a job within the church.

Day after day, month after month, year after year. He worked jobs he hated to put food on the table and doubted whether he’d ever heard God correctly in the first place. For quite some time, Dad lived in a state of dread, shame, and anger.

My dad put it all on the line. Uprooting his family. Changing the entire course of his little girls’ lives. Quitting the only career he had ever known and ever been good at to become an ordained minister. And two years after graduating from seminary he was bagging newspapers for minimum wage in the basement of a printing plant in downtown Dallas. Wagering everything on a costly epiphany from God had seemingly gotten him nowhere.

He fought hard. Applying for more jobs than any human being I had known and never giving in to the temptation to give up and go back to where he came from—to pretend the epiphany never happened. Yet despite his best efforts and my parents’ attempts to shield us from the cold, hard truth of it all, we knew: this wasn’t the dream. I learned when I was a little girl, from the strongest man I knew, that sometimes dreams crash and burn.