I Used To Be Amazing

I used to be amazing.

I grew up in a wonderful Christian home with a wonderful Christian family and I was very well behaved. We lived in a farming community with green hills and brown cows and my father was the most important man in town. (In retrospect I think Mister Barney was actually the most important; he owned the General Store where they sold the cheese curds.)

There were no problems to speak of in those days. Every Sunday my father preached in a purple steepled church and I tried very hard to make him look good. Mom slicked back my hair tight to my ears and I swung both legs silently in the front pew. Everybody in town thought I was a good boy and said I would become a wonderful pastor someday.

When I became a teenager my father resigned his pulpit and we moved away to another town. It was a bigger town where my father was not important and money was hard to come by, and houses too. I was afraid to move away and afraid about the money and the shortage of houses. But I told my parents it would be a great adventure and I wanted to remain perfect for them and for my younger sisters. (Younger sisters are a big responsibility.)

It became difficult to be perfect all the time. There were still no problems to speak of except for the money problems and the problems I had with thinking too much about girls. There were several pretty girls in my new high school and one of them had very bright eyes and she sometimes pointed them at me. I tried not to think about her eyes because I knew there would be a sinful thought and I did not want to sin because I was a Christian boy.

Sometimes I confessed my sins but I mostly kept them to myself and I felt that I was becoming a wicked young man and I began to conclude that there was nothing amazing left in me. And there was still the trouble with money and dad was very busy and the shame kept piling higher and higher. It seemed better to pretend that I was perfect than to disappoint everyone so I kept up appearances and I went to Bible School and I tried very hard some of the time.

I graduated with several awards and with a new idea about how to become amazing again. I decided that God wanted me to become the President of the United States. (You know, because if you can’t be perfect… be powerful!)

I enrolled in a Christian University until I earned a Master’s degree in Government. During that time I met many politicians who introduced me to many agendas. There were religious agendas and political agendas and there was money to be found and there were wheels to grease. There were many who behaved like moths in the light of the power and some of them gave me a worse feeling than the feeling of my own sins. I began to see how the machine was broken in a way to attract the wrong sort of men and I began to think that I was not so different from those men. One of them invited me into his bedroom where he tried to seduce me but I wasn’t quite ready to sleep my way to the top.

After a while I didn’t want to become a politician anymore. My buddy and I decided to be missionaries instead. We flew to China and lived there for one year. We made friends with Chinese kids who spoke English and played basketball and were curious about Christianity. We introduced them to our faith in God and they introduced us to hellishly hot food. The food was so spicy and so delicious that I crapped my pants many times. We always loved eating noodles with our friends though. Their eyes would gleam when we talked about God and many of them believed. I did not feel perfect but I felt very helpful and very happy and my motives were mostly pure. (My intestines never recovered though, just ask my wife.)

Toward the end of that year I had the idea that every American kid should be a missionary to China. I wanted them to live overseas for one year stints and make new friends and share their faith. When I returned to America I began to tell people about my idea and my friends got excited and they helped me. We started a non-profit organization and I started speaking publicly and we got some recruits and the vision came to life. The organization doubled in size every year for the first four years. By September 2009 sixty of us flew in to China together. I continued speaking in churches and at festivals and I began to feel important and a little too amazing and it was a feeling I had been starving for and it went to my head.

By that time I had married a girl named Dani. I loved her very much. Her eyes were the brightest eyes I had ever seen. But I had a problem with addiction that I did not understand and that would not go away and it seemed to get worse in China. I had been confessing the problem in small details but it was getting worse and we were getting scared. Dani and I called the missionary bosses in America and they were also scared and they asked us to come home.

We flew home from China and I phoned everyone who gave me money and I told them I was sorry. I did not feel amazing that day. Those phone calls were very hard and there were many questions I was unprepared to answer. When the phone calls were over I laid on the couch for several months and I began to think about my faith in Christianity and how it had never fixed me. I thought it was very silly of me to have ever hoped that my religion could make me amazing and I became very angry. When I was not laying on the couch I was attending counseling appointments and twelve step meetings and I began to wonder if the religion that never fixed me was nothing more than a big puppet show.

I stopped being a Christian as best I knew how and I became a construction worker and I began to write. I wrote a feisty blog called F.U.Questions that caused some trouble with people I loved. I wrote it anyway because I had given up pretending and now everyone knew I was the opposite of amazing. Finally I stopped blogging but I kept working and I kept writing and I kept asking my questions about God and about Christianity and about what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life.

After a while of dealing with my troubles I grew steadier and healthier and I tried to return to the organization I had started. I made many apologies and many amends and it was very touching. The girls cried when I met with them one-on-one and I cried when I met with the boys. I think some healing happened but in the end I found that my new ideas about God were too loose and too vague to fit inside the thing I had started.

Dani said that it was for the best and that it was high time I made some cash anyway. I had been writing more and reading more and I told her that I wanted to be a professional writer and she said that I was crazy but that I should try my best. I told her to blame Hemingway because he convinced me to try it.

Now I have taken a job waiting tables at night so I can write stories during the day. I write fiction and non-fiction and I submit my stories to The New Yorker and to Harper’s and to any contest I can find.

I am still waiting for a book deal but while I am waiting I am realizing how lonely it is not to go to church and not to have friends who think of God or who want to talk to me about the mysteries of things. These days I imagine how nice it would be to have breakfast at my house on Sunday mornings where people who do not fit inside of the church come and find some community with me. But after all the trouble I have had I am fairly skittish about starting things.

I am still afraid of screwing things up and I am still learning that perfection is an illusion. But because I no longer live under the weight of my wish to be amazing I will keep on writing and I will keep on sending out my stories, and I will also start this blog. I don’t know what will happen with it but even if nothing happens I think I will be OK.