1. I would say that my junior year of high school was my favorite year. I did pretty well on my SAT so the letters were coming in. I was applying to colleges. The summer after my junior year I did Boy's State and went to a laser camp for two weeks at Rose Hulman. At that time, I thought I wanted to be a surgeon. That would have been a huge mistake.
I was a camp counselor for the district middle school camp with some close friends. One of them was headed for Central Wesleyan College a year behind me. That stuck in my mind. I was a pretty poor counselor. I slept really soundly so the first night the middle school guys all left the cabin after I fell asleep. The rest of the week I put my bunk in front of the door so they would have to crawl over me to get out.
There was a moment when I especially felt the presence of God. A chubby boy ran away saying he was going to walk home. Someone had made fun of his weight. We found him. What impressed me is that he really didn't want to leave. He just wanted someone to come after him. There was a moment when I felt the love of God flowing from us to him in an incredibly rich way.
I was nearly at the peak of physical shape in my life. I remember running across the camp at what seemed like the fastest I had ever run. Those were days when I could easily run a 440 in less than a minute and was somewhere around 5:30 for a mile. I'd never get back to those speeds, although I would run a couple marathons in England 10 years later.
2. I also caught the traveling team from Central at district conference. I don't know what it was about singing teams like that. They were just ordinary students. But I was a singer, and they always impressed me, like they were stars. Irrational, I know.
As an aside, for as long as the special song phase of American church worship took place, I sang solos regularly in every church I attended. As a boy, my mother always accompanied on the piano. But soon were the days when you bought cassette sound tracks at the local Christian bookstore -- which began to be a thing when I was in college. From Fort Lauderdale to Trinity Wesleyan in Central to Stonewall in Lexington, I sang often. That phase of church music was ending by the time I moved to Marion.
I was also in quartets. At Central I was in a mixed traveling group that went everywhere from Florida to Virginia. A highlight was a trip to Florida with Elmer Drury, Keith Drury's brother. He would die of a heart attack less than a year thereafter. I was in quartets at Asbury too. I always sang bass. I also sang in choirs at Central, Stonewall, and at St. John's in England.
3. I applied to several colleges. Since I had been at Boy's State -- and Dirac still had an office at Florida State (he would die the next year) -- I applied there and was accepted. I was accepted at Rose Hulman. I received a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute award for science my senior year, so I applied there and was accepted. Tom Sloan pressured me into applying to Marion College, so I did. I also received the Isaac Bashevis Singer award to the University of Miami. It was a full tuition scholarship into a 5 year med-school program, an early 3 + 2 as I recall.
And I applied to Central Wesleyan College. My dad was on the Board of Trustees at the time, and he thought it would look bad if I didn't at least apply there. So I did. Because I was a National Merit Finalist, as I recall, they offered me a full tuition scholarship.
I had no intention of going there, despite two cute girls whom I knew would be there. As tempting as the University of Miami was, I really didn't want to be an hour from home. I wanted to get further away where I could be my own person (that was probably one of many not too smart impulses I've had in my life). Rose Hulman was still all boys -- NO! RPI was way in New York.
Marion College offered me a pittance of a scholarship. To be honest, I didn't think much of it academically at the time, although it was probably higher than Central. Florida State was in Tallahassee -- the middle of nowhere. I can't remember if I applied to Johns Hopkins. I know I thought about it.
4. In the fall of 1983, my dad wanted me to visit Central when he went there for the fall board meeting. Again, he felt like it was somewhat of an obligation since he was on the board. But there was no pressure on me to go there. We were a family of duty, and we were performing it.
But something strange happened while I was there. On the one hand, the academics seemed inferior even to my AP high school classes (this sometimes has to do with who you are teaching). I would face the shame of my high school chemistry teacher who would feel like good scholarships and awards were wasted on me. From Key Club to Daughters of the American Revolution to Veterans of Foreign Wars, I would do well on the scholarship night. And to go to Central?
But Central felt like home. After feeling like an outsider all my public school years. These were my kind of Christian. Although I was still painfully shy, Central felt like church camp to me, a place I might belong. As we left the campus to go home, I said that although I hated it, I felt like God wanted me to go there.
And so go there I did. For the first thirty or so years of my life, I would say I was a doubter about just about everything. An ex-girlfriend once said I was type cast when I played Thomas in a church Easter play. I doubted my salvation for ten years. I doubted whether I loved girlfriends. I doubted decisions to make and often felt like I consistently made the wrong ones.
But I never doubted that God wanted me to go to Central, and that was quite amazing. That was the first of such clear callings in those years of my life.
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