English Lessons: The Crooked Path of Growing Toward Faith - Softcover

Andrea Lucado

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780781873 ISBN 13: 9781780781877

Publisher: Authentic Media, 2017

Synopsis

English Lessons The Crooked Path of Growing Toward Faith

About this title

About the Author

Andrea Lucado is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. The daughter of best-selling author and pastor Max Lucado, she inherited an obsession with words and their arrangement. She has a masters degree in English literature from Oxford-Brookes University and contributes regularly to online and print publications such as Relevant magazine and She Reads Truth. When she is not conducting interviews or writing stories, you can find her laughing with friends at a coffee shop or running in the Texas hill country.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

English Lesson


Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose,
A ribbon at a time . . . 1

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.
—Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

Field Crickets

Church was not a part of my childhood. It was my childhood. Church, growing up—they twine themselves in my memories. They are the same color, indistinguishable. From my younger years, I remember more about the building itself than the words said within it. I remember the pews were classic, sturdy ones with rough blue cushions that fit nicely and would give you carpet burn if you crawled along them for too long. I remember the communion table from a vantage point underneath it, looking through the wooden slats and holding on to them, demanding my friends “let me out of jail.” I remember where the communion grape juice and yeast-free crackers were stored, in the closet tothe right of the stage in the auditorium. Sometimes we shoveled the crackers into our mouths while our parents had postchurch, prelunch conversations with fellow church members for what felt like forever.

Many Sundays, when I finished stealing the communion crackers, I was off to find my mom so I could tug at her, pull her arm in the direction of the door, and make it perfectly clear I was ready to leave. She was so good at not budging, standing her ground and remaining in conversation with whomever it was, as if a child were not yelling,“Mom! Mom! Mooom!” over and over at her side.

The church was built in the 1950s. Not beautiful, in a strange octagonal shape on a road called Fredericksburg. Home is what it felt like most of the time. So many people knew my name there. I didn’t know their names, but I wasn’t expected to. They heard my dad talk about me from the pulpit each week. I never heard their dads talk about them. Their faces were enough for me. Synonymous with the building itself. For me so many members existed only inside that building, as if they emerged from the walls on Sunday mornings and melted back into them afterward.

My neighborhood streets were the back hallways and classrooms of that octagonal-shaped building. My neighborhood friends were the daughters of elders and staff members. We got to know each other lingering outside our fathers’ offices, playing hide-and-seek. We did church-league basketball together and popped gum during Sunday school together. When we reached the sixth grade, we decided, together, that we had outgrown the church playground and developed the habit of forming circles to talk and gossip with our arms crossed, our weight on one foot, hips out to one side.

Church determined my social life as well as my weekly calendar. Sunday mornings were busy; therefore, Saturday night was early curfew night, a rule I openly hated and disagreed with until the day I left home for college. Sunday nights were for small-group gatherings called life groups. Wednesdays were for midweek service. Spring break was the youth ski trip to Colorado. Christmas was always spent at home because of Christmas Eve service. Summer was for church camp. This is what I knew. This is what deep down, beneath my teenage angst and complaining, I loved. I grew up in church and church grew down into me, as if my body housed a tree of church lessons whose limbs grew inside me and rooted my feet into the church’s ground itself.

This is why when people talk about how wonderful their childhood church experience was, or how terrible it was, it’s difficult for me to understand why they don’t simply say growing up was wonderful or growing up was terrible. How are those two things not twined for them like they are for me?

When your father has been a pastor at the same church in the same city for three decades, people come to recognize your family. At school, everyone knew I was a preacher’s daughter. At church, I was Max’s, the pastor’s daughter.

For some, faith and belief are learned over time, understood and accepted. For those like me, faith and belief have been written into your name. Your family’s profession is, in a way, Christianity. It makes “owning one’s faith” an impossible and confusing feat. For how could I own my last name more than I already do?

Considering my background, you can imagine how I relate to someone with a completely unchurched childhood. That person might as well be from a tiny island off the coast of nowhere near the edge of the universe. This is why when I found myself one day in the early fall of 2008 sitting in a classroom surrounded by tiny islands off the coasts of nowhere near the edge of the universe, I marveled. Nothing about us, our pasts, or our backgrounds braided together. We were from different countries and different continents with the common goal of achieving master’s degrees in English Literature. Now we have all returned to our respective origins, but then we had landed mere blocks from each other in a city called Oxford in a country called England.

Oxford. The place that makes you want to write books about it. It sucks in students from various nations on this earth, plops them together into graduating classes, and then either promptly shuttles them back home or loses them in its dark office corridors forever. I got out. Though it would have been magical to stay.

It was orientation day at Oxford Brookes University when I first met them all, the tiny islands. I left my parents waving at the bottom of a hill as I climbed up toward campus. Mom and Dad had flown over with me to help with the transition, and walking away from them that afternoon felt harder than it should have for a twenty-two-year-old. I left too early, worried I would be late, so I walked slowly as I neared the building.

I had been to Oxford before. As a junior in college, I participatedin a study-abroad program there. My three best friends and I made the journey from Abilene Christian University in West Texas all the way to England to spend four months living with fellow American students and traveling on the weekends. We clutched our Rick Steves guides and felt very grown up as we sat in pubs at the ripe, legal age of twenty. We drank espresso and red wine during a memorable weeklong trip to Italy. We learned how to buy train tickets and book hostels, and we often huddled together on our bunk beds and listed the things from home we longed for: our cars, Mexican food, big grocery stores, Sonic. When we landed at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in December, we felt relief and triumph. We had survived a semester overseas. And I vowed quietly to myself that one day I would return.

I don’t think two more opposite cities exist, Oxford and Abilene. One is in the Cotswolds, known for endless waves of countryside at the cost of endless waves of rain. The other is in the part of Texas known for tumbleweeds, oil, more wind and dust than rain, and, of course, the occasional dreaded cricket infestation.
--

I call it The Summer of the Crickets, and I can still feel its heat. Thick, consuming heat that settled and lingered over Abilene adamantly for three months. I had stayed in Abilene for my last summer before my senior year. I took summer school in the morning and worked in the afternoon, and then at night, when it was finally safe to go outside without absolutely melting, I would run around campus. Even though the sun had been down for hours, I still dripped all the way. Hot and humid—the ideal environment for cricket reproduction. Every few years Abilene and other regions in Texas are overrun by crickets that hatch in warm, moist environments. That summer they took over. In the building where my summer class met, an entire wall fell victim to crickets. Thousands of them spread out among the bricks, claimed their space, and held on until fall. I don’t think they moved for months. Each morning the wall of crickets remained. Class was canceled a couple of times due to the smell. Decaying crickets, I learned, have a distinct smell, similar to the aroma of stale Mexican-food leftovers with a little fresh fertilizer mixed in. Pleasant. Intoxicating.

One morning I showed up at my Latin American Authors class to find that my professor, who was also a decent artist, had drawn a picture on the whiteboard of a giant cricket with bulging red eyes and a gas mask. The picture remained on the whiteboard for weeks. I stared at it each day while he lectured. I hated those crickets. They left us alone in the classrooms, but the moment we entered the hallway, they hurled their bodies from one wall to the opposite one, creating an obstacle course between us and the exit. To make it from one building to the next was to run a cricket gantlet. I rarely made it through without getting hit. I think hell might be an eternal summer of crickets living, multiplying, and dying. There is nothing worse than your world being overrun by an insect you can’t control. Kill one, turn around, and there are thirty others. You have no choice but to coexist with them until the cooler weather kills them off.

I’ve since learned that this particular cricket infestation was one of the worst Abilene had seen in years. The crickets we were stepping on and running away from are known as field crickets. This name sounds inaccurate to me. I think they should be called “field, road, building, bathroom, inside-your-own-freaking-car crickets.” But I’m not the expert here. I started to do more research in order to understand this species better and why they came out with such a vengeance that summer in West Texas, but I decided the creatures that ruined my life those few months were not worth the time and effort to be fully understood. I don’t care about their biological origins, and I certainly don’t care about their benefits to our ecosystem. So my cricket knowledge is limited. I do know they can lay up to four hundred eggs at once — a fact that both terrifies and annoys me—and I know they shed their skin up to nine times before becoming adult crickets. The process of shedding skin is called “molting”—an appropriately gross-sounding word, I think. Moooolllllting. It takes about six weeks for the molting process to be complete and the cricket to reach full-fledged adulthood. Then they mate and lay trillions of eggs. Then, they die. Well, some live for three or four more weeks enjoying their molted state, but most of them die.

One lifetime, nine layers.
--
I should probably explain that Oxford Brookes University is a separate university from the one I like to call Oxford Oxford. It is more recently established—though I suppose everything is more recently established than a university where teachers were already teaching in AD 1096—and it uses lecture-style teaching rather than the intimate tutorial style used at Oxford Oxford. To distinguish between the two, most refer to Oxford Brookes as simply Brookes. Heaven forbid I should claim to be an Oxford Oxford student, when really I was just a normal old Brookes student. The Brookes campus is mostly concentrated in one place, on top of Headington Hill. Headington Hill boasts a city view I rarely saw. My classes were at night, so the view I remember best is distant blurs of lights, spires, and fields asleep in the dark. The daylight hours revealed lush mounds of grass playing leapfrog down the hill, a hill that was always damp from rain. Sitting at the bottom was the city center of Oxford—a dignified gathering of sixteenth-century buildings. Lined up and standing so close together, they formed one brilliant,cream-colored stone mass. Strong and old.

As I neared the building where I had been instructed to go for orientation, I felt like I might throw up. I had no idea what I was doing.I had no idea where I was going. Everything in me wanted to run all the way back down that hill into my dad’s arms and ask my mom if we could go home. But I had kept my vow to return to Oxford. I had applied and been accepted. It would be silly to go back now. So I pushed through the doors, held my breath, and hoped for the best.
-- 
I searched the room for a friendly face. There were a couple of guys standing by a table of snacks and a few people in the corner who looked like professors discussing an important piece of paper. And then I saw one. She was sitting down. She looked about my age and like someone I would have been friends with back home, and the seats beside her were empty. I made a beeline in her direction and sat down in the chair to her right.

“Hi,” I said, feeling dry mouth coming on. “I’m Andrea.”

“I’m Sophie,” she said.

“Nice to meet you.”

Sophie nodded.

“Are you from here?” I asked.

“No, no. I’m from South Africa.”

“Really? That’s so cool.”

Sophie laughed. “Where are you from?”

“America. I mean, the States. I mean, Texas. Have you heard of Texas?”

Sophie laughed again. “Yes, I’ve heard of it.” George W. Bush had been president for the last eight years. Of course she had heard of Texas.

Someone called for everybody to take their seats. After the program director made some introductions, we circled around the room saying our name and country of origin. I took inventory. There were about twenty of us, representing four different nations: England, India, South Africa, and the United States.

I was one of two Americans and, I would soon learn from various opinions voiced during class discussions, one of one Christian. I sat in my chair with my back straight and eyes unblinking and watched them, the tiny islands off the coasts of nowhere near the edge of the universe. So no one else in this room was like me? A pastor’s daughter. A graduate of a Christian high school, where most of her friends were Christians. And now, a graduate of a Christian college, where she had only Christian friends. An employee of a Christian camp in the summers, and someone whose handful of dates were with only Christian guys. I was in a Christian sorority, t...

Edition details

• Publisher: Authentic Media
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1780781873
• ISBN 13: 9781780781877
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240