Before The Foundation The Trinity

Before I understood inclusion and participation, I understood shame. I was born into a family and culture steeped in shame.

Our little family of four attended the First Baptist Church in Winter Park, Florida. This was in the late ’60s through the early ’80s, the years of bellbottoms and funny hairdos. The pastor’s name was J.C. (a nod to Jesus Christ), a lovely man with a head of white hair that seemed to glow under the soaring lights as the choir sang “How Great Thou Art.”

Separation wasn’t only assumed; it was baked into the sermon every week. The weekly altar call consisted of the choir singing Siren songs, sweaty handholding across the pews, and J.C. listing off a litany of tragedies that could befall any one of us at any time: car crashes, fatal illnesses, hurricanes. We could be made right if we would only surrender ourselves to Jesus. Those of us who hadn’t stumbled forward in contrition were prideful and lost sinners.

The shame of being excluded from this club and presumably from heaven tugged at me weekly. Yet something in my mind and spirit resisted. I slept on the pews or snuck out with my brother to wander the golf course that surrounded the church or to buy a Slurpee at the 7-11.

As I looked at those who had joined the club, I didn’t see the kind of joy and freedom, the kind of love and selflessness I read about in the parts of the Bible that made any sense to me. I saw suits and fake smiles, smelled a lot of perfume, and ate a lot of cafeteria-quality food in the skating rink they built adjacent to the sanctuary.

By twelve, I turned to rock ‘n roll and drugs. Unfortunately, these escapes didn’t make me feel less creepy; in fact, the cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs became a new form of shame—feeling like I always had something to hide.

I started working at Kentucky Fried Chicken at the age of 15, bought a Suzuki 185cc motorcycle, and worked up the courage to ask a girl out. I thought I was in love, but, looking back, I realize I could have given my heart to most anyone. I was desperate for belonging. The only time I felt real peace was when I was sitting on my surfboard, letting the swells roll beneath me, and staring at the horizon off the New Smyrna Beach coast.

Though I don’t recommend it as a path to spiritual enlightenment, the fact of the matter is that I first met God while on an acid trip. I didn’t feel “born again,” and I wasn’t aware of God having a particular name: Jesus, Buddha, etc. But I experienced the world stripped bare of its manmade edifices and experienced a primordial pulse of life and love that I couldn’t shake thereafter.

Let’s move this along. I graduated from FSU. I got a corporate job buying and selling houses for a bank. I got married. I worked for a billboard company helping them find locations for new monopoles along I-4. I started making six figures due to a scheme I worked out to renegotiate leases with landowners. I drank giant diet Cokes, sweet tea for lunch, and was high every waking hour.

At a Don Henley concert, we passed around a joint, and suddenly I began to panic. I had never felt dissociated in that way, so I began to run around the concourse of the arena until I realized the fear and anxiety couldn’t be outrun. I had to stop. I stopped running. I stopped smoking pot. The doctor put me on Xanax.

I had always been interested in writing and literature, so I went to UCF to get a Master’s in English and Creative Writing. There, I began to explore themes relating to identity and wrote about having my own consciousness but being in someone else’s body. I came to see, though, that that fantasy was just as unrealistic as my attempt to outrun my terror.

I applied to PhD programs and got accepted at the University of Cincinnati. Around that time, I found out my wife was having an affair, so we got divorced. I was half crushed and half relieved. Even on the honeymoon in Hawaii, I felt a sinking feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I still felt creepy and alone.

Karl the Beagle and I settled into a one-bedroom apartment in Cincinnati, and I began my journey toward writing the next Great American Novel. Mine had to do with Ponce de Leon and Dick Clark discovering the fountain of youth in Central Florida, drinking fulsomely for centuries, until Walt Disney and crew had the temerity to begin constructing Cinderella’s castle right atop their eternal spring.

The poet in residence was a woman named Dina. She told me how she was born in Orlando but was then given up for adoption and raised Jewish in Manhattan. She was unlike anyone I had ever met, and, though she was in a relationship, we became intimate friends. A group of us spent evenings together laughing and writing poems making fun of our classmates.

When we were at parties, we’d find ourselves sharing a plate of food, neither one of us paying heed to our normal germophobia. People would come over and ask how long we’d been together. We’d demur and say we’re just friends.

The point of all of this is that the openness and love we began to share—which we still share some 30 years later—began to heal that feeling of loneliness, isolation, and shame I had harbored all my life. Through a deep human love, we both began to awaken to a sense of divine love, though we didn’t know what that looked like.

Fast forward a bit: we got married, had a son, Razwell, moved to New Smyrna Beach (my happy place) to work on our dissertations, and spent the summers in Maine with Dina’s parents. I was studying world religions and science, searching for the truth. Dina was having what she thought were psychic experiences, detailed visions about people’s lives that would prove true.

We went to Cassadaga, a spiritualist outpost in the middle of Florida, thinking that Dina could join their ranks. The psychics were gray, sad, and sallow. And I knew enough from my J.C. days to be afraid. My parents sent us lists of scriptures warning about the evils of witchcraft. And they were right, of course.

Confounded, Dina broke out of her lifelong atheism. (Her parents, having been one generation removed from the Holocaust, forbid her to step foot in a church or synagogue.) She lay in bed one night and asked God, “God, if you’re real, make a breeze blow across my face.” Nothing happened. “God, if you’re real, light up this room.” The wall in front of our bed lit up in a huge rectangle, so bright like the sun shimmering on water, and a face appeared amidst the light.

Dina shook me awake. “Did you see that?”

I didn’t. I was asleep. She described the light, and, to her, the part that shook her up the most was that someone or something had read her mind. She didn’t speak out loud; she just thought the two requests.

Given my quest, I asked, “Well, who was it. Who is God?” She didn’t know.

The next night, she had a dream. She and her childhood friend encountered a man along the shore of a river. The man invited them to walk on the water with him. Dina believed him and began walking on water; her friend refused. Dina knew little of the Scriptures, but one of the things she knew was that the man who famously walked on water was Jesus.

Again, she shook me awake. What happened, I asked, beyond intrigued given the miracle the night before. She told me about the dream and said it was the most vivid one she’d ever had, and that was saying a lot. Her next statement was life changing. She said, “I think I believe in Jesus.” Without skipping a beat, I said, “I think I do, too!”

Simply hearing those words come out of her mouth, given all that I knew about her and her past, was shocking and transformative. All the busy tumblers in my mind clicked into place, and I could see that He had been there all along, just buried under the rubble of dogma and fear. It was a Baxter moment, though I wouldn’t stumble onto his teachings for another 15 years or so.

The only other thing Dina knew about Jesus was that he was generous. He liked to give stuff away. So we rounded up a laptop computer, a set of gigantic speakers from which I used to blast Steely Dan, a fishing rod, and a bunch of other things and drove around New Smyrna searching for the poorest-looking church we could find.

We found a small, dilapidated, wooden Missionary Baptist Church in midtown, and the pastor’s name was listed on the sign: Rev. Milton Curry. We called—in those days there were phone books—and he answered. He asked, “Can I keep the fishing rod?” “Sure.” We immediately drove to Daytona Beach, where he and his wife, Erma, lived.

Rev. Curry turned out to be a black man, and he invited us to his church. He said, “We’ve had Caucasians visit before.” We began attending, trying to get two-year-old Raz to sit still. The choir sang a cappella, and it was heavenly. Every week, Dina arrived with a question about God, and every week Rev. Curry would miraculously speak directly to that question.

We grew in our faith, and Dina knew from the moment she experienced Jesus that He wanted to talk to her. She began journaling and listening. I did the same.

We moved to Ormond Beach and decided we needed to find a church that was closer (though we stayed in touch with and supported Rev. and Mrs. Curry until they died, a decade apart).

Because of her prophetic gift and her willingness to share her faith and visions with strangers—with great fruit—the enemy started attacking at night. We visited church after church and asked each one what to do. None of them had any concrete answers, and I felt like I was back in First Baptist of Winter Park most weeks. Separation, separation, separation.

Around that time, we were running out of the money I had saved from the billboard days, so I began searching the Want Ads for a job. God highlighted one that said, “Support Coordinator for Developmentally Disabled Children and Adults.” I applied and got the job: $22,000 a year. Somehow, we were able to buy a small house on a block between the Intercoastal Waterway and the ocean.

I continued to seek God daily, meditating on the back porch, or singing worship songs as I jogged along the beach. I asked God about my dissertation, which was a collection of short stories that was almost complete. (I had a 4.0 GPA, received a rare high-pass on the grueling oral exam, completed the second language component, and turned in the critical portion of the dissertation.) I say all that to express my shock when I heard God say, “Let it go. You don’t need another degree.”

What?! I quit my six-figure job to go be a hippy writer, much to the dismay of my company, parents, and friends. And now, on the doorstep of completion, you want me to lay it down? So I laid it down. Around the same time, God told Dina to lay down her poetry, even though she had another book contract. So she did.

I listened to a radio show on health and made note of the location where the two ladies practiced counseling and alternative healing. We stopped by one day. We were greeted by a woman named Jody, who turned out to be Jewish. She held us by the shoulders and looked lovingly in our eyes. It was uncanny. As we talked about health, the topic of spirituality came up. Jody said she was a Messianic believer and asked if we’d like to see the worship space they had just across the hall. Sure.

We saw rows of padded chairs, a full-sized Grand piano, Hebraic banners and art, and a gleaming Marine sword mounted to the wall.

The next night, a Friday, we found ourselves back in the worship space, standing in front of the small congregation, with prayer shawls draped over our shoulders, the gleaming sword in our hands, prophetic piano music being played, and Jody and the other woman I’d heard on the radio show, Ann, prophesying over us. This was remarkable.

We began attending House of God’s Glory. Jody’s husband, Alyosha Ryabinov, was the head pastor and a classically trained pianist from Ukraine. (He’s also a Hebrew scholar who has written two books, the second of which, The Hidden Elephant, I helped him edit.)

Ann, it turns out, was prophetic and had spent years learning about inner healing and gaining freedom from demonic attacks. She gave us a list of prayers to break off agreements we’d made with darkness over the years, along with some generational repentances.

Dina and I went home, gathered up all the New Age books and paraphernalia I’d collected over the years, and hauled it all out to the garbage bin in the garage. It was nighttime, and we started in on the prayers. Halfway through the prayers, the electricity cut off. There we stood in the pitch-black garage. We found a flashlight and forged ahead. As soon as we finished the last Amen, the lights instantly came back on. (Our friend Rose who had been with us the night of the sword and songs also prayed the prayers a few days later. In her case, the transformer at the end of the block blew up, and her power wasn’t restored until the next day.)

One evening, worshipping at a church we’d never attended, God told Dina to face the left wall, even though the worship team was obviously straight ahead. On the left wall were framed faces of dozens of children. It turned out the church placed an emphasis on their members adopting children, and these were the faces of each child, some there that night. God spoke to Dina and told her we’d be adopting a little girl. We prayed and heard that her name would be Rebekah Joy. In terms of the timing, we had no idea. We just kept praying.

It turns out I was uniquely suited to my new job as Support Coordinator. Given my business and writing experience, I was able to secure huge budgets for families, upwards of $50,000 a year, for things like respite care, medical supplies, transportation, and so forth. And I felt like John Travolta when I’d walk into the day center where many of my clients worked rolling labels onto Hawaiian Tropic lip balms. They would smile and cheer. I learned what being in the moment is from them.

One of the most important lessons I learned from God was visual, almost as if I’d seen it with my eyes. In prayer, I saw myself on an athletic track with running lanes. It was a relay race, and I was the next man to receive the baton on our team. Running toward me was Jesus. When He reached me and went to hand over the baton, He wouldn’t let go. I tugged once or twice, but his grip was firm. So we ran the race together.

Later, in prayer, He showed me that this is this posture we’re meant to maintain throughout our lives. We’re to run with Him. To take the baton is a sign of self-sufficiency, a willfulness and arrogance rooted in pride. To deny the baton is to abdicate the role we as humans are meant to have in changing the world for good. As we run together, in union, we can be assured that we’re on the right track. He empowers us to run the good race.

After a year and a half of being discipled and learning about the Hebraic Roots of the faith, God spoke to us and told us to move to Northwest Georgia. For some reason, we were led to Berry College, a small liberal arts school in Rome, Georgia, which happens to have the largest land mass of any college in the country.

We drove to Georgia and stayed in a hotel. In the chapel at Berry College, as we kneeled and prayed, I heard God’s voice, almost audibly, say, “Move, move, move; this is the land I have chosen for you.” I told Dina, and we looked around at the beautiful campus with hills and meadows and assumed he meant the college itself.

Later that day, Dina was tired and went back to the hotel to rest. She said she had a vision of us following a white car. (I forget the make and model now, but she told me.) So Raz and I and set out toward Berry again. Sure enough, we spotted a white car, driving fast, and we proceeded to follow it all the way to Summerville, a town about a half hour away, and then the car turned up a mountain road, and we followed all the way to the top until it became precarious. The whole thing seemed odd.

We went back to Florida and told our friends we were moving. Many thought it was rash, my parents being at the top of the list, though by now they were getting used to rash. We prayed about a price to sell the house, $20,000 more than we’d paid a year and a half before. We put signs up at both ends of the street and went to a Saturday morning meeting at church.

By the time we returned home, we had two messages about the house. We called the first woman, and she drove over immediately. We named the price, and she tried to haggle a bit, but we told her God had given us the number, and she could take it or leave it. She took it. (We threw in the washer and dryer for good will.)

I quit my job, said goodbye to our friends and clients and headed to Georgia. We gave the Currys our second car.

Given what I’d heard from God, Dina applied to teach at Berry College. We were living in a mice-infested house in Rome and felt disoriented to say the least. Raz was traumatized when we dropped him off at a daycare, so we decided to homeschool him.

Dina didn’t get the job even though she was beyond qualified. (She had taught at major universities for years, Syracuse, University of Washington, Bethune-Cookman, among others.)

In the meantime, we continued to drive around the hills and mountains looking for a house with some land. One day, we found a log cabin on the top of a small mountain with 20 acres and a creek running along the valley between the two ridges. The dirt, switchback driveway was steep, and the van began sliding backwards, stopping just before a ditch that lined the drive and a drop off.

As we left the house, which was in the middle of the Chattahoochee National Forest, we took a back way out. As we came down the winding mountain road, I suddenly realized we were passing the exact spot where Raz and I had followed the white car several months before. We knew this was the house for us.

We met the owner who worked in the heavy equipment business and had built the house and road. We negotiated for him to pave the road, which he did before closing. The only problem was we had no job or money, aside from the $20,000 from the house sale, which was going quickly.

I applied for several social work jobs, as I felt like God was calling me to continue in that field. I applied for a couple of hospice jobs among others. Nothing was panning out. I finally resorted to what I knew from Florida, billboards, and applied at Lamar Outdoor Advertising in Rome. The day before the closing, they called to offer me a job in sales. The amount was $5,000 under what was needed for the loan approval. I told them that, and they agreed to match my number.

We bought the 2,000 square foot cabin with a wraparound porch and moved in. Once we were there, Dina had an epiphany. On one of our first dates, she said she saw us getting married, having a young son, and living in a house with mountain views and an arched doorway leading to our bedroom. She assumed it was in Oregon, given her time in the Pacific Northwest before moving to Cincinnati. Standing in the Georgia house, though, she saw the vision again, only this time we were in it. The arched doorway and mountains were in Georgia—at least for the time being.

Given that I’m an introvert, I hated sales. Yet I felt like God was using this job to redeem the ways that I had been stoned and somewhat ruthless back in Orlando, strong-arming landowners into long leases for less money. (I had a phrase, “You can take the shadow or the cash,” threatening to move an existing billboard to their next-door neighbor’s land. Rude.)

While in Dalton, Georgia, one day on a sales call, I went to the UPS Store to make some copies. A disheveled guy was there with papers spread all over the center table, furiously making stacks of copies and organizing them. He looked like he had pink eye and didn’t look in the mood to be disturbed. But I felt an urging to engage with him.

I asked him why all the stacks and papers. He said he worked for a social work agency and this was part of his monthly reporting. I inquired if they might be looking for employees. He gave me a wry look and said, “They’re always looking.”

I met with Diane O’Brien who ran the agency, and she offered me a job. I thought I had accomplished something significant, only realizing later, as Lee had said, they would hire just about anyone. It was contract work, so they got paid when we worked with families, and DFCS had more than enough work to go around.

Time to fast-forward again: Over the course of time, I began running the Supervised Visitation center for kids in foster care. It was still a contract job, but space was donated in an old fire hall (with termites, squirrels, and mice), and we transported kids, supervised and documented weekly visits, and began offering faith-based classes in parenting, marriage and relationships, grief recovery, and more.

In prayer back at the log cabin, God gave me the name Compassion House. (I guess Love House would have sounded too much like an adult toy store.) I told Diane about the name, and miraculously, she agreed to turn the whole operation over to me to run as a nonprofit. Shortly thereafter, the center in the adjacent county went under, and we were able to secure grants for both counties.

God told Dina to leave teaching, which she’d been doing at other colleges in Rome and Dalton to volunteer at Compassion House, which she did for five years before coming on with a small salary. Over the 15 years we ran the agency, we worked with hundreds if not thousands of families. By the end of our time there, the number of families being reunified was up by 50%. Better, 94% of the families we worked with in their homes before the foster care levers had been triggered were able to avoid that soul crushing phase of life.

Dina’s mom, Violet, died, and her father left Manhattan to live in Dalton, Geogia. Talk about a culture shock. He lived there for close to six years before he died. By that time, we were burned out, both in terms of religious and political systems and in terms of the daily grind of working with prideful staff and brokenhearted people. During that time, we’d also enrolled in a Master of Social Work program in Valdosta, five hours south, which took us three years.

The day before we were scheduled to walk the graduation line, we received a call from our adoption agency asking if we wanted to drive to Athens, Georgia, to pick up a three-day-old little girl. This was 15 years after Dina had first had the vision, and we were now 52, two years older than the normal cutoff for this agency. But because we were healthy and Dina was a speaker at their adoption conferences, given her training and being adopted herself, we brought Rebekah Joy home the next day.

Most nights, we would watch HGTV since no one died and the renovations always ended happily. We also revisited our dream of living in the Pacific Northwest. We’d look at towns like Ashland, Bellingham, and Bend on Zillow. We took summer trips to investigate the towns we’d seen, and when we rolled into Bend, though it was just the dusty side approaching from Redmond, we knew we had found our next home.

Back in Georgia, we told the staff (now 14 people in a 14,000 square-foot former church that was completely paid off through local business and community support) that we were in a year-long transition.

A year later, Dina’s dad, Shim, died, and within a month we were driving across the snowy pass from Portland to a new life here in Bend, where we’ve now been for just over eight years.

Though it has been a time of rest and reward, the initial years were among the most challenging we’ve faced. Four months after being here and just after moving into a nice house that backs up to a 40-acre park, I was diagnosed with stage-four head and neck cancer. At the same time, our son, who was living in Portland, was deep in the throes of addiction to all manner of drugs, including heroin.

The next two years consisted of radiation, chemo, hair loss, a feeding tube, the shedding of 70 pounds, along with late-night rescue missions to save Raz or visit him in the hospital. In a way, trying to help him and cope with various crises he underwent made the cancer treatments seem like a bad dream.

I am now over five years in remission. Raz lives in West Hollywood and is active in the recovery world. Bekah is turning 10 this year. Dina has become a collage artist, featured in galleries and shops around the region and writes monthly articles about celebrated artists. She writes poems, which I convert into songs.

After the cancer treatments, at the beginning of the pandemic, we cashed out of all the investments we had and bought rental houses here in Bend. We have since flipped a number of houses and still have four that are furnished vacation rentals.

Five years ago, as I’ve done in the past, I began a deep dive into theology. I had heard a podcast by Greg Boyd that fascinated me, so I began reading his books. He defends the goodness of God and explores evil and the seeming discrepancies in the Bible in Spirit-inspired ways.

I think I stumbled onto Baxter’s YouTube videos as part of a suggested playlist based on the Boyd videos I’d been watching. As anyone reading this (and who has managed to get this far!) can imagine, I was instantly hooked. Baxter became my new addiction. Well, the Trinty did, but Baxter and others served as wise and loving guides.

Since then, I’ve read most everything Baxter has written and have sought out many of the theologians he references or lists on the class bibliography. At present, I’m working on a book that synthesizes what I’ve come to believe about our inclusion in God’s trinitarian life, drawing on Baxter’s work, along with writers like Boyd, Chris E. W. Green, Stanley Hauerwas, Bradley Jersak, Paul Young, Julie Canlis, John Behr, Douglas Campbell, Fleming Rutledge, and many others.

Along the way, through Greg Boyd’s website, I tracked down Jason Barrett, who is also in this class. We have become good friends. He has introduced me to a number of authors and teachers over the past few years, and he and his wife, Liz, and their two dogs have visited us for weeks at a time. We enjoying talking about the goodness of God and sipping on a Big Nose Kate whiskey or two.

Jason is currently working on a book about Romans, among others and has a great blog called Jay’s Jots on Substack. He’s a talented speaker, former pastor, and someone I think should be invited to Trinitarian conferences to share his story of going from being a combat veteran to a pacifist theologian who hears God’s voice.

While there are many writers and speakers I admire, there’s something about Baxter’s relational style of sharing and teaching I always return to. He makes the spiritual life seem intuitive and natural. As I read and heard about his life and theology, I was inspired to begin writing songs that celebrate both. So this CD, Before the Foundation, is a love song to God out of thankfulness for His willingness to bring us through a pile of dung and wrong beliefs and never stop wooing us and being with and in us.

Around the same time I stumbled onto Baxter, I also started learning how to produce music, setting up an elaborate home studio, investing thousands of hours of time and returned to writing again. For me, the song is the perfect vehicle to prevent verbosity. (Even still, some of the songs are quite long given the simple structure that is traditional.)

As I’ve told Baxter, I’m primarily a songwriter and producer. I play piano but primarily rely on all the plugins, technology, and subscription services I have, which house virtually any sound or instrument you can think of. It would take me a full year just to audition every patch or sample I’ve accumulated over the years. Ideally, I’d like to find reputable recording artists to cover or modify some of the songs.

My hope is that more writers, artists, and musicians will begin to explore the boundless love and creativity we have as participants in the life of God and this world that He so generously created. Inclusion is a joyful place to land. My prayer is that the separation mindset that I wore for so many years will be lifted off anyone who has been force-fed that lie.

One of the songs is called The Lie of Alone. Thanks to Baxter and others like him, we now know that was never true. We are never alone, and we have an eternity to explore the wonders of who God is in His loving fullness and who we are in Him, and Him in us.

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