My Story, Part 1

I grew up in Midwest town called Kenosha, Wisconsin. My dad was a pastor at a Pentecostal church, and that church was the background of my childhood. So many memories and main events of my childhood took place there. All my best friends grew up there with me. Friends from school would tease me about being religious, but they just didn't know how great it was on the inside. To grow up a part of such a tight knit community and positive atmosphere was great. I felt as if I was on the very pulse of life.


Big Sunday dinners of roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, homemade biscuits with butter and honey, honey glazed carrots and so on and so forth. Every Sunday and every Wednesday, Robert, the church organist and perpetual bachelor, would come over to eat with us. Without fail he would show up every time with pie from Baker's Square. Key Lime, Lemon Meringue, Boston Crème, French Silk, you name it we had it multiple times. Life was chock full of church choir rehearsals, Christmas & Easter Cantata's, Christmas & Easter Children's Productions, church picnics, Heaven's Gates & Hell's Flames Drama's, Sunday School, Cell Groups, sleepovers, day trips, Summer Camp, Winter Camp and so much more.

The home I grew up in was full of laughter, life, singing, music, family meals and had a rotating door. We had people living with us all the time. Very few others did this in our church, but we took in those who needed help. Our house was the neighborhood hang out for all the neighborhood kids. Sunday nights after the evening service we would invite people back to our house for ice cream and nachos. While the adults would chat, us kids would sit with our bowls of ice cream and nachos and watch The Three Stooges or The Discovery Channel. During the week my two younger brothers and I would wake up and get ready for the day, eat breakfast and then we'd have our Family Devotions. Dad got us all One Year Bible's for Christmas one year and we would read from it every morning together. Then we'd be off to school only to come home to mom's warm chocolate chip cookies, then we'd do our homework, watch a little TV, come in for a big family dinner and then play outside til bedtime where mom and dad would pray over us and tuck us in every night.

Thinking back on all this seems like such a fairytale, but growing up in it made it normal. I thought everyone had wonderful lives like mine. Obviously as I grew older I began to realize this wasn't true. But it was still so far from me that it didn't seem like it could really be that bad for people. Surely life couldn't be so hard as friends at school said their home lives were. I went to public schools. I was the only one of my friends who did. My parents didn't want us growing up in such a Christian bubble and wanted us to learn how to relate to the “real world”.

Yet still it took me a long time to understand that not every little girl had wonderful memories of her braids flicking in the wind as she rode on the back of her dad's bicycle or of her mom taking her out on Mother/Daughter days of shopping. Not every family went on walks together through the neighborhood after dinner or looked forward to the family vacation every year or did Family Devotions.

And even though my safe little world popped like the big bubble it was when I was fourteen, I wouldn't trade it for anything. For a short time in my life, everything was perfect.  And even though my memories of that time are rosier than they maybe really were, it seems impossible for me to stop thinking of them in that way. I am so thankful for the family and home I was born into.