An Ordinary Life, An Extraordinary Life

After she recovered from the flu, Laura and I had another employment battle. It was time for her to find another job. She had had enough of the daycare world and she wanted to find something else. Once again, she wasn’t attacking the job-finding task as I would have liked. She was just praying and waiting for the right opportunity – GRRRRR!!!! But she loves to strip wallpaper and paint. So, while she was waiting, she decided to go help Susan Gimotti with her new house.    Mike Gimotti was working as a salesman/account executive for a company called the Apartment Guide and one of the other ladies in the Care Group was his boss. She was pregnant and needed to hire someone to help her to service her accounts. Laura’s job-seeking method had worked again. As the Gimottis settled into their new home, they were asked to start a new Small Group for couples without kids. We were one of the three other couples to join them, along with the Dalmases and the Jordans. Those were fun days. B...

We sent Mindy back to California safe and sound and I convinced Laura to try Southside again. Now that she was with me, it was also time to get more involved. We decided to visit a Small Group which met twice a month on a midweek evening. Small Groups are also called Care Groups because that is where people can be better cared for and care for others. It’s hard for the pastors to take care of everyone well but if someone is involved in a Care Group, then the Care Group leader and the other members of the group can do so. So when someone has a baby, the ladies can make meals for the family. If someone moves, the Care Group can help, etc. Care Groups are also a context for spiritual accountability and growth. In the meetings, the group discusses the messages from the Sunday service or some other subject and talks about how they can apply it to their lives. The men and women also break down into men’s and women’s groups for more pointed discussions and accountability.  We visited a Sm...

Southside was named for its location, on the “south side” of the Chesapeake Bay. They were about six years old and part of a group of churches called People of Destiny International (PDI), which was what they called an apostolic and church-planting ministry. An apostolic ministry is one based on the early New Testament where Jesus’ disciples became the Apostles and led the church as it grew. PDI had begun during the Jesus Movement in the seventies in Maryland, near Washington D.C. It started as a para-church Bible study which grew to thousands. But as the leaders began to study the New Testament more, they concluded that the best way for people to grow and mature was to be committed and accountable in local churches. They shut down the Bible study and started a local church. Then they started planting other churches with the leaders calling themselves apostles to oversee the growing movement. I also discovered another aspect of the church that very much intrigued me. While they affirme...

Laura went to London for Robyn’s birthday but as she was on the ship, she heard about a King’s Kids team that was forming, run by some long-time friends. She felt like she was supposed to join the team. However, it wasn’t going to be possible if I didn’t get work. She called me to tell me the news and ask if I had gotten the job. I had just found out that I did get it and agreed to let her stay. This was her opportunity to get to go to more of Eastern Europe and even some countries that I had never been to. Boot Camp was in Finland then they traveled to Russia, Estonia and Latvia. In Russia, she got to go to St. Petersburg and Moscow, whereas I had only been to St. Pete. The whole time we had been in Virginia, we had been looking for a good church to go to. We had visited many but none of them really gelled for both of us. There were certain things we were looking for – good worship, sound doctrine, good teaching, small groups. I continued to look while Laura was away.  I had heard...

Any time you get people together, there will be conflict. As in any organization, there was bickering and complaining and interdepartmental power struggles. CBN was run by a man named Pat Robertson, of whom I had only heard about from his negative publicity (of which he had plenty). I had pigeonholed him as an ostentatious “televangelist”. A lot of controversy swirled about him, especially from the media. Some of the criticism may have been true but I believe a lot of it had to do with the media not liking someone who claims to be a Christian who has power. His comments were often taken out of context I began hearing snippets about some of Mr. Robertson’s flaws and I later saw some of it for myself. But as I continued to work there, I also began to see positive things about this man. He seemed to have a genuine motivation for his activities. I also saw that, with all the power he wielded and the seeming lack of accountability, he had accomplished a lot of positive things and appeared t...

Chapter Fourteen - Virginia In the process of looking for a place to live in Virginia, we had, coincidentally or not, found some friends of my family with whom we could stay. They were the Browns and again, coincidentally or not, Bill was the new Dean of Communications at Regent University. Unbeknownst to me, my family had a long history with the Browns. It went back to the mid-seventies when our family had lived in a house with a bunch of young ladies in Hawaii. These were the young ladies from which my brother, Samuel had derived so much pleasure in terrorizing. Bill’s wife, Nancy had been one of those young ladies. Later on, when Bill and Nancy were married, they had spent some years with my sister and brother in Hong Kong with FEET. Still later, Bill had been a professor at the University of Hawaii in Oahu where my brother was now living. The Browns had a large FROG available in their house which is Virginiaese for a Finished Room Over Garage. So we had arranged to stay with them a...

We were going to spend Christmas in California with Laura’s family then we were going to try to get what is called a driveaway car to Virginia. A driveaway starts with a car that someone wants to get somewhere else but without being able to drive it themselves. Shipping your car on a truck is very expensive so there are companies that will match the car up with someone who wants to get to or nearby the desired destination. Not only is this proposition cheaper for the customer, it’s also cheaper for the travelers. Instead of paying for plane tickets, all we needed to do was pay for the gas. The only rules were that we had to get it to the destination within a certain time frame without going over a certain mileage. Other than that, we could go whatever route we wanted, stopping anywhere along the way. Trying to do it this way was a bit risky. You had to be flexible in your timing but there was still no guarantee that there would be something going your way. And, of course, it wasn’t pos...

I only had a few classes left to complete my Associates degree and I had to figure out what I was going to do next. I also needed to get a few extra credits beyond the quarterly classes. The university was putting on a writing seminar that was going to include a film script-writing segment. They were bringing in a professor named Andrew Quicke from a graduate university in Virginia called Regent. Little did I know how significant this would be for my future. Andrew turned out to be a quirky Englishman who was so interesting that we loved just listening to him. We all wrote short film scripts and Andrew seemed so impressed that he talked to the Dean of Communications at Regent about how he could incentivize us to go there. The Dean offered us 25% scholarships. There was one hiccup. Regent was only a Graduate school and I was only doing an Associates degree. However, Regent had a program called ASAP (Advanced Scholars and Professionals) by which, if you were already working in the busine...

We stayed at a place about twenty minutes outside Vilnius but had a van available for transport. However, there was a mix up with our scheduling. A big time YWAM speaker was in town doing a conference so people couldn’t attend the seminars we had planned. Instead, they had us attend part of the conference and filled up the rest of our schedule with sight-seeing. Lithuania had been the first Soviet republic to declare independence a year before the formal break-up of the Soviet Union in January, 1992. There were still barricades around the old parliament building in Vilnius to stop the Russian tanks from taking over. I was taking pictures in a beautiful church when my flash began to act up and then one of my cameras. Then the camera stopped working all together. I had two cameras. One was borrowed and one was mine. Fortunately it was mine that went down. Next day we went to Trakai, a town built on islands on a lake. One of the smaller islands is filled with a beautiful old castle built ...