Chapter 14. Never Good Enough

Lab sessions in any subject drove me crazy. I understood processes and theory, but could never master the precision needed for decent lab work. In physics, we were usually required to calculate our percent of error. Mine was always the largest in the class. Fortunately, DeVasher based his grades on exams not lab results, and his tests focused on processes and theory.
I did manage to engineer a quarter mile aqueduct to fill the old swimming pool from a nearby creek. Mr. DeVasher came and inspected our handiwork and laughed. Eventually more responsible faculty found out about it and required us to dismantle our elaborate structure before someone drowned and the school was held liable.
The most serious problem at Highland was religion starting with Bible class. It must have been early fall. The weather was still warm. It was sunny. I was sitting in Bible class listening to Elder Glenn. I expected a lot from him because my older brother, Arthur the hell-raiser, actually respected him. If Elder Glenn had been able to connect with Arthur, he must be an extraordinary teacher.
Suddenly, Elder Glenn riveted my attention.
“The sun is the center of our galaxy.” This wasn’t his main point, it was a simple fact about the universe he mentioned in passing as part of a larger argument about the amazing dignity God had invested in this earth. Still, he supported his words with a diagram on the board which featured a dot labeled sun at the center of a large circle labeled “Milky Way Galaxy.”
As far as I could tell, no one else in the class was bothered. Apparently, they all knew he actually meant the sun was the center of the solar system. But I couldn’t let the remark pass without saying something.
After a couple of minutes, Elder Glenn recognized me.
“You said the sun is the center of our galaxy, but you meant the sun is the center of our solar system, right?”
“No, the sun is the center of our galaxy.”
“What? Our galaxy is the Milky Way galaxy. Our solar system is a small part of the galaxy. Our sun is just one star off in one of the arms of the galaxy. It’s not at the center.”
“Johnny, if you have any further argument you want to make, please see me after class. The sun is the center of our galaxy. When God created the earth, he created all the stars and planets of our galaxy. The galaxy derives its meaning from its relation to the earth.”
I was dumbstruck. This was a new school. I didn’t have my gang to back me up. I slumped down in my seat. I did not go back with an encyclopedia. I just let it go. For two years I sat in Bible class, did my home work and didn’t believe a thing he said. Just another ignorant preacher.

But I couldn’t ignore the preacher in my own head–the constant, bruising sense of guilt and unworthiness. Every morning I read a chapter from a book about the life of Christ written by our prophet. Others talked of the wonderful comfort and encouragement they found in the book. But all I could find was constantly swelling evidence of my abysmal failure to measure up.
By now I was an expert on Adventist eschatology. I could draw a chart of last day events–the National Sunday Law, the Loud Cry, The Mark of the Beast, the Seal of God, the Little Time of Trouble, the Close of Probation, the Great Time of Trouble, the Seven Last Plagues, the Heavenly Proclamation of the Day and Hour of Christ’s Return, the Second Coming.
I knew that the only adequate preparation for these events was complete personal purification. Every transgression had to be confessed. Every bad habit had to be mastered. And it was not enough to control external behavior. One had to have a pure heart as well.
And how was a teenage male to have a pure heart? Even in the cloistered environment of an Adventist school where girls and guys were carefully segregated most of the time, my mind created all sorts of wonderfully salacious visions. I would get the victory over masturbation for a week or even months at a time. But how could I control my dreams?
I was one of the student speakers for a week of spiritual emphasis. I scolded my student audience for their lackadaisical religion. I preached fierce denunciation of “making out,” which I knew was a regular practice on campus in spite of all the precautions against it. I asked my classmates scornfully if, in hindsight, it was as sweet as they expected it to be. Since I had never participated in this sin, I could speak with great authority about its unfulfilling wickedness.
I was in earnest. I wanted to be holy. But every night I agonized over my sins. Every morning reading The Desire of Ages I found new reasons to condemn myself.

My voice teacher had me memorize a page from the book. One paragraph read:

Christ made no plans for himself. Instead everyday he committed himself to God and followed his guidance for the day.

If we consent, God will blend our hearts and minds into conformity with His will, that when obeying Him we shall be but carrying out our own impulses. Our will refined and sanctified will find its highest delight in obeying Him. Desire of Ages p. 668.

But God did not guide me through the day. I had a class schedule and work and homework. Once in a while, I would have occasion to talk with another student and have a sense of helping someone, but most of the time I was just another student trying to get “A’s” and get girls to notice me.
And I knew I wasn’t good enough. When the Judgment of the Living reached me, I would be crossed off the list of the saved. People liked me. I was elected student body president and voted Friendship King my senior year. (My girlfriend was voted Friendship Queen.) I knew all 151 students by name. But at night I would spend sometimes an hour agonizing in prayer, confessing my sins, asking forgiveness, asking for victory over lustful thoughts and my scorn for Elder Glenn and my resentment of popular students who treated my redneck friends with contempt. I was never good enough.
And I wasn’t alone. There were a couple of other guys who talked to me about their struggles with free-floating guilt and restless sexual desire.
I still had no questions about the validity of Adventist theology. Even if it made me miserable, I knew it was true. All of it. Arthur brought home from college reports of questions about our Adventist prophet. Some people argued she had copied some of her ideas from other people. There were questions about whether she was exactly correct in every statement of historical fact. It sounded like heresy to me, but I didn’t have to form my own opinion about any of this. No one in my world was asking the questions.


The church as a system continued to show its fallibility. One rainy day, I was exploring a grassy hillside behind the maintenance building looking for spider lilies. There was a little rivulet of water running down the hillside. The area stank. The odor was only vaguely familiar. I traced the rivulet to its source, a small nondescript hole in the ground. Then I noticed bits of toilet paper in the runout. The school’s septic system was overflowing! It ran down the hill into a creek.
I was appalled. What about water quality? What about stewardship of the earth? I asked questions. Yes, the administration was aware of it. No they did not have any plans to do anything about it. They didn’t have the money.
By this stage in my life I was already thoroughly infected with environmental protection fervor. I considered reporting the school to some local environmental authority to see if the government could force the school to clean up its act. But I didn’t. How could I bring reproach on God’s church?


Protests against the Vietnam War were building. Historically the Adventist Church had urged its young men to not enlist in the military and if drafted to enter the military as conscientious objectors. They would train and serve as medics, but would not bear arms. But at least since WWII, we had hardly been antiwar.
My senior year, along with Jonathan Wentworth and several others, I wore a black band to show my solidarity with those opposed to the war. I could not understand why the adults in my home church and here at school supported the government in its immoral, futile war. The youth leader in my church at home once said in response to some negative remark I made about the war: “My country and my God, they are inseparable. Patriotism and Christianity cannot be divided.” For once I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say.
One of the faculty members at our school organized a chapter of the MCC–the Medical Cadet Corp. The medical cadet corp was designed to prepare Adventists to face the realities of the draft. Young men learned to stand up for their rights as noncombatants and Sabbath keepers. They were trained in marching and basic first aid. It seemed to me that it was really a celebration of martial culture.
I loudly refused to join. Wentworth stood with me. Neither of us were jocks so the faculty sponsor encouraged his guys to call us the Pansies. The MCC guys would have weekend sessions in the campmeeting cabins at the rear of the school property.
Jon and I organized the resisters. We called ourselves the Pansies in laughing mockery of the cadets’ scorn. We raided their camp at 3:00 a.m. one Sunday, pounding on all the doors, blowing a whistle and calling them to fall in. Then ran for our lives. It took them a while to figure out their commanding officer was still in bed.
To get back at us, the commander challenged us to a game of capture the flag the next weekend. The army pretenders won.


Most Adventist high schools schedule two Weeks of Prayer each year. These consist of two meetings a day–an assembly at 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. and an evening meeting. They usually feature a colorful revival speaker–a former drug addict turned preacher, a converted felon or someone more conventional but whose personal story includes a dramatic, intense conversion story. The goal is the spiritual renewal of the school and the conversion of any unbelieving students. Usually, by the end of the week, the emotional tone is pretty intense.
Elder Euel Atchley was the speaker for the Spring Week of Prayer my senior year. He was flamboyant and dogmatic. He told good stories, but he was in favor of the Vietnam War. On Tuesday, Wentworth and I talked to him about our growing conviction we should register as full conscientious objectors and refuse to be drafted rather than join the army as medics.
He ridiculed us. Called us cowards. Questioned our patriotism and our sanity. And dismissed our quotations from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. "That just doesn't apply to real life, at least not the life of a citizen of a world power." He said. "Do you really want Communism to take over the world? Do you want to live in a totalitarian nation?"
I couldn’t answer all his challenges, but neither did I change my mind.
He continued preaching morning and evening. I grudgingly listened. He was a good preacher, even if he was hopelessly wrong about the war. On Friday evening, at the end of his sermon he gave a call. This was typical. Almost all weeks of prayer included calls for students to come forward and rededicate their lives to Jesus or give their hearts to God for the first time. But this call was not about that. Elder Atchley asked for any young man who felt God was calling him into the ministry to stand.
He talked about the call to ministry for a few minutes, described the glory and weight of responsibility involved in the work of ministry, then gave the invitation again.
“If you feel God is calling you to the ministry, I invite you to stand right where you are. I want to pray for you.”
Suddenly I was standing, looking around and wondering why I was standing. I was going to be a doctor, not a minister. Elder Atchley prayed. I sat down, puzzled. Me, a minister? That would be a hoot. Sure, Mrs. Powell, the old Baptist lady who lived across the street from us had suggested that if I didn’t follow my daddy in the practice of medicine, I should consider the ministry. And after I preached my first sermon when I was fifteen years old in my home church a few of the old people had said, “You ought to be a minister.”
But you would expect them to say things like that. They probably didn’t notice when the minister used bad grammar or make mistakes when he was talking about history or science or even the Bible. They were gullible people who believed preachers.
Medicine, especially medicine in a research environment, made a lot more sense than going around calling pacifists unpatriotic. And at least as a physician, I would have some credibility when I spoke about faith and God.
That summer I worked on the water front at Indian Creek Youth Camp which served Adventist kids from Tennessee and Kentucky. In the fall, I registered at Southern Missionary College as a physics and math major.

Chapter 13. Academy

Adventists prize education. However, they are supremely suspicious of the subversive effects of public school education. So they have their own schools. Since Adventists are relatively few and scattered, most states had a boarding high school. Attendance at these “academies” was a rite of passage for most Adventist young people. I was no exception.
In Memphis, the local church school went to tenth grade, so I didn’t had off for boarding academy until my junior year. The level of academic challenge dramatically increased. The Spanish teacher was stern, exact and never wrong. The same teacher taught geometry and chemistry. He was ruthless, taught to the top ten percent of the class and never slowed down. There was no busy work. He didn’t even care about attendance.
“If you think you can make the grade without coming to class, be my guest,” he said. “But if you aren’t making it, you better be here because I won’t put up with any whining about needing help if you aren’t here for class.”
I was amazed to encounter a teacher obviously smarter than I was. I reveled in the structure and rationality of geometry. There was enough complexity to invite good argument about processes and conclusions and enough structure that if you stayed with the problem, eventually you could prove the correct answer beyond dispute.
In chemistry, Devasher insisted he was getting us ready for college, not running a program for building self-esteem. He didn’t care if it was hard. He was notoriously mocking in his interactions with students who didn’t instantly get it. This meant that Linda Sanderson–a gorgeous blond from Atlanta with the richest, most delicious accent I had ever heard–needed my help. Sometimes she was joined by a couple of her friends, also members of the in-crowd. It was my first taste of the social benefit of being smart. I never dated Linda or her friends. I was never part of their circle. But chemistry gave me a certain access.
In lab, DeVasher encouraged us to check things out, to experiment. He was more interested in our engagement with the subject than in fastidious safety. I burned my nose with hydrochloric fumes, scarred my fingers with sulfuric acid and stained them with iodine. DeVasher thought it was all great fun. When I recounted some of my adventures to the public high school chemistry teacher who attended our church back in Memphis, she was appalled. She would never allow her students to be exposed to such risks. My reaction to her horrified reaction: More points for Mr. DeVasher.
DeVasher taught physics and advanced math my senior year. There were only seven of us in advanced math, six guys and Jeannie. Jeannie was cute, quiet, gentle and brilliant. The guys often worked on our homework together. Jeannie worked alone. (School rules did not allow guys and girls to be together after supper.) She would still come out a few points ahead of us. She provoked me to the most intense diligence I had ever invested in school. In spite of my academic envy, or maybe because of it, around her I was perfectly at ease.

Chapter 12. If Only I Had Been a Doctor

The summer after tenth grade, we had a guest preacher one Sabbath for church, Elder Schmidt. He was invited to our house for lunch. I rode with him to give him directions.
Even to an ninth grader, he seemed a little strange. At that time in my life, I wasn’t really familiar with the word, effeminate, but he had a softness that seemed strange in a man. He had attended Madison College with my dad and they had stayed in touch over the years.
Elder Schmidt took ministry and became a pastor. After several years he became a youth director for the Florida Conference, then moved on up the denominational bureaucracy, eventually becoming director of the General Conference Children’s Department. For the last ten years, he had been the editor of “Our Little Friend,” the weekly Sabbath School paper for preschool kids.
In his sermon that morning he talked about the eternal importance of ministry to children. He said the required things. They were all true . . . and dull.
On the drive from church to our house he asked about my career dreams.
“I’m planning to be a doctor. Maybe I’ll be a missionary doctor in Africa.” (There was no point in trying to explain to a preacher about Jacques Cousteau and Ed Link.)
“That’s great. I’ve always admired you dad. He’s a great man. Back when your dad and I were classmates at Madison College, we both were hoping to become doctors. And I would have been a doctor like your daddy, but I got married and didn’t have the money for medical school. So I settled for being a minister.”
I was shocked. He worked for the General Conference. In our denomination, that was like working in the Vatican. There was nothing higher. How could a person work for the General Conference and think of their work as of secondary significance?
“So if you don’t like being a minister, why don’t you do something else?” I asked.
“I’m too old to do anything else. Besides, I have a wife and children who are counting on me to support them. You can’t start over at my age. I have too many responsibilities to change now. I have fifteen years till I can retire.”
By this time, we were pulling up in front of our house on Vinton Ave. My head was spinning as I climbed out of the car. How could this man travel the country talking about the wonderful progress of the church, promoting ministry to children and telling inspirational stories to children–while loathing his work?
He wasn’t the first minister to tell me they wished they were a doctor like my dad. But he was the first to tell me–in plain English–that he was a minister for the money. That the only reason he stayed in the ministry was because of the financial needs of his family. I had never heard a doctor say such a thing.