Maybe it was my first real date. I can’t remember after all these years, but going out with Jeraldine Crabtree was definitely very early in my dating life. Jerry was pretty, stylish, and had honey blonde hair down to her waist. Our relationship fizzled about as soon as it started, but I became friends with other people from her neighborhood while hanging out at her house. Keith Heartsill lived down the street from Jerry and we became best friends.

Keith and many of his friends went to Hillcrest Baptist Church. I grew up Catholic and went to mass at St. Mary’s on Sunday mornings because it was on my way to the Jitney Jungle grocery store where I worked. Back in those days, Baptist churches held services on both Sunday morning and Sunday night and Keith’s parents made him attend both. I started going to Hillcrest with them on Sunday nights.

I found Baptist services very interesting in comparison to Catholic services. I wasn’t looking to make big changes in my life, but the preaching got me to thinking about God and faith and life more deeply. I had a conversion experience in the summer before I turned 17 and soon joined Hillcrest Baptist Church myself.

Baptist young people, at least back in those days, showed up at church on Sunday morning for Sunday School at 9:45 AM. Next there was a worship service at 11 AM that lasted until at least noon and maybe longer if the preacher got really wound up in his sermon. Then the faithful, or at least those with strict parents, came back on Sunday night for Training Union at 6 PM and another worship service at 7 PM. There was a service on Wednesday night too, so Baptist young people grew up getting 5 hours of religious instruction every week.

I assumed that I had a lot to learn to catch up with my friends who had received about 2000 hours more religious instruction than me by then. I immediately began reading the Bible through from cover to cover because Baptists believed that the Bible was the go to source for knowing and understanding God.

I started at the very beginning of the Bible. I did not attend a class for beginners. I did not read an introductory guide to help me better understand the Bible. I just started reading how God separated the dry land from the waters, took a rib from Adam to make Eve, rescued Noah and his family from the flood in an ark, led the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob out of slavery in Egypt, allowed David to remain king even after he killed the husband of a woman he slept with so he could marry her himself. I read hundreds of pages of things that confused me and made no sense, but kept reading because I thought this was the best approach to learning about God and becoming a good Christian.

I did not realize that the real religious instruction that was having a life changing influence on my life then was in the relationships I had with the people I met. My relationship with Keith’s mother who was always willing to add a place for me at their supper table. Brother Don, the white haired pastor who opened his office and home and even his vegetable garden to me. Brother Don would pull weeds while we talked. Jim and Debbie Pritchett, the young married college students who became my teachers and friends. The men who welcomed me to their 7 AM prayer meeting over black coffee and dry toast on Sunday mornings. And a hundred others who welcomed me into their lives and their faith.

I’m still reading the Bible and still finding things on hundreds of pages that make no sense to me, but I’m still in church too because the welcome I experience is so powerful. And now, I am one of those people offering welcome.