Crazy for God Read Online Free Page A

pastor who was questioning the literal truth of scripture. Judging by
my mom’s account, Dad’s real salvation was when he met her. Dad’s reward for accepting Christ was to get a saint for a wife, a sexy saint.
    Dad’s newly converted zealot heart twined with Mom’s zealot heart, though Dad was but a mere “newborn babe in Christ.” And Dad became a pastor, called by God, or pushed by Mom, or both.
    By the time I came along, Mom and Dad were thriving and making a living on propagating their ideas and defending them. And the verbal images they spun out of thin air had to be strong. They were describing a world you can’t see, the invisible link between mortality and immortality. They were bringing alive the biblical epoch to twentieth-century young people, competing with modernity by talking up a storm, convincing smart people that the spiritual world is more real and essential than the evidence of one’s eyes. And they were good at it.
    Dad had one big idea: God has revealed himself to us through the Bible. And he spent a lifetime trying to fit everything into that one idea, and explain away anything that didn’t fit. Dad’s apologetic method—combining scripture, theology, and culture—became his trademark, a kind of rationalist approach to the mysteries of faith, as instantly recognizable to his millions of evangelical followers as a Rothko is to anyone who has seen more than one canvas painted after he hit his blocks-of-color stride. (“Apologetics” being defined as the method and means and content of one’s argument for the faith, a way of reasoning, one’s method of evangelization.)
    Dad was also a dedicated hiker and camper, a starter of campfires “even with wet wood,” and a man who could fix and build things. Dad always kept his father’s tools handy. His
father’s hammer, plane, and chisel were like sacred objects in our home, along with his father’s old Lionel train set.
    Dad passed on one saying of his father’s to me. It related to how to survive working high in the rigging of a wind-tossed sailing ship. “Keep one hand for yourself, boy!” Dad would often exclaim, applying his father’s wisdom to all sorts of situations in life, from how to argue, to hiking and tree-climbing safety rules.
    Dad had a reverence for the way his father had done so much with so little. Everything my grandfather learned was something he taught himself—the engineering knowledge needed to run a building’s heat and electrical generating plant; how to wire his house, which he did with Dad helping; how to build his first radio. You never called the repairman in the household Dad grew up in; you did it yourself.
    My father kept his old Boy Scout manual, his father’s tools, and his father’s Navy shaving mug next to his bed on a little shelf behind a curtain. It was like a little shrine. As a child, I often looked at my father’s precious mementos, but I never took them out of Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Dad also kept his own metalwork “exam pieces” from high school shop class behind that curtain. They included a stained-glass monogram of the letter “S” and several pieces of beautifully crafted wrought iron. “I made those,” Dad would say.
    When Mom would talk about how wonderful her father was and how he could speak and teach Mandarin, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, Dad never said much. But later he might quietly mention to me that his dad could fix anything. And sometimes there would be tears in his eyes when he would talk about how his “Pop” wired that old house while laboring to read the electrical manual he was learning from.

    “Pop never had the opportunities I had,” Dad would say, “but you would have liked him, boy.”
    When Dad turned in his first philosophy paper at Hampden-Sydney College, his professor invited him over to his house a few days later. Dad found him sitting in a rocking chair next to an old pot-bellied stove and smoking a pipe. For a while the man said nothing, just