Crazy for God Read Online Free Page B

smoked and watched Dad and smiled inscrutably. Then at last the professor spoke.
    “Schaeffer,” he said, “I have a problem with you. I don’t know how to resolve it. This is the best philosophy paper from a first-year student that has ever been turned in since I’ve been teaching. It is also the worst spelling I’ve ever seen. What should I do with you?”
    “I have a suggestion,” said Dad; “I suggest you always grade my papers on the ideas and pay no attention to my spelling. I’ve never been able to spell. And I can’t fix that.”
    There was a long pause. Dad said he was nervous but tried not to move, or even take his eyes off that old professor’s face.
    “You know what, Schaeffer, I think I’ll do just that,” said the professor at last.
    This was a big break for my father. He spoke of the incident with such emotion that his voice would shake. It was an unusual thing for a professor to do, back in the days when spelling and grammar, even handwriting, still figured heavily into a college grade.
    Dad was very aware of each step in his journey to a “bigger world,” as he called it. There were the Boy Scouts and that symphony, and then there was one high school teacher who Dad recalled with tears. She had “opened all the doors” for him by encouraging him to start to read books for pleasure. She “opened my eyes,” Dad would say. And years later, my father
tracked her down and wrote to her, and remarkably she was still alive, and in 1968 (or thereabouts) Dad sent her a signed copy of his first book, Escape From Reason, and a letter telling her that she was why he had “done anything” with his life.

4
    D ad was pastor of several small churches in the Northeast and in St. Louis. Then he became a missionary in 1947. Sponsored by his mission board, Dad located in Switzerland because from there he could get anywhere in Europe to do his mission work with young people in war-torn cities. The next year, Mom and my three sisters joined Dad.
    The Swiss had sat out the Second World War as neutrals, trading security for the lives of the Jews they turned back to the Nazis, banking for all sides, selling weapons to everyone, and waiting for other countries to send their young men to die to make them safe from the Nazi empire. So in 1947 the Swiss infrastructure was intact. And Dad would travel almost every week to the cities all over Europe where he was helping to start youth ministries. And on those trips his quest for self-betterment continued, and he would visit the art museums, buy guidebooks, and study what he was seeing.
    At first my family lived in Lausanne and then moved to the small alpine village of Champéry, where I was born in 1952. Then we got kicked out of Champéry when I was three. My parents were expelled from the Roman Catholic canton (state) of Valais because they led a local man to Christ. In other words, Mom and Dad talked him into becoming a born-again Calvinist fundamentalist Protestant like us.

    The local priest was not amused. And the bishop of Sion (the capital of Valais, just a few miles from the border of “very Roman Catholic Italy”) was not amused. Swiss democracy notwithstanding, he arranged to have my parents’ residency permits canceled to get the “religious influence”—the official reason given for our family’s expulsion—away from his flock. That was when we moved to Huémoz, where I grew up.
    Huémoz is in the Protestant canton of Vaud and is a lot more open to the sky than Champéry. The mountains look friendlier, easy to see whole, not looming close as they do over Champéry. Our old village was “a lot darker,” Mom would say, “and I don’t mean just because there was so little sunlight compared to Huémoz. It was darker in every way!”
    I heard the word “dark” a lot while growing up, and most of the time it was other people’s spiritual darkness that was being spoken of. There was a lot of that around. People, places, history, villages, cantons,