“Not Just a Dream” Part I It was for several reasons that a 19 year-old high plains country boy found himself standing in front of the snow covered Stage Coach Inn in West Yellowstone, Montana, on a January night at 51 degrees below zero. I later found out that I was not the first to come to the West (short for West Yellowstone) needing a new start. I brought only two bags, 50 bucks and an unimportant name. As Mac Davis put it, I had truly found happiness putting Lubbock, Texas, in my rearview mirror. I left there a tangled mess of flunked classes, empty beer bottles, failed expectations and damaged family ties. I had spent high school and three semesters of college exasperating most everyone I came in contact with and began to be ashamed of the man I was becoming. I felt the mountains might be the place to provide the education I knew I needed. It was my parents who dropped me off at 3 a.m. to catch the bus north out of Lubbock, and as hard as I tried, I really couldn’t blame them for my situation. My Dad was a science teacher, preacher and farmer who believed in never missing a Sunday (am or pm) or Wednesday service, including Super Bowl Sunday. He also believed all the verses in Proverbs about the rod. My mother was a classic dedicated homemaker who sewed my clothes and made my lunch for school every day. I had spent hundreds of hours in the assemblies of churches, with outdoorsmen, farmers and cowboys with my Dad. I had all four grandparents alive and well and interested in my spiritual development, as well as the many other surrogates that any good church provides. To say the least, I should have been the last boy to find himself drifting and directionless at 19. But there I was. And finally something from all those years kicked in. I remembered being told, when all else failed, to find the church, to find God’s people, and that is exactly what I did. Well, first I began my job cleaning motel rooms in my faded brown coveralls and cowboy hat. I’m not sure what people thought when I knocked on their door and said, “Housekeeping,” but I don’t think it was, “I can’t wait to sleep in the sheets this guy cleaned.” After a 40-hour week of finding out why you don’t skip class and drink beer all night, I looked up “churches” in the phone book. Since the “Church of Christ” was the only church I knew existed at the time, I called the number and made plans to attend a service. There are many moments in our lives when we can look back and say this or that changed my entire life or set a course of events into action that was irrevocable. This was such an event. I showed up one Sunday morning to a motel and was directed upstairs to a small room. In the room were 20 or so people along with 20 or so jackets, hats and gloves hanging over two 7x7 elk antlers. It was the heart of snowmobile season, the snow was high, and the air was cold. The elk were there just because it was Montana. It was here that I would learn one of the truest functions of the church. I met the man who would teach me the meaning of the word “mentor” and lead me into the purpose of my life. His name was Gale Loomis, and he was a mixture of mountain man, preacher and entrepreneur, with a Mark Twain twinkle in his eye. He was joined by his faithful wife Terry who deserves much credit for caring for him and his soon-to-be and all-too-eager sidekick. I’m not sure why Gale decided to take me under his wing as he did. I ate a lot, talked a lot, and had no money and no car. Maybe it was because he ate a lot, talked a lot and needed somebody to catch his horse and not laugh when he had to mount his horse from the back of his pickup. Whatever the reason, Gale began to talk to me and take me places. He would always buy dinner if we ate out and ask me over to his house to watch basketball or football games. Gale and Terry were in their sixties at this point and it really didn’t make sense why I liked spending time with them, but I was always there. There were many others in that small church who did the same types of things. Paul and Diane Scott, Glenn (Gale’s brother) and Virginia Loomis, and John Schumacher to name a few. As the weeks turned into months, and finally two years, I had spent hundreds of hours with Gale riding horses and snowmobiles and watching the Denver Broncos and Utah Jazz, in addition to the times we spent together singing, preaching, and praying through three services a week in that little one-room church building. It wasn’t all fun though. After my first eight-minute sermon, Gale smiled and critiqued, “You’ll get better.” A young lady I was pursuing and her family were disapproved of in no uncertain terms. Then there was the time I told Gale that I had a few beers for my 21st birthday, and he called me a fake. We didn’t talk for a week. There were no gray areas for Gale. He was the kind of man that you either had to reject or give in to and conform to his standard. In two years, I gave in. I guess it was because I saw he was real. I saw his many successes, but learned his flaws as well when he told me about his failures in his life, business and family. I saw that he really did care about me and not just about enforcing a bunch of rules that fit his religious views. I realized that he loved me. I was drawn to him and his example of what a godly man was. During this time, as in all small churches, a need for a Sunday school teacher developed. Seeing that the church viewed me as being somewhat stable and the fact that we were all in one room, what damage could I do to the 1-3 kids that showed up once a week. I had always liked kids, and I began to greatly enjoy my duties keeping them in line for 30 minutes and walking them through the creation, the flood, and David and Goliath. Of the many kids I taught and began to love, one slowly became especially important. I will call him Trey. He was five years old and had long been the care of relatives as a result of poverty, neglect, vice and abuse. While we knew his first five years had been a little less than ideal, none of us knew the extent of the damage he had received. Trey began having more and more trouble, and people started asking questions. Eventually he began to put words to some of his past, and he revealed the source of his problems. His five-year-old mind developed descriptions of sexual abuse, and he spoke of them with his limited vocabulary. The type and extent Nathan of his abuse are too evil to write, and the sorrow that I felt upon discovering this was nothing less than revelatory. I felt the instant I was told his word-for-word account that I could see the face of Satan. To this day, I hate to write or even speak the name of the deceiver. My life to that point had been about me. I was the main character, and my development and success were really the only thing on the radar. Up to this point, the saddest day I had experienced had been when my two horses accidentally ate poison and died when I was 12. Now I had a five-year-old whom I loved, in desperate need, before me. He had been the recipient, through no fault of his, of abuse that will haunt, confuse and possibly destroy his entire life. And I saw the deceiver, standing there laughing at him and me. I realized that all he desires is to kill, rob and destroy. I didn’t have to read Jesus’ admonition on that one anymore. I saw it, I had lived it, and I was crushed and bewildered. I wept, and I was angry. I wasn’t angry at God or entirely at the abuser. I was enraged that the evil forces of this world had stolen and planted seeds of death in one whom I loved, one who was so innocent. I began to see my life through different eyes. Things stopped being quite as gray as before. There were good and evil in the world, and the evil was altogether evil, even if for a time it appeared harmless. I began to talk to God about these things more and more. As a result, the desire to help ease Trey’s pain and give him a chance at joy and peace began to grow in me. Then I looked around that small town and saw hurting people just about everywhere. I began reading the Bible all the time and listening to any sermon I could get my hands on. My thirst for meaning and purpose brought me to drink deeply from the poetic works of David and Solomon.