Falling Through the Ice. John D. Hiestand

so this ultimately was a great lesson in teaching me how hideous smoking is; but hanging out with Mark was the main goal. Mark was the designated ‘bad boy’ of our neighborhood, and he was constantly in trouble at home and at school. For all I know he might be a bank president now, but back then his penchant for juvenile delinquency made him fun and attractive. He also gave me my first formal introduction to fundamentalist Christianity.

      “Mark’s mother was quite devout, and she was concerned that I wasn’t ‘saved.’ One afternoon when I was about 11, Mark invited me to come to his church (Baptist, I think, but it certainly wasn’t the Methodist church) and meet with him and his mother. We gathered in a windowless room in the back of the church, where Mark’s mother instructed me to close my eyes and pray for Jesus to enter my heart. And I did. I so wanted Jesus to enter my heart, and I prayed fervently that Jesus would do so. The truth was, I didn’t have any feeling of belonging to my mom’s Zen group, or really any other group, but if Jesus would just enter my heart I might belong to that group. I wasn’t really sure what that group specifically was, but I really wanted to belong. I was overwhelmed by the emotional, cathartic feeling that this kind of experience can bring, and I cried and told Mrs. Galen that Jesus had indeed entered my heart. But . . . that was the end of it. After the emotionalism ebbed, I could detect no evidence at all that Jesus had entered my heart, and even at that young age I suspected it had all been a setup. I’m sure Mrs. Galen’s motives were good, but the net result was reinforcement of the idea that Christianity was phony. When I didn’t join their church or participate at all, Mark and I gradually grew apart, and he went out of my life before we were out of elementary school.