Tag Archives: Hyles-Anderson College

Wisdom Out the Window

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Back in 1985, I’d recently walked away from fundamentalist religion. I’d been a student at a school run by a Baptist megalomaniac named, Jack Hyles. I’ve written many posts about Hyles across the footprint of my blogging that dates back to 1993. Of course, in 2020, blogging is as anachronism, just as outdated as a rotary dial phone. Doesn’t mean it’s bad—it’s just not the way the ignorant masses roll these days, especially the impressionable kids.

I was just an impressionable kid myself back in the mid-1980s when Ray-Bans were all the rage. But, I had determined to dry the wetness behind my own two ears. I figured broadening my understanding was the way to go. Moving beyond mere Bible verses and jeremiads offered in daily chapel services at Hyles-Anderson College seemed like a step in a new direction.

Mark was two-years-old and Mary was working the breakfast shift at the local Wendy’s. I was working the afternoon shift keeping the prisoners at Westville Correctional Center healthy and medicated (I was a medical assistant employed by the Indiana Department of Corrections).

With my morning free save for childcare, I decided to take my three semesters of credit at the University of Maine and see if I could ramp up my hopes of success in higher ed. Purdue University had a satellite campus about 20 miles away from where we were living and just up the road from the prison where I was working in Westville. Not sure why at the time, but I enrolled in Philosophy 101. It was probably a morning time slot thing.

Thinking college was the way to go (Purdue satellite)

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Back in God’s Country

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A week ago today, Mary and I were heading north on I-65, back to places where our young family began our life together. This is about as close as one gets to having what could be called a “time machine” or sorts.

Traveling back in time, via I-65.

A week later, news is still filtering forth from the Hoosier State, fallout from the newly-minted documentary, Barefoot: The Mark Baumer Story. We got to hear a welcome voice yesterday afternoon. It was Julie Sokolow, the filmmaker. She’s remained behind after we flew back and her cohorts headed back to Pittsburgh. The festival actually has continued for another week. We were thrilled to hear that her efforts at telling Mark’s story were rewarded. The film landed the Heartland International Film Festival’s Best Premier Documentary Feature. As Mark’s parents, this elicited more emotion—but this time it was something more joyful and made us less sad. We’re thrilled for Julie and the film’s team that worked so hard in capturing Mark as elegantly as they have.

Barefoot wins award at Heartland Film.

I think Sundays will forever be a day that I remember as one that once centered on God and church, especially back in the days we first pulled up in our rented U-Haul in front of the Bible school I would be attending. Last Sunday, we drove onto the grounds of Hyles-Anderson College, where every day was focused on those two elements, at least in a theoretical and experiential manner for a 22-year-old who’d felt “called to leave everything behind save for his pregnant wife and a few belongings. Continue reading →

Speaking in Public

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An amalgamation of skills acquired across a lifetime continues to intrigue and also puzzle me. My skill set offers surprises, too. Where did it come from? Were there models in my life that I emulated that led me to them?

Public speaking is a primary one. My evolution as a speaker was a gradual one. I never envisioned when I was in my late teens or early 20s that I’d become someone who would eventually speak before a myriad of groups, and deliver a host of disparate topics, mainly after the age of 40.

When I was a player attending classes mainly to maintain my spot on the Maine Black Bears fall baseball roster and so I could pitch for John Winkin, I enrolled in Public Speaking 101. The class of primarily freshman and sophomores—most of whom dreaded getting up to speak—offered me that first taste of the thrill that I’ve always experienced standing before a group, and the sense of power inherent in being able to do that. While most people equate speaking in public with fear, cold sweats, and ostracism, I was learning back in 1980 that this skill was a valuable one to have in your back pocket.

At 18, I wasn’t committed to my craft. I simply chose a topic and basically got up and riffed on a few things I knew, threw in a joke or two, and thought I was something special. I wasn’t. What allowed me to pull this off back then was some belief I managed to summon from somewhere. I believed I could do it. Continue reading →

Walking Away

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Walking away from fundamentalist Christianity was a pivotal event in my life. It probably is one the most significant (and difficult) decisions I’ve ever made since. The year was 1985. After three semesters at a school that from the outside seemed like it was “blessed by God,” once I was on the inside (as a student) however, nothing was as I expected.

One of the things I know about organized religion is that reality regularly falls far short of the ideal. Then there were the practical matters that caused immediate red flags when we rolled up to Hyles-Anderson College in our overloaded U-Haul, during the oppressively hot Midwestern August, in 1983. First, there was the expectation that the school provided some support for students when they arrived. I’d been told that there was assistance at Hyles-Anderson in finding a job.

Our pastor back home had given us a point of contact. Clayton Busby had pastored a small church in Maine, but felt “called” to Hyles-Anderson. We stayed with the Busbys for a few days, and then moved into a condo project near the school, where many other students were living.

Two days after arriving, I met the man, Brother Phil Sallie, who was in charge of workforce assistance. My 21-year-old radar told me he was a fraud. Of course at the time, I thought this was “the devil” trying to trip me up. It was evident months later (and perfectly clear from where I sit, today) that this man was a sadist who derived pleasure from wielding control over people’s lives.

Twisted scripture, Northwest Indiana-style.

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Easter: Just Another Sad Holiday

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Today is Easter Sunday. Some of you got up and went to a sunrise service. I used to like these. Being outside, in nature, helped connect theology to Earth. Of course, many Christians don’t care about Earth because they’re fixated on heaven.

I’m not a practicing Christian these days, whatever that means. When I was 21, I was naïve. I didn’t know any better. Thirty-five years ago, I simply accepted the false notion that “Christians aren’t perfect,” to excuse the abhorrent behavior I found inside “the fold.”

When you embrace something new, there is always a honeymoon period. Having been raised Catholic, I was attracted to the enthusiasm for scripture I found in many other believers during my initial Protestant foray. I loved the freedom that came from reading the Bible for myself, not having it spoon-fed to me by a priest.

For the Catholics I knew, Jesus wasn’t seen as a revolutionary or renewing figure in their brand of religion. That’s not to say that Catholics don’t believe in Jesus, just that salvation is a different process than “simply believe and be saved,” as I came to understand Christianity back in 1980.

My born-againism “lit a fire” in me, enough so that I left school at UMaine and walked away from my second love (Mary was my first), baseball. But, it doesn’t take long for this initial zeal to cool, or get squashed. Or, in my case, moved to another location. In this instance, it was Crown Point, Indiana, and Hyles-Anderson College.

My experiences at Hyles-Anderson have been documented here and here, as well in one of my essays in the previous book I put out, The Perfect Number: Essays & Stories Vol. 1. Things in the Hoosier State didn’t turn out as expected. Continue reading →

We Showed Up

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There’s a huge advantage to living nearly halfway across the country from the rest of your clan when you are 21 and you are a brand new dad. This formative experience fosters deep bonds between you and the other two members of your unit.

Being so young and suddenly thrust into the role of parents forced the two of us to become really clear about our lives and our love for one another. Yes, I suppose we could have gone in the opposite direction, but what we lacked in money and resources—we more than made up for in devotion to one another and our newborn baby boy, Mark.

When I look at photos of the two of us from the early 1980s, I’m struck by a couple of things. First, I’m amazed at how young we both looked. This was the stage in life when many people our age were getting started on a career, and contemplating what grad school to apply at. For the two of us, it was cobbling together enough cash to pay our rent, keep one of our two clunkers running and on the road, and later, how best to sync our dual work schedules so that Mark could have a parent home, spending time with him and nurturing his spirit.

On the steps of our duplex in Chesterton, IN (circa 1986)

After I fell out with the God people in Hammond and Crown Point, Indiana, I landed a job working in a prison. While Westville Correctional Center sure as hell wasn’t glamorous, it offered decent wages and even more important for our young family at the time—access to health insurance and our first HMO. Continue reading →

The God People

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We’re getting ready to move. It could be next month, or it might be next spring.

Mary has been going through piles of stuff that’s collected over the last two decades. She’s done a great job of winnowing down the clutter that grows over a lifetime of saving things, thinking that there might be a better use for them.

Some of what she pulled out over the weekend came from that period in our lives when we were God People. That was more than 30 years ago.

We actually moved halfway across the country to congregate with other God People at a place where we were supposed to learn new things about this God. The leader man sold us on his place by telling us one time that he knew more about God than anyone else.

The God place in Indiana

The God place in Indiana

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A Demagogue By Any Other Name

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Beware of wolves in sheep's clothing.

Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Since the government shutdown began, and the image of Ted Cruz began flashing across my television screen, I’ve been thinking about things that happened in my life 30 years ago. That’s when I learned a valuable lesson—one I kept trying to run away from. Those experiences taught me firsthand just how dangerous and delusional demagogues are.

It was thirty years ago that my young wife and I loaded up a U-Haul and journeyed 1,500 miles across the country to Northwest Indiana. She was pregnant with our son. I would enroll at Hyles-Anderson College, a fundamentalist, Baptist Bible college located in Crown Point. For two years, I attempted to correlate the inconsistencies I saw upon arrival, but kept tamping down, like a good little preacher boy. Continue reading →

Zig zag

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Zig Ziglar passed away nearly two weeks ago at the age of 86. I’ve been meaning to get up a post about Ziglar because I first encountered his personal brand of positive thinking at a time of my life when I wasn’t positive about much. In fact, being positive used to be something I never put much stock in. I had no truck with optimism, instead finding it easier traveling the paths of cynicism and negativity. When appraising any situation, I always saw a glass that was half empty.

Ziglar was part of a pantheon of 20th century positive-thinking gurus that included Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Og Mandino, and W. Clement Stone, to name just a few. All of these men believed that people had the ability to change their circumstances as a result of the power of the mind and their attitudes. Continue reading →