Question Number Two

2. How many brothers and sisters do you have? What are their names and birthdates? What do you remember about them from growing up?

There are four of us siblings in my family. I have an older sister, an older brother and a younger brother. My mom had a miscarriage between myself and my younger brother. She told me she was about 5 months pregnant when she miscarried. I never discussed this with my mother, but I think it's interesting that my four children were born in the same pattern as my siblings and I. My firstborn is a girl, my second is a boy, my third is a girl, then I had a miscarriage, and my youngest is a boy. Of course they're all grown up now.

My siblings and I were all named with "S" names. My sister is Sarah, my older brother is Scott, and my younger brother is Seth. We had a babysitter who occasionally struggled with our names. She tripped over our first names because they began with the same letter. It was like a tongue-twister. And then there was the barber who could never remember my little brother's name. He called him "Sid" or "Stu".

We were all children of the 50's except for Seth. Seth's age is the easiest for me to remember. All I have to do is add the decades. (Or subtract four from my age, which is shorter.)

I shared a room with Sarah for a couple of years when I was 6 or 7. She would make up bedtime stories to get me to go to sleep after the lights were turned out. My favorite was about Moosely and Chumley, a moose and a squirrel who were friends and lived together. (I detected a strong Bullwinkle influence.) Everything about the town they lived in had the word "moose" in it. For example, they would go shopping for groceries at the Supermooseket. I would get the giggles and I don't think it helped me go to sleep much. I used to beg her to tell them again. Not long after, I moved in to a room with my little brother, and we shared a room for about 5 or 6 years. I remember trying to tell him bedtime stories, but nothing topped Moosely and Chumley.

My brother Scott had amazing timing as a child. When I was four years old, my family moved from the Midwest to California. We drove all the way in a station wagon with my baby brother in a bassinet. When we stopped at one of several toll booths along the way, the man in the booth commented on Seth who was sound asleep. He teased Scott by asking, "Can I have your baby brother?" to which Scott replied: "No, but you can have my little sister." Ba-dum-bum.

I was very impressed with Scott because he knew the Cuban Peanut Vendor song: "In Cuba, every merry maid/Wakes up to this serenade: "Pea-nuts" (bum-ba-dum-ba-dum)/"Pea-nuts" (bum-ba-dum-ba-dum)/If there's no ending to this song/A million monkeys can't go wrong."  That kind of talent can't be learned. You either have it or you don't.

Music was always a big part of our lives when we were kids. One time Sarah and Scott took a big empty appliance box and decorated the outside to look like a jukebox. They cut a little slot for coins, then put me inside and told me to sing "Blue Moon". First they had to teach me the song. Every good jukebox should know their songs.

My little brother Seth and I spent most of our childhood together, whether it was riding in the way-back of the family's station wagons, watching Saturday morning cartoons, or sharing bunk beds. When I was 10, the neighborhood kids got together and put on a couple of extremely amateur "theatrical" plays in our garage. (Very off-off-off Broadway.) We wrote the plays, made the costumes, and our parents even let us hang curtains so we could change scenes. The first play had a Frankenstein's monster theme, and the second play revolved around a day in the life of the Peanuts cartoon characters, which were hugely popular then. We put black paper spots on Seth's footy pajamas and sat him on a card table for a dog house. He gave a stellar performance as Snoopy. That kid could emote.

Question Number One

1. When and where were you born? Did your parents ever share their memories with you about the day you were born?

I was born on the first day of Spring in the 50's, in a small hospital in a small Midwestern town. I believe the name of the doctor who delivered me was Sauer. I was born at 5:05 p.m., which sounds to me like a good time to get on a train and go somewhere. It was a Wednesday. Wednesday's child is full of woe, according to the nursery rhyme. That would be either "woe" or "Whoah!!", depending on what kind of day I was having. (Just kidding.)

I don't remember my parents sharing any memories about the day I was born. I was their third baby, so maybe they were fresh out of memories by then. (Just kidding again.) I do remember my mom telling me that she was given a general anesthetic during labor, so she was either asleep or pretty groggy by the time I arrived on the scene. Maybe that's why I like naps so much.

I do have a memory that involves the birth of MY first baby and Dr. Sauer's granddaughter. (No, not kidding.) She and my older brother went to a formal dance in high school together. (The granddaughter, not my baby.) I think her name was Shelly. (Again, not my baby.) Anyway, Shelly lived locally at the time. When I was a junior in high school, I was in a musical production of Jesus Christ Superstar at an Episcopal church in San Marino, and the guy's last name who played Judas was Weinmann. (Trust me, this all comes together eventually.) I went on a few dates with him after the show ended. Fast forward to 1981, and I was in the hospital after the birth of my first child. A nurse came in to see me and introduced herself as Shelly Weinmann. We chatted about our families and how she had gone to a dance with my brother, and how her grandfather had been my family's doctor. She was very nice. Then she told me that her husband played Judas in the same amateur production of Superstar as I did, and she was dating him while he was in the show and went to see him and really enjoyed our performance. Not sure if we were all dating each other at the same time, but she did say her husband remembered me. (Now is when I start singing "The Circle of Life".)

The Beginning

I became a Christian when I was 15. I don't remember the date I made this decision, so I have chosen October of 1971 as a "guestimate". I have no idea if that's right or not, but I think it was in the Fall and it was definitely during my sophomore year in high school.

I grew up with my family attending Sunday School and going to church, but I never cracked open the Bibles I got from my Sunday School classes. You had to be in a certain grade in school to get a Bible. And at Christmas, we got a different piece of the Nativity scene each year. One year it was a sheep, the next it was a donkey, the next it was Mary, until you had the whole set. For me, the Bible was a reference book; something you were supposed to have but not actually read.

In my sophomore year of high school, I made friends with a girl named Ruth. We spent a lot of time together during the summer, going to the beach and hanging out. She brought her Bible with her to the beach one day, and I was surprised at how effortlessly she opened it and read from it. I was so intrigued. It was like a V8 Vegetable Juice moment. The Bible stories I was told when I was little, and the stories about Jesus, were treated like they were relevant for today. She invited me to the weekly high school youth group bible study at a church in Alhambra, and I followed. I had never heard Jesus or the Gospel preached like that before.

It was during the Jesus Movement of the late 60's and early 70's. Jesus felt so reachable. He looked like a hippie and he taught about peace. And he stood up against the Religious Establishment of his day. And he cared. He went to the cross for me and died for my sins. I was thrilled that the Jesus from my childhood who loved everybody was somebody I could now cling to. I bought a new Bible and wrote this phrase in it: "The only one who won't love somebody else more than you is Jesus." That was super important to me. I believed I was low man on the totem pole in life, at home and at school. Jesus understood. Finally somebody understood. I read the Bible and I tried to be "good".

I thought the high school youth group was supposed to be like Shangri-La (my exact thoughts), a perfect place where everybody accepted everybody else because, of course, Jesus accepted everybody. I thought nobody would care about my social status and my shy, awkward ways. What I didn't realize was that the high school church group was full of cliques and jocks and cheerleaders and wannabees, just like school was. Imperfect, immature people, just like me. And I got treated in the church group just like I got treated at school. Ruth was beautiful and outgoing, and the guys naturally gravitated towards her and ignored me, just like at school. Other girls seemed to want to get to know her and bypass me, just like at school. And I got tongue-tied around people and felt like an idiot, just like at school. Nothing was any different. My expectations that Christians would want to be nice to me and get to know me weren't met. I began to believe that I was better off with my non-Christian friends at school because at least they didn't pretend to be something they weren't.

Eventually I stopped going to youth group. I became very disenchanted with the whole Christian scene. Once, a group of us had piled in to the youth pastor's car to go somewhere, and the car wouldn't start, even after several attempts. So we all prayed. The car never started, so we got out and walked. Praying seemed pretty stupid to me if you weren't going to get any help. At the same time, Ruth had been dating another youth pastor, who began pressuring Ruth to have a more physical relationship with him. She left the group saying that Christians shouldn't act like that, especially pastors. And they shouldn't. But she decided she was never going back. I finally left, too. I decided that it was impossible to be a Christian, because Christianity asks too much. My exact thoughts were: "Being a Christian is a physical impossibility." No more youth group or Jesus Movement for me.

When I got to college, I was attending church weekly with my parents but leaving it at that, just in case someone would think I was one of those Jesus Freaks. I saw Christians at school who carried their Bibles around with them, and I felt sorry for them. I heard the things other people were saying about them behind their backs, and I was embarrassed for them. Been there, done that, never again.

One day I was at my friend Sue's apartment between school and show choir rehearsal and I didn't have my car with me. Sue said she had a Bible study to go to before rehearsal, and asked me to go with her. I was stuck. I didn't have a way to decline without missing rehearsal. So I went with her. It was a group of people from our show choir and a few other students. I felt like the elephant in the room - the tribal heathen in the midst of the missionaries. But something was different this time. They weren't trying to be cool, or showing off, they were real. They talked about how living for Christ was the most natural thing in the world because it's what we were created to do. It didn't have to feel like hard work or a struggle to be "good enough". It was a relationship with Him, and it made all other relationships possible. The biggest difference was that they were obviously in love with Jesus. They admitted that they weren't perfect and they couldn't do life alone. They needed the Savior. Instead of wondering if everyone was going being nice to me, and judging people from a self-centered perspective, I realized I missed Jesus so much, and that there was so much more to know about Him.

One of the sticking points for me in my Christian infancy was the concept that Jesus is God. I believed he was only a man, just like anyone else. I was bothered by this constantly. It became a deal breaker for me. Either he was God, which I couldn't accept, or he was a man.

One of the people in the room at that fateful Bible study that Sue dragged me to was my future husband, Don. We began dating and I began trying to learn as much about Jesus from the Bible as I could. One day Don was driving me home after a date, and I asked him, out of the blue: "Was Jesus really God?"

He paused for a second, and his answer was: "Yes. And he still is."

I continued studying the deity of Christ in the Bible, reading what he had to say about himself as well as what the apostles and other people said, and when the light bulb finally went on, the puzzle pieces began to fall into place. The Jesus I had put my faith in in high school, the one who loves everybody, loves peace and confronted the Religious Establishment, has the power to change my life, forgive my sins, clean me up and make me his own, because he is fully God and fully man. And it's still true: "The only one who won't love somebody else more than you (or me) is Jesus."