Like a river that don’t know where it’s going
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going
Bruce really summed up my approach to living well with that line. Dianne Reel Fuller and I went to see him together when we were in Seminary. She was also a member of the congregation that I was inexplicably put in charge of. Later she was also the very first person that I hired at Union Mission.
I remember the audience went nuts when the E Street Band launched into “Hungry Heart” and Lady Di and I danced in the aisle with thousands of others.
I was living in the gritty inner city of Louisville, Kentucky surrounded by homeless people, prostitutes, and poor little old ladies who had just one leg up on their poverty. And the poverty went on for blocks and blocks for as far as I could see when I stood on the roof of the Church building that housed us all.
Hungry Hearts indeed!
Daily I’d drive to the beautifully kept campus of the Seminary to be indoctrinated on the Baptist brand of faith which minimized “those kinds of people.” So because it was those kinds of people who were “my people” I took it upon myself to represent them in class which of course got me in trouble with the professors.
I was forever being summoned to the Dean’s office for being “confrontational in class” and I was instructed to absorb the knowledge of the esteemed mostly white men with suits and swirl top hair cuts from Dairy Queen.
But back in the inner city the Hungry Hearts kept coming and the tiny broken down church grew and drew the attention of the Baptist corporate offices and the secular press. And I was introduced to media management which wasn’t taught in Seminary.
And we got a lot of it!
Which really didn’t sit well with the esteemed mostly old white men of the seminary. I was getting more press than they were and I was saying things that weren’t particularly Baptist.
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going.
Now I look back on those days with pride and satisfaction. I am certain that my name has been “blotted from the Book of Life” at the seminary and it makes me kind of proud.
But what I remember is the satisfaction and happiness of those homeless men, hookers, little old ladies, and increasingly other students of the Seminary who were not satisfied with what they were being taught and how “everybody found a home.”
Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
Don’t make no difference what nobody says
Everybody wants to have a home
For eight years in Louisville I found one that I am still proud of and it fills my heart. And there are old press clipping to remind me that it all happened that way.
