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Youth for Christ had made such a lasting impact on my life that,
after finishing college, I returned to Beloit to work full-time with
Dick Myers. I wanted to reach high school kids for Christ in
the same way that I had been reached years earlier, and as a staff
person I had the opportunity to do just that. I worked for
Stateline Youth for Christ for four years and, during that time,
discovered that I loved working in ministry. I was pretty good
at it, too.
At the time, Stateline had club ministries in
Beloit, Clinton, and Orfordville. I was in charge of the
Beloit and Orfordville clubs, and at one point, I was running what
was then the second-largest program in the state of Wisconsin.
I don’t take a lot of credit for that achievement. I was just
fortunate enough to recruit some exceptional volunteer staff members
during the first few months there, and they’re the ones who deserve
the real credit for whatever success we may have had.
I worked with a lot of good volunteers during my
years at Youth for Christ, but one in particular, Jeff Vander
Wielen, comes to mind. Jeff wasn’t your typical Youth for
Christ volunteer. He had been more interested in getting high
on marijuana during high school than in going to class, and it
showed. His grades were lousy, and he managed to graduate only
by the skin of his teeth. It took a few years, but Jeff
finally turned his life around. He became a Christian, worked
at a couple of jobs in Texas, and moved to Beloit in the summer of
1980. That’s when I talked him into volunteering with the
Beloit YFC club, and for the next three years Jeff and I worked
together in ministry.
I liked Jeff. He was down to earth and easy
to talk with, and the kids loved him. It didn’t take very long
for the two of us to become the best of friends, and before I knew
it we were spending three or four evenings a week together. We
were the perfect team, and his popularity certainly made my job
easier. All I had to worry about were logistics:
planning club meetings, putting together special events, and
getting everything ready for camp. Jeff, on the other hand,
spent a lot of his free time with kids. We loved to camp, and
YFC’s winter camp was the best. The same camp that I had gone
to as a teenager, I now attended as a staff member, and Jeff was
always there to help. Some years, we took as many as 70
teenagers into northern Wisconsin for three fun-filled,
action-packed days of playing in the snow.
Tradition had it that a talent show was held
every year, and one time Jeff and I decided to give the show a new
twist. We conducted an in-depth comparative study between the
guys’ restroom and the gals’ restroom, both of which were located in
the basement of the main lodge. Since none of the cabins were
equipped with plumbing (which probably explains the yellow snow that
appeared periodically outside the boys’ cabins throughout the
night) these restrooms were the only two restrooms in camp.
We talked one of the female staff members into
escorting us into the gals’ restroom and were absolutely dumbfounded
by what we saw. Compared to the guys’ restroom, it was the Taj
Mahal of camping, complete with curtains, flowers, wallpaper, and
even individual shower stalls. We, on the other hand, were
forced to make do with a shower room built out of cinder blocks,
with four or five faucets sticking out of the wall. There were
no flowers, no curtains, and a lousy paint job; it didn’t even come
close to the room that we had seen on the other side of the
building.
Now, I personally didn’t mind the disparity
between the two rooms. But when Jeff and I got up later that
evening to report our findings, you would have thought that a bomb
had just exploded in the main lodge. The gals were stunned,
the guys were outraged, and the camp staff were really
embarrassed—so much so that when we returned the following year,
major improvements had been made in the guys’ shower room.
I had so much fun on those camping trips, even
when I was the butt of a practical joke. One night, Jeff and I
were in the restroom together. I was at the sink, and Jeff
was in one of the stalls. Before coming out, he had removed
the lid from the toilet tank and scraped out a handful of sludge.
“I ran out of toilet paper,” Jeff said, showing
me the contents of his hand.
I almost lost it.
“Steve, it’s a joke,” he yelled, trying to catch
me as I ran out of the restroom.
“Some joke,” I said, managing not to get sick.
He hadn’t counted on the fact that I had a weak stomach.
That brings me to my next story. One
summer, Jeff and I took a road trip down to Corpus Christi, Texas.
While there, we decided to try our hand at some deep-sea fishing off
the Gulf of Mexico. We arrived at the harbor around 6:30 A.M.
to catch the boat that would take us on our eight-hour fishing
expedition. I made three mistakes that morning. The
first was not eating before leaving the house. I couldn’t
quite stomach the cow’s tongue that everyone was having, so I
decided to forego breakfast. I made my second mistake about
half an hour after we left port, when I decided to walk to the front
of the boat. The water was choppy, and I wanted to see how it
felt to be up front as the boat hit the waves. That was not a
good idea. With each wave, the boat rose twenty feet into the
air before coming down with a crash. Up and down, up and down,
over and over again. The temperature was near a hundred, there
wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and I had an empty stomach—a lethal
combination, to be sure.
It didn’t take long to feel the effects of my
stupidity. I was sick, and there wasn’t a thing I could do
about it. I tried sitting down, walking around, and even lying
down on a bench in the rear of the boat, but it was too late.
I was getting sicker and sicker by the minute and figured it was
about time for me to make my way over to the side of the boat.
That was my third mistake. How was I to know that the best
place to be when getting sick in a boat is in the rear?
Throwing up over the side of a boat has the same effect as spitting
in the wind. Need I say more? Let’s just say that for me
it wasn’t a fun trip.
As sick as I was, though, whenever the boat
stopped and it was time to fish, I always had my line in the water.
I may have been puking my guts out, but I had paid $40 for that trip
and wasn’t about to let anything rob me of the chance to catch the
“big one.” It would have helped if I had been able to catch
something that day, but no such luck. I had one bite, but that
was it. Jeff didn’t fare any better. Dwayne, the other
guy in our group, came home with two sharks, so I guess the day
wasn’t a complete waste. Still, I wish that at least one of
those sharks had been mine. All I had was a severe sunburn and
some vomit stuck to my tennis shoe. Those aren’t the kind of
souvenirs that you want to bring home from a vacation.
Jeff and I did a lot of fishing, and during the
summer months we were out on the lake at least twice a week.
We both had our own canoes, and we made it a practice to meet after
work and fish until dark. We loved to fish. It didn’t
matter how much it rained or how low the temperature dropped; if the
fish were biting, we were on the lake with our lines in the water.
Jeff was in back, I was in front, and between the two of us we
fished with four poles.
Strange things happen to people when they spend
so much time in the sun. They become selfish, especially when
one guy is catching fish and the other guy needs to go ashore.
“I think we’d better leave,” one of us would exclaim, usually after
putting off going to the bathroom for as long as possible.
“But I just had a bite,” the other would respond,
knowing that both of us had to be willing to pull up our anchors in
order to go ashore.
After a minute or so, the person who wanted to
keep fishing generally gave in without much of an argument. It was
dangerous to wait too long before agreeing to go ashore, because we
both knew that the next time out the shoe might be on the other
foot.
Between the two of us, we caught a lot of fish.
Sometimes we had to go home empty-handed, and on those days, we
drove to a restaurant and ordered ourselves a fish dinner.
There’s nothing worse for a fisherman than admitting failure, but by
going out to eat, we could truthfully say that we had gotten our
share of fish. They might have been caught by someone else,
cooked, and brought to us on a plate with lots of French fries and
coleslaw on the side, but that was all we needed to boast of a
successful fishing trip.
Jeff and I loved to eat almost as much as we
loved to fish. One night, shortly after Jeff began working in
the Beloit club, we met early and went to the Pizza Inn just down
the road from the office. The two of us split a large,
deep-dish pan pizza with everything on it. It was without a
doubt the best pizza I ever had, but we paid for it afterward.
Jeff and I had stuffed ourselves, and neither of us felt much like
leading a club meeting. We had no choice, though. The
kids were showing up around seven, and we were the ones in charge.
We were too embarrassed to tell the kids that we weren’t feeling
well, so we took turns up front, looking like we were about to keel
over. Somehow we made it through the night and then vowed
never to eat that much pizza again.
Jeff lived in Beloit for three years, and during
that time we became closer than brothers. His experience in
working with club kids spurred him on to higher goals. In the
fall of 1983, Jeff left Beloit to attend the University of Wisconsin
at Steven’s Point as a psychology major. I felt as though I
was losing a part of myself when he left Beloit. I do not make
close friends easily. Jeff was the closest friend I’ve ever
had. He stayed at Steven’s Point for a year before
transferring to Westmont College, in Santa Barbara, California.
That’s when we began losing touch with each other. He lived in
California and then moved to Idaho. I lived in Wisconsin and
then moved to Illinois and later to New York. We simply went
our separate ways. We still keep in touch and occasionally see
each other. We were even in each other’s weddings. But
that’s not the same as the ongoing camaraderie that we shared as two
single men living in Wisconsin, spending our evenings trying to
outdo each other with fishing poles while sitting in a boat out on a
lake.
In all of the years that I worked with Youth for
Christ, my cerebral palsy became an issue only once. Jeff and
I were out one night with a couple of club kids, Paul Lee and Larry
Smith, when Larry began telling us about an uneasiness that some of
the kids in the Beloit club felt.
“What do you mean, they feel uneasy?” I asked.
“Some of the kids just happened to mention that
something about the club makes them comfortable.”
“Well, did they say what it is?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I should tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I just shouldn’t,” Larry said, without any
further elaboration.
I’m usually not one to be intrusive, but this was
different. I was in charge of the Beloit club. And if
there was something going on to make some of the kids
uncomfortable, I wanted to know about it. It was one thing not
to say anything about the situation. It was something else
entirely for Larry to tell me that something was going on and then
refuse to tell me what that something was. Every time I asked
for an explanation, he refused to give one. His excuse?
It wasn’t his responsibility to tell me what the other kids were
thinking. Poppycock! If it wasn’t his responsibility,
then he shouldn’t have said anything in the first place. But
once he did, how could he then refuse to give us any further
explanation? He couldn’t. At least, that’s how I saw it.
Jeff agreed with me, and so did Paul, and the
three of us spent a full hour trying to convince Larry to tell us
what was going on. Finally he admitted that my cerebral palsy
was bothering a few of the kids. Imagine that! My
disability prevented a couple of teenagers from coming to some of
our activities. I knew that.
I realized early on in my ministry that my
cerebral palsy might prevent some people from giving me a chance,
and I could drive myself batty by worrying about all those who might
be turned off by my disability. I decided not to do that.
No one person can be all things to all people, and even if I
weren’t disabled, some people would remain unresponsive to my
ministry. I know that, and I accept that. Yet I also
know that for every person who allows my disability to be an
obstacle to his coming to a meeting, there stands another person who
welcomes my ministry abilities with open arms. And I believe
that those are the people to whom God has called me to minister his
gospel.
The fact is, despite Larry’s perception of how
the other teens felt, I had a very good rapport with most of the
people who came to our clubs. So much so that I would probably
still be at Youth for Christ today if it weren’t for the friction
that arose between myself and the executive director. I could
write volumes about what went wrong or who’s to blame for my leaving
Youth for Christ. But that is not the intent of this book, and
pointing fingers would serve no useful purpose. Suffice it to
say that I left Stateline Youth for Christ in August of 1984, and
that I did not do so under the best of circumstances.
As difficult as things had become at YFC,
deciding to leave was one of the hardest decisions that I’ve ever
made in my life. Although it’s true that I loved youth
ministry, my true dilemma was that I was terrified of leaving.
I was just too afraid of looking for work elsewhere, and I felt
trapped. Youth for Christ was safe. I was known in
Beloit and had already proven myself as someone capable of
performing quality work. I was afraid that no other employer
would give me the same chance to prove myself that Youth for Christ
had given me.
My fear of permanent unemployment kept me at YFC
a full six months longer than I should have stayed. As a
matter of fact, it was my fear that had brought me to Youth for
Christ in the first place. I had always wanted to work at
Stateline YFC, but in some ways I took the easy way out by returning
to Wisconsin after graduating from college. I never even
considered looking elsewhere for work. I was too afraid to
try. I could not risk being told that I wasn’t suitable for a
job, knowing full well that the reason behind that decision was my
cerebral palsy. That would have been unbearable. I’m
glad that I went to work with YFC, but I wish that I had done so for
the right reasons and not out of a fear that no other options
existed for me.
A part of any job search is being told by
employers that you’re not exactly the type of person they’re looking
for. I know that. Everyone faces the prospect of having
the door slammed in his or her face while looking for work. I
also know that most people, if given enough time, will eventually
find work. Although I believed that to be true for other
people, I didn’t believe that it was true for me. Instead of
having confidence in my ability to find work, I was convinced that
no one would ever hire me, regardless of how many applications I
submitted or how many interviews I had.
I was sure that I could easily find work, if only
I could figure out a way to present myself to potential employers so
that my cerebral palsy wouldn’t show. That was asking for the
impossible, though. Everywhere I go, this disability called
cerebral palsy goes with me, and there isn’t a thing I can do about
it. Cerebral palsy isn’t something that I can take off right
before a job interview and put on again once I’ve landed a
position. It’s with me every single day of my life, and no
matter how much I try to hide it, it is always out there for
everyone to see. |
