“Now everyone bow their head and close their eyes…” the pastor’s Kentucky accent added vowels where they didn’t belong, but I had visited and even lived there so many times, it was like a second language to me.
“If you’re ready to accept Jesus in your heart, I want you to just raise one hand. No looking around, this is an intimate moment between you and God.”
I lost count how many times I asked Jesus into my heart. Like he moved in long enough to notice the unstable foundation and holes in the walls clean to the outside, and promptly vacated the premises. Oh but at fifteen, I was grown. Mature even, because juvenile detention grows a girl up real fast.
“God chooses the most unlikely of people to carry out his most magnificent plans. For the meek shall inherit the earth,” the pastor went on.
What a marketing hook. The week before I was staring out a window covered in bars dreaming of a life bigger than the tiny cell I was in. My prayers, though at the time were to the tune of teenage angst, had been answered. Tears poured from my eyes and I sobbed quietly. I am meant for something bigger, and nothing is bigger than God. Why had this never clicked in my adolescent mind before? If anyone was unlikely to do big things for the Lord, oh yeah, I was your girl.
Dear Aunt Jacqi placed a hand in the middle of my back and raised the other in the air. I wasn’t peeking. I’d seen her do this every single church service I’d ever attended, which this was the third service in the first week I went to live with her. The courts determined it was in my best interest to not live with my mother, and my dad was on orders back to Korea and not an option.
Poor life choices and my smart mouth triggered such a beating from my mom, that in the midst of her banging my head off the kitchen floor, I had swung back. I’d never swung at my mother before, but I had also never been punched by her either. Pretty ballsy, but I figured if I was big enough to take the beating she was giving me, I was also big enough to defend myself.
The rest was a blur of me getting away from her and running up the stairs to my room. It wasn’t long until she appeared in my door with a belt with the biggest buckle she owned.
“NO!” I screamed and pointed at the belt. I could tell by the way she was holding it, which side she wanted to hit me with. “No you will NOT!” Real ballsy.
“Oh, you’re going to get it and not from me. Tomorrow morning, we’re going to the courthouse. They’ll put you in juvy and I’ll let them take care of you. You ever had a broom stick shoved up your twat?”
I think I had heard this word twice before in my life, and I could not help but crack a smile hearing it fly out of my mother’s mouth in a fit of rage. Like if she’d randomly screamed about a forceful fart. I had a lot of growing up to do, apparently, behind bars.
“Good! It’s better than being here,” I yelled back at her as she slammed the door. Was not my best comeback, but I knew something was going to change. I did believe it would be better than being home. Maybe I’d tell the cops to give my mother a drug test, too, and they’d feel bad for me. I made no attempt to sneak out or run away that night. I was booked in as soon as the Juvenile Center opened the next day.
“Please God, hear Dacia’s prayer. See her repentant heart and fill her with your Holy Spirit,” Jacq whispered next to me.
It was her job in the church to peek at who raised their hands and pray with them. I’m sure she waited with baited breath for me to raise my hand during a service. I love her so much.
“I know you will guide her to be something so much bigger than herself, Lord, bigger than her circumstances, and, Father God, I know you will place her feet on the path of righteousness because your word says, ‘…the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day’. Please God let your light shine through Dacia today until you come again.”
I didn’t fake the tears. This was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to God about me, I imagined. I just wanted someone to love me. God, as big and all-knowing as he was, was still some guy far, far away. Much like my dad. Besides, with an aunt this nice, I could totally see past the jaggoff she married and raised five children with.
“Who forgot to clean the kitchen? Oh, let me see,” Deputy John would say aggressive-aggressively to no one in particular but loud enough for all occupants of the entire house to hear. His steps were far heavier than normal, because he’d come home for his lunch break still wearing his body armor and utility belt. The stupidest hilly-Billy accent I ever heard incorrectly enunciated his words. No wonder he was so mean.
“Dayeeshuh. You were supposed to clean the kitchen.”
“Yep,” I answered bee-bopping my teenage self from my room to pay for the crime I had committed that day.
“Whiiii didn’t you clean the kitchen before doin’ your schoo work? Ain’t you suppost to do your chores before your school work?”
“Yep.”
“Yes, whut?” all this spoken in a harsh, I’m-a-cop-you-better-cooperate tone.
“Yes, I am supposed to clean the kitchen before doing my school work,” I answered conversationally while cleaning the kitchen.
“Then whiii didn’t you do it?” mentally writing me a ticket.
“No reason,” I continued in my nonchalant tone, progressively pissing my uncle off.
“Well if you cain’t do your chores, then you don’t get a ride to youth group.”
The strange thing is he did this type of unnecessary interrogation to his own kids as well. Jacqi was the youth pastor. No one stayed home from youth group. I was a quick learner, though, and after seeing some of the ridiculous punishments he came up with for his own kids, I knew he was cooking up something particularly humiliating for me. So, I never called his bluff.
I never tried to appease John, either. It was pointless. He never showed love to any of his kids, or Jacqi for that matter. He was an authoritarian and his mood was his love. This man made no attempts to encourage or nurture anyone. I knew, no matter how good or bad I did, it would not affect how I was treated.
He wasn’t like my dad. My dad was funny when he was in a good mood. My mother loved him more than herself, and taught us to do the same.
“We have to wait until your father gets home to eat,” she would say sighing heavily at the clock. “Clean up the house before he gets home.”
On Monday nights, we ate dinner in the living room consisting of meat, a starch which was usually potatoes, and two vegetables, one us kids would eat and one my dad wanted like spinach or lima beans.
After we ate, my brother and I would do the dishes while Rosanne or Married with Children played in the background. I remember laughing when the audience did, but never understanding the jokes. Then wrestling came on.
“The Road Warriors!” Dad barked in a deep gruff voice with two fist raised in the air, elbows bent slightly like his biceps were too big to stretch them outright. “Road Warrior Hawk and Road Warrior Animal. Are the Legion. Of. Dooooooooom!”
My brother, three years older than me, and I would stand up and raise our fists in the air. On the screen, two face-painted men with football pads adorned with spikes walked to the wresting ring.
Once the match was underway against the Bush Whackers, a pair of goofy backwoods bumpkins who were the Road Warrior’s arch nemesis, Dad said, “Dacia, get me another beer.”
Earlier in the day, a police officer came to school and gave us Drug Abuse Resistance Education. Gen X remembers this as DARE. The result of such education is as follows…
“No.” blink, blink.
I could feel the color leave my face. In the gaping silence I added, “At school they said we shouldn’t get our parents beers.”
No other words were uttered. Both my mother and father looked at me expressionless. Pinpricks ran across my forehead and I couldn’t swallow. I got up off the floor and walked to the kitchen to retrieve the requested beer. That was the end of that conversation.
By this age, around ten, I absorbed these experiences differently than everyone else involved. As the middle child, I was often invisible. I didn’t want to just be seen, though. I wanted the love and admiration my father received from all of us and I wanted it from him.
Uncle John neither gave nor received anything emotionally but anxiety and anger. So, it was easy for me to be unphased by his scare tactics.
At youth group, there were three families of kids and some stragglers from the west end the church had picked up many years ago during a revival and stayed after the revival was over. Two of those families were up on the stage playing music for most of the service: my cousins and our friends. I knew the time would come when I would get a spot on the stage. After all, if you pray for it, it must come true. Right? And Jacqi was the best pray-er I knew. It was her actual job.
“You have to be called to ministry, Dacia. I believe you’re called to serve the church, you just need more time. You’re still a little rough around the edges,” our paster explained to me at 18 years old.
My still-teenage mind churned. I looked to Jacqi and asked, “Is there some kind of holy sandpaper to fix my rough edges? Is there something specific I can do? Or work towards?”
“It just takes time,” she said. Her accent drew out the long I in time for sympathy.
“Stevi is younger than me and she’s been playing bass guitar for two years now,” I pleaded, trying to understand how I was in Church Service Purgatory. Stevi’s friends were my friends, and they were all on stage during service. I was the odd one left out.
“Stevi has been in the church her entire life. She’s memorized all the scriptures. You’re still a Baby Christian.” My aunt looked at me, but I knew her and the pastor had already discussed how this conversation would go.
I wanted to scream about half the youth ministry team having sex and doing sinful things even though they grew up in the church. Could they just give me a level or target experience points to get to the next? Was I a level three but needed at least a level seven to place a foot on the stage? I wanted to help people, because being helpful would earn their love.
“Now, Sister Dacia, I understand your desire to help build the kingdom of God. But your ‘rough edges’ kind of go against what some of our parishioners believe. For example, you got a very prominent tattoo of the very bible scripture that determines tattoos to be a sin.” I was most impressed the pastor kept a straight face.
Romans 12:1 states, “Let your body be a living sacrifice holy and pleasing to the Lord.” According to some, tattoos are most definitely NOT holy. I figured, it was the biggest compliment to God to have such a declaration of faith permanently inscribed on my body, a sacrifice very pleasing indeed. All good and well in theory.
“Ummm, we’re gonna have to fix that,” the tattoo artist said mid-“Sacrifice”. Somehow, after a review of no less than five people, I had a tattoo of a cross with the word “Living” above it and “Sacfrice” below.
I absent-mindedly rubbed my right bicep. “Contemporary Christian rock stars have tattoos and are still able to lead praise and worship,” I pleaded to no avail.
There were many more reasons the pastor could have listed that I was fully aware of. I quickly became unsure what my goal was in this meeting. The top of the rough-edged list was I was boy crazy. Though, I had not dated since leaving my two year relationship with a guy three years older than me, this did not stop me from pushing the envelop of good Christian-girl sexuality, or any envelop for that matter. If it challenged the old folks of church to consider alternate views of what being a Christian physically looked like, it was my new favorite fashion trend. Or just a ploy to get attention. This was how “baby Christians” acted. According to the pastor and my aunt, God couldn’t use babies.
I left the church and walked across the parking lot where I was sharing an apartment with my other aunt, Gina. She let me sleep on her couch. I held a job as cell phone customer service agent for a year, but in this tiny Kentucky town, something was missing. Validation from the adults in my life mostly.
After some not so careful planning and a ton of charity from the members of my church, I packed up my little blue car and drove myself to Northeastern Pennsylvania to Master’s Commission. I figured my church would have to take me seriously if I attend a year of intense discipleship training. The bonus, no one in my new church knew me. I could fall back on all my experience moving and reinvent myself. Who would I be this time? Maybe the person who got to peek at people raising their hands during the alter call.