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  I had also met Kevin’s roommate, Luc Phan, and Sean’s roommate, a guy named DB who freaked out because Sean had a snake in an aquarium, and “black folk don’t do snakes,” he said. Kevin had introduced himself and informed me that he also was in a band that sang a capella Christian music.

  “Maybe we can jam sometime,” he offered.

  “No, man,” I said. “I don’t do Christian music.”

  The irony wasn’t lost on me a few years later, when all I played was Christian music and Kevin’s group had a hit with a song titled “I Wanna Sex You Up.”

  Later that day, I had grown tired of marking my territory with the guitar and had instead plugged my stereo into the amp, blasting the new album by Ace Frehley, my guitar hero, to everyone within earshot. And that’s when Sean walked in, strolling with an easy gait, long, confident strides and a cocky grin on his face, wearing skinny-leg Levi’s with penny loafers at the ends.

  “Whatcha listening to?” he asked, as if we had known each other all our lives.

  “Ace Frehley,” I replied. The guitarist had quit his band, Kiss, five years earlier, and in the summer of 1987 he had finally released his long-awaited first solo album, “Frehley’s Comet,” which I soaked up like a sponge, ignoring the horrible lyrics because I loved the guitar playing.

  “It’s wild,” he said, not wanting to offend. “I’m Sean, and I only listen to Christian rock, but this is really good.”

  What was it with this place and Christian music? I had never heard the words “Christian” and “rock” used together. It was the 1980s, and Tipper Gore and the Moral Majority had been spending tons of time and wads of cash convincing everyone who would listen that rock and roll music was the tip of a slippery slope sucking poor, innocent kids into drugs, sex and ultimately murdering their parents in the name of Satan.

  “Christian rock” seemed like an oxymoron to me.

  Still, I was intrigued.

  “Ace Frehley is a Christian,” I said, for lack of a better response. I had absolutely no social graces, so I didn’t even think to introduce myself; instead, I immediately flew into defending my guitar hero against the implication that he was playing the devil’s music. I pointed to the lyrics for his song, “Rock Soldiers,” which tell how Frehley survived a horrific drunk driving incident: When I think of how my life was spared/From that near fatal wreck/If the Devil wants to play his card game now/He’s gonna have to play without an Ace in his deck.

  Sean, to his credit, simply said, “Wow. That’s cool.”

  Years later, he laughed as he told the story, recounting how I had thought Ace Frehley’s music was Christian rock. But at the time he wasn’t laughing. Instead, he formed a friendship with me that transcended our differing views on religion: he was a staunch believer, while I enjoyed thumbing my nose at religion, once telling my religious step-father that I was “fornicating” when he called and asked whether he had interrupted anything important. It was a stark contrast that somehow worked. We connected on a more cerebral level, possibly, or maybe it was just Sean’s nature that he continued to reach out even when the cause seemed hopeless.

  By the time our first day in the dorms was nearly over, Darryl still hadn’t arrived, so Sean and I passed the time throwing water balloons at arriving students and taunting them from behind the safety of the cinderblock walls beneath the roll-out windows.

  “Bye, Mommy, I’ll miss youuuu,” I teased one kid as he hugged his mother in the parking lot opposite Sean’s room on the north side of the dorm. The kid flipped me off and Sean launched a balloon at him as we scurried across the hall, laughing hysterically, and slammed the door to my room on the south side in case the kid figured out that the taunts—and the balloon—had come from our hallway. We did that all day long, laughing giddily, speculating about each person who moved his stuff in on the floor, whether it was Darryl or not.

  “That guy’s a stoner for sure,” Sean said as one dude moved in at the end of the hall. Then a lanky guy nicknamed Skip arrived on the other side of my room. Sean leaned over and giggled: “Did you notice he shaved his legs?”

  Turned out, Skip was a bicycle racer and his penchant for shaving his legs was part of a push to make his body as aerodynamic as possible, but that didn’t stop us from giving him a hard time about it all year long. Later in the year, we were all riding in a Jeep, and we saw Skip on his bike, so I squirted him with a water gun as we passed him. Much to our surprise, Skip was a lot faster on his bike than we had assumed, and he actually caught up to the Jeep, grabbing the water bottle from his bike’s frame and squirting us all with water.

  One guy who called himself “Moose” moved in next to Sean, and he immediately supplied us with hours and hours of discussion material, because he had somehow found a mannequin and had dressed it up like Freddy Krueger, the creepy killer from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and then perched the mannequin at the window of his dorm room, peering down on every person who walked past the building. Moose had also hung a banner across his room the first day he was there that read, “Dyslexics of the world UNTIE!” Sean and I both thought that was really clever, so we liked Moose, weird as he was, from the beginning.

  Sean was the first person I really connected with at college, and the only one with whom I formed a lasting friendship. Though our friendship later would coalesce around two pillars—religion and writing—in the beginning, we were just a couple of guys who liked poking mostly good-natured fun at other people for a few laughs. From the day we met, we were nearly inseparable, the odd couple through and through.

  For me, college was my first real taste of freedom and I found myself going wild, gravitating toward anyone who had drugs or alcohol. I paid my own way, unlike many students, so I had literally no extra money to spend on things like that, but I wasn’t above hovering at parties and borrowing others’ libations. Almost immediately, I got a job at a fast food restaurant about a mile down the road, and I would walk back and forth to the restaurant, working until closing time, which was when the employees could select whatever leftover food they wanted and take it home. The chain has since discontinued that practice, but at the time, it meant the difference between eating and starving for me. Every night, when I came home and stocked my dorm fridge with leftover food, people would gravitate by to pick through the haul. Sean was no exception, and every night, we would sit and watch my tiny TV while chowing down on old burgers and fries.

  That week, unbeknownst to me, he made a list of everyone in the dorm —all four floors—in order of the likelihood that they could be converted to evangelical Christianity.

  I was at the bottom of the list, on the “forget about it” portion of the page.

  Sean made lots of friends in the dorm, and I was friendly with lots of people, but didn’t really make any close friends. Kevin and I hung out a bit (and Sean and I penny-locked him into his room, blowing talcum powder into the room with a hair dryer, the cloud from which forced him to climb out a window), and Luc and I spent some time hanging out and comparing our martial arts skills (his were better) and him trying in vain to teach me to fence, but other than the guys at the end of the hall with whom I got high, Sean was the only person with whom I spent significant time. Because he was smarter than just about everyone, Sean never really seemed to need to study, so he had time to hang out.

  He was disarmingly normal for my view of what a Christian was supposed to be. When I bought a cable splitter and stole the cable signal from the dorm’s lounge, running it up to my room through a cracked window, Sean didn’t get morally superior on me; instead, he’d come into my room, ask what was playing and we’d watch whatever it was. He made fun of me, of course, when a couple of months later the dorm’s resident advisor caught me and forced me to give up my larceny, but it was a good-natured ribbing; there was nothing malicious about his humor at all.

  Even though I was literally at the bottom of his “salvation” list, Sean went out of his way to share his faith with me. He never came right out and said
anything like “you need to get saved.” Instead, he occasionally would mention something about church, and then he would wait to see if I asked questions. If I didn’t, we transitioned to something else. If I did, he didn’t jump in and start trying to seal the deal; instead, he simply answered the question and if it led to other questions, he’d answer them. If it didn’t, we’d move on. The strategy wasn’t immediately successful for him, but he trudged onward. I wasn’t the only one, either. Shortly after the university term began, he started spending a lot of time with a girl on the third floor who eventually became his girlfriend.

  Sean’s weekly Bible studies moved up to his girlfriend’s room and I started attending, because it seemed plenty of girls were going, too. There were two girls on the third floor whom I was interested in, one an ice skater and the other an aspiring singer. Both were regulars at Sean’s Bible studies, which sort of meant I had to be a regular, too. The Bible study part bored me; I had no idea what they were talking about, nor did I care. But Sean seemed to know what he was talking about. Sometimes he flipped to some random Bible passage, read it and then related it to modern life, no matter how tenuous the connection or obscure the scripture.

  I guess I looked interested enough, however, because at some point Sean and his girlfriend invited me to church with them at Crossroads Cathedral, a 6,000-seat behemoth literally at the crossroads of Interstates 35 and 40 in Oklahoma City. I agreed to go and it was shocking to a guy who had never been in a church service more upbeat than old-school Southern Baptist. In the church my parents attended, everything was pretty straightforward: we found a seat in the balcony and sat quietly until the service was over, listening dutifully to the sermon and getting pinched by my mother if we squirmed too much.

  When I left for college, my dad had given me only one piece of advice: Stay away from Pentecostals.

  But Crossroads Cathedral was another thing entirely. The first shock I had was a drum set on stage. These days, they seem pretty common in church, but in the fall of 1987, drums were nearly unheard of in a church. The next shock was how the congregation (I remember calling them the “audience”) reacted to the music. They stood, swayed, danced, sang along and lifted their hands above their heads like the surrendering antagonist in an old Western movie. And one lady halfway across the church, eyes slammed shut, hands thrust into the air, silently chattered throughout the service, tears pouring down her face the whole time. I was transfixed. I watched her the entire service.

  After church, back at his girlfriend’s dorm room, I asked about Chattering Lady.

  “Don’t worry,” Sean said, smiling, “we think she’s weird, too.”

  With that offhand comment, he effortlessly defused a confusing and awkward experience and made the Pentecostal religion seem perfectly reasonable to a non-believer. I didn’t find out until much later that the Crossroads Cathedral was exactly the thing that my dad had warned me about: it was Pentecostal; it was actually Oklahoma City’s First Assembly of God, disguised under a different name.

  “Why do people put their hands in the air?” I asked Sean, still oblivious to the fact that I had been to a Pentecostal church service. All I knew was it was different. “Is it like antennae, to get better reception?”

  Sean laughed.

  “Actually, that’s an excellent analogy,” he said. “They’re reaching out to God, literally.”

  I wasn’t a convert, but I didn’t mind going to church with him and his girlfriend and they became good friends of mine. By the time I learned that Crossroads Cathedral was Pentecostal, I no longer minded; the people there were friendly, the services weren’t that crazy once you got used to them and I enjoyed hearing the pastor, Dan Sheaffer, preach. He was funny. When the congregation wasn’t shouting “amen” loudly enough, Sheaffer jumped down from the platform and sat down on the front row and shouted into the microphone, “Amen, Brother Sheaffer, preach it!” and then hopped back up and continued his sermon.

  Crossroads was one of the first of what is now called “mega-churches,” and it showed. Each service, even those on Wednesday nights, easily was attended by more than 1,000 people, and the Sunday morning services were packed with nearly 6,000.

  Sean could not stop talking about how successful Sheaffer had been in building the church and he often spoke about how other churches could learn from him. Early on, when Sheaffer was building the tiny First Assembly of God into a mega-church, he noticed that less than half of the congregation had shown up to a Wednesday night service. The following Sunday, he said, “Folks, I don’t know where you were Wednesday night, but we are here to build a church. If you are not going to be here on Wednesday night, then I don’t want you here on Sunday mornings. I will need your seat pretty soon for a person who wants to serve God and build here what God has asked us to build. You either have to get in, get committed and pray through, or you will have to find somewhere else to go.”

  Not one person left, and Sean loved stories like that, where people who made their living from preaching nonetheless stood up to those they were preaching to and offered them an ultimatum: serve God or get out. To Sean, that signified the height of faith. Sheaffer was also renowned for being a pioneer in racial integration of the church, another position that appealed to Sean, who believed white churches had a lot to learn from black churches. Sean and I settled in at Crossroads and, although I still wasn’t a believer, I came to enjoy the experience.

  But Sean and his girlfriend had a secret plan to “win” me that I didn’t know about. Over the course of the semester, I had drawn a picture of Eddie, the Iron Maiden mascot, on my dormroom door. Eddie was essentially a reanimated corpse, and looked the part. His eye was the peephole for my door, so when I looked through the peephole, I was looking through the eye of a corpse. It was positively creepy to people like Sean and his girlfriend, who believed such images were inspired by Satan.

  When I came back from Thanksgiving break, Eddie was gone. Later, Sean told me he and his girlfriend had spent hours erasing the drawing.

  “We cast the demon out of your door,” he said, smiling.

  Eventually, I stopped going to church with them, because other things were demanding my time, but Sean and I remained close. He visited me periodically and never commented about the beer can pyramid, the smell of marijuana or the liquor bottles littering the floor. As religious as he was and I wasn’t, Sean never openly judged me, which may be why we remained friends while we were so at odds over religion.

  It was a key to Sean’s personality—until he considered you “under his authority,” Sean never corrected you. Even after I converted, Sean never said a cross word to me, because I was a man and, as such, in his mind an equal. We disagreed many times, but Sean’s way of correcting men he saw as out of line was much gentler, much more collaborative than his method of correcting women, who even then he viewed as less spiritually solid than men. He never voiced such a thing in public, but in private, he confided that women needed men to lead them.

  With men, he presented his case in such a way that it provided an opening for you to agree with him and thus avoid the appearance of having lost an argument. It was an intuitive method of arguing that Sean probably picked up from growing up with three brothers who were larger and stronger than he was. But with women, his approach was much more direct, because he believed women needed to be led, not collaborated with.

  The way Sean presented that point of view, much as the way he presented just about everything, made it less offensive—and even plausible. It wasn’t misogyny, he said, to fulfill the roles God intended for us when he created humans. Was it anti-dog to teach your four-legged friend to sit, not to beg and not to urinate on the carpet? In Sean’s way of thinking, the two ideas were parallel; though he didn’t view women as dogs, he certainly viewed them as being under the authority of men, and thus it wasn’t anti-woman to simply fulfill the roles God created for humankind. Men were second only to God in the hierarchy of authority; women and children were third and fourth, respecti
vely.

  And dogs, he added with a wry grin, were probably fifth on that list.

  I never could accept Sean’s way of thinking about women, but he believed it wholeheartedly. In fact, it was a foundational aspect of his entire theological worldview. God, he believed, ran an explicitly ordered universe, and when humans slipped outside that order, they were placing themselves in positions to reap the negative consequences of being apart from God’s will. God was all about order in his kingdom, where Satan was all about chaos. Being out of order was akin to being in league with Satan, at least in practice, and that meant you were vulnerable to his influence the farther you slipped outside the plan of God.

  For Sean, that understanding was a foundation that must be laid first, before any other information could be adequately added or comprehended, and once that was understood, the true theology of God’s kingdom—and the spiritual warfare that accompanied it—could be built on top.

  Spiritual warfare, however, wasn’t the only kind of violence the whisper-thin kid preacher was into. One day I was shocked when Sean was on the third floor with his girlfriend. The third floor was where all the girls lived, so of course most guys spent a lot of time there. There was a goofy kid from the fourth floor named Stan who was also on the third floor, being goofy as usual, and he happened to drop the F-bomb in Sean’s girlfriend’s hearing.

  Sean flipped out.

  Before Stan knew what had hit him, Sean ran over, grabbed him by the shirt and began yelling at him. The dorm had no air conditioning, so the windows were open and at the end of each hall there was a full-size window. Sean pushed Stan up against that wall and then he pushed Stan’s torso outside the window, holding him up by his shirt.

  “Apologize,” Sean said in a weirdly calm voice, a smile/smirk plastered on his face. There was no yelling, only a calm forcefulness to his voice. “Apologize to her for talking like that or I’m going to drop you out of this window.”