Loving Jesus and Kissing Boys

My story continues, the summer after my vacation in California with Grandpa Ware. After he bade me farewell at the airport, and warned me not to get pregnant, I continued home, questioned my friends about whether my experience was “normal,” and promptly fell in love with every boy who looked at me. There were many who did, and still others I fell in love with who never even looked at me. 

There were entire drum lines of several bands, drum majors, and drum instructors. There was even the biology teacher, and the chemistry teacher, who was known to be a flirt. I was wishing he would flirt with me, but he didn’t.

I made up a parody to the song “Happiness” from “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” but I don’t think I sang it for anybody. It included all the names of the boys I was in love with right then (mostly drummers). After all:

“Happiness is playing the drum in your own school band
And happiness is walking hand-in-hand.”

There were also two different young airmen the summer of ‘72: Mike, who met me at a Spiritual Life Conference and then rode his motorcycle from Norton Air Force Base in California to Arizona to see me on weekends, and Daryl, a tenor who sat behind me in the Luke AFB Chapel Adult Choir. Somehow I kept them from knowing the truth about each other and kissed them both. Mike eventually stopped coming because I was in high school and he thought that at 18, he was “too old” for me. But I found what I thought was love, in the arms of Daryl, who was 21 and who also had a motorcycle. 

My mom privately warned Daryl that if she ever found out he’d been messing around with me, she’d have him locked up. So he considered this carefully and started pulling back. This had me very worried that I was losing him, and I didn’t know why.

That summer, I had been asked to house-sit for a farmhouse while its owners were on vacation, because in Arizona you never turn off the air conditioning in the summer or all your candles will melt and your birds will die. They needed someone to tend to the garden, collect eggs from the chickens, and just live in the house mainly, so they could justify the electric bill. So I asked Daryl to come and visit me there because I was lonely. 

Through the window, I could see him riding his bike down the dirt road, and riding back again. And then finally driving away. How could I keep him? How could I convince him that we were meant for each other? I decided to offer him my body. Later on, after I called and begged him to come back, he did come in, and when he left, I was no longer a virgin.

When Daryl finally told me the reason he had been pulling back, we agreed upon a solution:  we made sure Mom didn’t find out. Honestly, neither of us were even really sure it was bad, and we kept trying to find out. Since neither of us were married, it didn’t seem to come under one of the Ten Commandments. So, neither of us being a Bible scholar, we did what came naturally. And I had an idea that it was a way to keep Daryl, at a time when I was very much afraid that I would lose him and be all alone again. It had worked for my mom, all those years ago, or so I thought.

One Saturday morning, my mom woke up with a lot of energy, saying we needed to have a cleaning day. Her enthusiasm met with lazy resistance from my siblings and me, but especially from my siblings. I did eventually buckle down to dust the Venetian blinds, but by then my siblings had utterly discouraged Mom. Depressed, she got in the car to drive to Circle K, just down the road, to pick up something. But then she didn’t come back.

When she finally did come back, long after dark, we found out she’d driven nearly to Tucson, and was passed out along the side of the road when a police officer pulled up behind her to ask if she was all right. Somehow, after being brought back to herself, she made it back home. Years later, Mom could not remember that day at all, but it was very real to the rest of us. 

When she got home again, the yelling began. I did not like to hear that, but the worst part of it all was finding Dad, in the bathroom, crying. Dad never cried.

I called Daryl then, and told him to come over and bring some wine. Being young and inexperienced concerning what to do when facing a crisis, I somehow had the idea that if you are unhappy, you should drown your troubles in wine. I didn’t know exactly why, but I heard it would make you feel better. Where did I hear it?  Sometimes things are more “felt” than taught.  I was brought up in an environment where alcohol was not “wrong” per se, but just “for adults.”  I had an adult-sized hurt and an adult-aged boyfriend, so I gave it a try.

It was the one and only time I got drunk. It didn’t really impress me, but there I was, drunk in the dark to deaden the pain, on a picnic table in our yard at the trailer court, kissing my 21-year-old boyfriend.

Did that help my parents’ marriage? Not a bit! Fortunately, Mom and Dad began counseling with the Lutheran chaplain at the base, Chaplain Hermanson, and eventually everything settled down again. Mom and Dad had a vow renewal ceremony, and all of us got new clothes so we could participate – it was to be something like a wedding, 17 years after their first one.

In January, when Dad retired from the Air Force, we moved to California, Daryl moved to Michigan, and I continued to look for love. Because I still looked good, from my weight loss in 9th grade, and because I was now the “new girl,” everything was different. Suddenly, I had boyfriends. And I remembered how I had whined to God about not having any friends when I had been expected to tell them all about Jesus. If I had boyfriends finally, I was determined to tell them about Jesus.

There was the Jewish boy who was the class president, whom I kissed but also tried to witness to, whenever we came up for air. There was the curly-headed Italian Catholic kid whose dad ran for school board and whose competition had their campaign signs removed by his son and his son’s friends while I ducked down in the back of the car to avoid detection. I tried to witness to him too. Neither of these guys appreciated the Gospel, for some reason! Okay, probably they didn’t take me seriously because my actions were speaking much louder than my words.

Sometimes I had close calls, like the time I was riding my bike home and a guy in a truck picked me up. He put the bike in the bed of his truck and started to drive me home out of the kindness of his heart, but made the mistake of nonchalantly showing me a pornographic magazine. I told him I lived RIGHT THERE (at a small empty lot) and ordered him to stop and let me out.

Another time, I heard someone whispering my name from inside a bush at the school, and beckoning me to come in there with him. Upon inspection, I found out it was just some boy who wanted to kiss but I didn’t even know him! So I didn’t stay in the bush.

I met more drummers, guys at church, and guys at school. 

Our youth band toured the summer of ‘73, and we found that the back of the bus became a good place to kiss. 

But the other thing I did on that particular tour was lead a fellow band member to the Lord. At that time, the Jesus People in the band kept running around greeting one another with “Maranatha!” and pointing upward with their index finger, which was the official hand signal for the Jesus Movement – the “One Way” sign. 

The poor girl was very annoyed because she didn’t get how Jesus could, as we said, come back again if He had died on a cross. So I showed her Jesus in the Book of Revelation. She was amazed and got saved! It was the first time I’d been able to do that and it was very thrilling to me. For the rest of the tour, we all sang Jesus Music together in the back of the tour bus.

I dated a very nice guy named Joel, from the Baptist church, who casually told me on a date while we were sipping sodas, that he had, I think, eight siblings, and that’s what he wanted to do when he got married. My eyes widened, but he was really good looking and I thought that plan might work – I just hadn’t thought about that concept before. 

Joel took me to the Queen Mary for a New Year’s Eve party with the Youth Group, and he was my date for a Pan American Queen Festival Competition that I didn’t win. He even helped me craft my speech for that. But afterwards, when I was still all dressed up in my purple semi-formal, he dropped me off at home and kissed me on the doorstep …

FOILED by my parents, who drove up behind us, caught us in the beams of their headlights, and honked their horn. The next Wednesday, Joel apologized. And I was crushed!

Compared to girls, I did actually prefer guys, though, for their superior companionship. There were too many girls in my life with whom I had nothing at all in common. I was the only girl in the chess club, for instance. And well, there were never any other girls in the drum line. One girl tried to get me to show her the answers to a test while the teacher was out, and when I answered with a “no,” she threatened to have a bunch of boys gang-rape me after school. 

Once, on a band trip to Catalina Island, I hung out with three boys, just having fun and talking. We walked around Catalina doing things like balancing on a log or doing a Monkee Walk. Later on, I overheard some girls, who were painting their nails and talking – about me!! They called me a synonym for a woman of ill repute, and that got me crying. 

But the good thing about the Baptist Church was that they made you come to the Youth Group if you were going to sing in the Youth Choir. And they had teachings. And one time, the youth pastor taught a very detailed program about all the big words in the Bible that have something to do with sexual promiscuity. That’s right – growing up in Sunday School, I had never heard a single teaching on this subject, and so words like “concupiscence” had never been a part of my vocabulary. 

But now I came to the realization that I was supposed to wait till marriage for all of that. Now that I knew it, for the most part, I changed my ways. I understood why Joel apologized. Embarrassingly, this change was noticed in the Youth Band, and even though I had been a Christian for 6 or 7 years, the drum instructor gave me as a gag gift during the annual awards ceremony, “The Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice Award,” They had just noticed that I belonged to Jesus. Before that, I was just like everybody else.

Then there was Joe. We met in Anthropology class. Joe was tall and skinny with wire frame glasses and a ‘fro. (Short for “Afro” – a type of hairdo that today would be called “cultural appropriation,” but it was cool back then.) Joe was a full-fledged “Jesus Freak” and he and I were in Anthropology class together, not because we loved the subject – the study of Man – but because it was a place to witness. We were the only two Christians there, and whenever the teacher began to ridicule us for our beliefs, we were a fighting team. Jesus is Real, Jesus is Truth, Jesus is our Savior, and Jesus is Coming Back – Soon!

Joe took me places, like the Fire Escape – a Christian coffee house, where kids were “getting high on Jesus,” and to his Assembly of God youth group, where there were about 40 kids all wearing blue denim from the waist down, and where all forty of them grouped around me one Sunday night and prayed a long long time for me to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. We also went to a park on dates, with a tape recorder and Revelation teaching tapes.

And Joe took me to Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, where they had two free Jesus Music concerts every Saturday night, back to back. It wasn’t for social distancing purposes either – they had two concerts because their “new facility,” that seated 5,000 people, was filled to capacity for both concerts. Hundreds of kids got saved every week, without much fanfare. It was the time of the Jesus Movement and it was awesome! 

In Maranatha! Village, where Calvary Chapel’s old building used to be, you could find a little shopping mall of Jesus People artisans and their wares. We bought the Revelation tapes there, and some of my first records like “Andrae Crouch and the Disciples,” and “Children of the Day.” I also picked up a leather Calvary Chapel dove on a chain, and some tiny dove earrings.

Joe also led the “Jesus for Lunch Bunch,” who sat under a large tree at the school during lunchtime and discussed the Scriptures. Joe bought me a “real” Bible, since my Revised Standard one was obviously for Catholics. The new Bible was a Cambridge King James with center column references, and I still have it today. And he bought me a small leather purse during his family’s vacation to Ensenada, Mexico. That made it worth the temporary separation. 

I really thought this one was going to work out. I wasn’t sure how, because Joe talked about wanting to have a ministry to Hispanics in the area, but I didn’t speak Spanish, and I was thinking about the Air Force after graduation. It seemed like a long shot. But yes, I kissed him too, and the only picture I ever took of me in my red graduation robe from Artesia High School was next to Joe in his black one. Had I finally found the man I could love and would love me back – forever?

As you can see by my survey, I led two different lives during this period – on the one hand, I was a Jesus Freak, but I also “tried out” many boys and men at the same time, and never understood the hypocrisy. I found out, at least, that “missionary dating” is never effective. Guys who want to kiss you are not going to listen to the Gospel of Jesus Christ you deliver to them. 

I began to narrow the scope of my search to guys who were real Christians. There were much better possibilities there. It would be better to find someone I did not have to “fix.” We would be on the same page from the get-go. I even wrote about that in my Sociology class. I did not care what my future husband would look like on the outside – I desperately wanted someone who loved me, and who loved Jesus like I did.

There are two sides of this coin, concerning all the boys I kissed. Be assured – these were not all of them, but they represent the whole.

On one side of the coin is my personal responsibility. I did repent of my sins in the Baptist Youth Group. Once I realized that the main problem was that I was kissing someone else’s husband – because all of these guys would marry someday – it didn’t feel right to do it anymore, but pulling back was much harder than I thought it would be. 

On the other side of the coin is the fact that one of the effects of child sexual exploitation is that the victim becomes hypersexualized. And so the period between the summer of ‘71 and the summer of ‘74 was very likely directly linked to my experiences with Grandpa – his desire to “awaken me sexually,” and “give me sexual satisfaction.” 

Only recently did I truly understand that Daryl was legally a rapist. Sex with a minor is actually a crime in every state, whether or not there is consent. Before then, I looked upon this time solely as a period of my own personal guilt and shame. This is also on the list of consequences of childhood sexual exploitation. But the way I was “acting out” was actually a result of how I had been taught. The only good thing is, I heeded Grandpa’s warning to “not get pregnant,” (Daryl knew how to do that) so nobody had to whisk me away or pay for an abortion to hide an unintended baby.

God has been gracious to me, taught me things, and opened my eyes both to my sin and shame and to His mercy and pardon. If we go through the fire, only to come out stronger on the other side, hasn’t it been worth it in the end?  The question is whether we take the straight path from there, learn, and grow, or go down the way of destruction, which is broad and has a fancy gate.

Grandpa Ware and Grandma Burch

You cannot choose your ancestors, no matter how hard you try.  There are some probably even Jesus didn’t want to talk about much, but the writers of the Bible did, however sordid the details.  All you can do is find out who they were and see if there is some aspect of their lives that you can find that was passed on to you by heredity or example.  So you can think about:

1.  In what ways have these ancestors made me who I am today?

2. Is there something I can relate to, that I would like to emulate? 

3. Is there something I want to do differently? 

Here’s what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10 about those people we read about in the Old Testament:  

Now these things became our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted.

And do not become idolaters as were some of them. As it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play."

Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in one day twenty-three thousand fell; nor let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed by serpents; nor complain, as some of them also complained, and were destroyed by the destroyer.

Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. 

~1 Cor. 10:6-11

I remember seeing a sign once, that read:  “No one is entirely useless -- they can always serve as a bad example.”  And with this in mind, I approach the subject of the other side of my family -- my mother’s side.

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Grandpa Ware, Lee Roy Ware, Jr., was born on Christmas Day in 1915 (like Jesus!), and grew up in Independence, Missouri (pronounced “Mizurruh”).  He was the second son of Lee Roy Ware, Sr. and Jenny June Riley, and he had a sister and four brothers.

I don’t think I have any pictures of Grandpa Ware’s father, Lee Roy Ware, Sr..  He died in a traffic accident when I was pretty young, and I don’t remember him.  But when I was grown, I thought it an “adulting” type of thing to pay a visit to a great grandparent without my parents, so when my husband and I stopped by on the way across country, I got this picture of Jenny June, who was my “Great Grandma Ware in Missouri.”

In case you’re wondering, she didn’t smile much, at least not for the camera, because she didn’t like her teeth, and her face was somewhat asymmetrical, which could have perhaps been due to Bell’s Palsy.  When she wasn’t having her picture taken, she was funny and loved to laugh.  I mostly remembered her for having a bathroom up a long flight of stairs on her old house, and a claw-foot tub up there that I could barely climb into.  I must’ve been pretty young when I took those baths, but those tubs are pretty deep!

The story was often told, both by Grandpa Ware and by others, that the reasons he left his hometown in Missouri and brought his wife and daughter to California were because of lack of work during the Depression, and because it snowed there.  You couldn’t work as hard in the Midwest.  When you had snow storms, you could be snowed in.  But Out West, in the land of opportunity, spring, summer, winter, and fall were always temperate. That was the place for an ambitious man.

Grandpa was short but dapper in the 1930's.  Early on, he invested in a service station with a friend.  Back then, these businesses were called service stations because the attendants wore spiffy uniforms and provided actual services, like checking your oil and washing your windshields while they filled your tank with gas.  Times have certainly changed!

But Grandpa made most of his money by purchasing homes that needed to be moved out of the way when a freeway came in.  He paid to have them transported to a good, developing neighborhood, and did all the repairs and remodeling necessary to sell them at a goodly price.

Yes, Grandpa was one of the original “home flippers.”  It worked for him, and he taught his step-daughter, Jackie, to do the same.

Lee Ware Realty had an office on Norwalk Blvd.  Behind the office was a long driveway leading up to his house, and along the driveway, he had built apartments.  Across the driveway from the apartments were tropical flowers along a wooden privacy fence.  Grandpa’s house was huge in comparison, and it had a pool behind it.  He and his second wife, Grandma Pearl, had their hands full with being landlords.

In 1964, Grandpa and others founded a small city of less than half a square mile, in what was then Dairy Valley, California.  He led the drive to have this city incorporated before the land was swallowed up by any of the neighboring cities and turned into a landfill, and in the first official city election, the voters tapped him to be their mayor.  They called their new city “Hawaiian Gardens,” and they paved roads, added city sewage, and planted palm trees to give it a tropical look.  The City Council always wore aloha shirts to their meetings.  Today, Hawaiian Gardens is still a small city in Los Angeles County, totally surrounded by other cities.  

I found this page in an online book about the history of Hawaiian Gardens:

We were always in awe of Grandpa.  We learned at a young age not to pronounce “realtor” like “REE-luh-ter,” but like “REEL-ter.”

When I was eight, the same year Grandpa was being elected mayor, Dad had to go to the Philippines without us for six months to look for housing, so we put the trailer in storage on a friend’s farm and lived in one of Grandpa’s apartments.  I loved to squeeze and pop the pomegranate blossoms that grew across the driveway!  We spent a whole summer contracting all the childhood diseases together (measles, mumps, chicken pox), not being able to go anywhere or swim in Grandpa’s pool, and being cranky.  

Finally we were about finished with that when it was time for school to start.  I got a solo in the Christmas program and I was thrilled.  I hurried home from Hawaiian School to tell Mom that I had to learn “Here Comes Susie Snowflake.”  Although I did learn the song, we had to move to the Philippines before the program ever happened.  The teacher had to find another soloist.

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Grandma Burch was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1921 and her maiden name was Audentia Bell Burdick.  Her parents were Bernard Burdick and (wouldn’t you know it?) Audentia Bell Peak.  The Peaks were prominent (elder level) in the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints, something we weren’t thrilled about, but it wasn’t exactly something my grandma espoused anyway.

Grandma Burch was married to Grandpa Ware for a while, but they split up when Mom was eight.  There are only a few pictures of that small family together, and I don't really know why they divorced, but I figured it was adultery, hearing about the wild lifestyle that characterized Audentia’s life after the divorce. It simply could not have been Grandpa’s fault.

This picture had to have been taken while they still lived in Missouri:

We called her “Grandma Burchie,” because she was remarried to Harry Burch (“Johnny”) when Mom was still young.  She and Johnny had four more kids, and our family would sometimes visit them, always in a tiny trailer, where we could never have fit so we stayed outside.  I heard a particular story about Grandma Burchie offering me a chicken leg when I was a teething baby and Mom did not approve of that.  Mostly, Mom did not approve of Grandma Burchie.

Grandma Burchie’s mother was called “Grandma Coopie” (Cooper) because after she was married to Bernard Burdick, she married one Clinton Cooper. Grandma Coopie’s mother was “Grandma Peak,” and somewhere we have a five generation picture of all these grandmas, who were all the oldest (or only) daughters, with little baby me at the end.  It’s not clear now whether all three of these grandmas in my family tree had been divorced.  It’s possible Bernard Burdick was killed in a trucking accident.  But I grew up believing they were all divorced, and I knew my parents would never do that.  They loved each other and were committed to being married for the rest of their lives ... and so I too wanted to be just like that!

Grandma Burchie died on the 4th of July, 1968, at the age of 47, when we were living in Iowa and I was in 6th grade.  Somehow Mom was able to make it to the funeral in California, but we didn’t go with her.  Mom told us how much she hated funerals.  Of course, then I hated them too, along with hating the Beatles.  Children are like that -- they hate what their parents hate, without questioning why.

When she came back, we learned that Grandma had “drunk herself to death,” that her mother (Grandma Coopie) had arranged for a Mormon funeral for her, and that Mom heartily disapproved of that and totally disagreed with the idea that Grandma had lived the life of a good Mormon!  Grandma Burchie was cremated, and her ashes were scattered at sea.  

But despite the problems and disagreements with her mother, Mom mourned the loss. I sometimes caught her crying, and she somehow took solace in the notion that her mother was watching over her from Heaven.  I wanted to say something about this questionable theology, but decided I should just let Mom mourn in whatever way she needed to.

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Yes, I do have a problem with “recreational drinking,” and I don’t like the fact that large swaths of the major retailers like Wal-Mart and Meijer, and even several aisles in pharmacies, have become liquor stores.  I thought it disgusting that liquor stores were open and considered “essential” during the Pandemic of 2020.  I have witnessed the devastating effects of the Demon Liquor in a family, and I know that had I been alive in the days of Prohibition, I would have campaigned for it, signed a Temperance Pledge in the family Bible, and made all our kids sign it too.  I would have been devastated to see Prohibition repealed.  

I’m well aware that there are religious traditions that hold to using real wine in their communion services, and people who would argue that Germans and Irish can “hold their liquor better” than other cultures.  But the statistics say something different.  And grape juice is just fine for communion. 

A full discussion of this topic would take up more room than I want to use in the end of this post, but suffice it to say, I never want to run the risk of being an alcoholic -- or as the Bible calls it, a drunkard.  It is far better and safer to stay totally away from a cliff, than to see how close you can come to the edge without falling off.  This is something I can take away from the discussion of these, my grandparents.  

“Thank you, Lord God, for this bad example in my family tree.  In that I have learned from that, Grandma Burchie didn’t die in vain.  And I pray that my children and my children’s children can also learn from the bad examples in our family tree, and be spared the pain and sorrow.  Lead us in Your ways, and in Your Truth, O Lord.  In Jesus’ name, Amen.”