Reply #9: It may not be about conversion at all

[The Straight Story]

When I was in 7th grade I always had my bible with me, and would read it on the school bus and often when we got time outside or study hall (back in my day we had k-6 then 7-12 and there was no middle school, so we got a mix of outside time and study hall to prepare us for higher grades).

So if I was outside reading it, and a few other kids were as well, and we got together to discuss and debate things, how is that bad?

In 8th grade I read chronicles of Amber, as did two of my friends. I was being bused at the time and ended up (for 1 year) at some far away school. In our free time at school we got together to talk about it in depth (and a few other books we were wanting to get from sci-fi book club). We did not want to get other people to be nerds like us, we just had something in common that we wanted to share and talk about and could not in class. It was cool (and the Empire was coming out too and one of the dorks had the book and was filling us in - Han was with Leia? What about poor luke? Vader was his dad? We sat around and had some serious study time on that book I assure you. Ahhhh the days of youth).

I remember too wearing a Jesus shirt and sometimes some buttons. My parents were not fundies but to me it meant something. Kids were tshirts with what they liked (black sabbath is what my buddy Andy wore a lot) so I thought, "hey, I like Jesus and he is cool". I was surprised one day when my rock and roll bus driver commented on one of my t-shirts. "Not many kids wear those, Jesus is cool man" (and that guy had a hard job on the bus - he eventually had to play a different radio station based on the day of the week because some kids hated rock and some hated rap and lite music et al. He compromised and it worked out well. I never asked him to play the music I liked though, but he would have. He was one cool guy and I often wondered what happened to him.

At any rate, I was a 'jesus freak' as some might call me here. But it was one of many things I liked and was into - and like any other kid I shared that in my own way.