Ministry (ULC/AMM)
I. Grandma's Gifts
About 1983, when I was about 11 years old, my maternal grandmother chose one Christmas to lavish me with gifts. I was far from being her only grandchild: she'd had nine children, and I was the only son of her second-oldest daughter. I had never met her in person, because she lived in the desert of southeast California and we lived in Arkansas, and I wouldn't get to meet her before she died in late 1984. I still do not know where she got the ideas for some of these gifts, but I was thankful for them, and oddly enough they would determine some of my intellectual and spiritual interests as an adult. As you read this, keep in mind that apart from hearing from my mother how intelligent I was in school, she knew virtually nothing about me.
The most puzzling gift was a subscription to The Family Handyman. It might have instilled a can-do spirit in me, but at that age I had zero interest in tackling any kind of home improvement or carpentry project.
A set of 75 "prophetic booklets" by Howard C. Estep, president of World Prophetic Ministries, Inc. I immediately found these booklets on the "end times" highly suspicious and rather laughable. One even proclaimed that the end of the world was likely to occur in "The Year 2000"! Fundamentalist claptrap, good for laugh and for wondering what was in water in Mr. Estep's part of California.
About $100 in cash, which she had earmarked for my mother to purchase a slide projector for gift #4. The slide projector we bought was from the Montgomery-Ward catalog.
A series of slides and accompanying cassette tape on the Petra ruins in Jordan, made by the aforementioned Mr. Estep. While the slides were absolutely breathtaking, the narration on the tape was, again, laughably "prophetic," alluding to how 144,000 Jews would cram into the Petra ruins after the "Rapture," when the Antichrist is supposedly to begin his seven-year tribulation. It somewhat defeats the purpose of hiding if it's so plainly predicted where they're going to be, don't you think?
A subscription to Biblical Archaeology Review. This was easily the most solid of her gifts. Although I was interested in the material, it was written a little too high for my reading level and perception at the time. It turned out, though, to be that magazine subscription that gave me the spark of an idea to switch my major from Mathematics Education to Anthropology, when my grades in my first college caluculus course crashed and burned. Despite my changing religious views, I've had a deep interest in anthropology, archaeology, and critical biblical scholarship ever since.