My Life So Far - Chris Willis
In 1970, before I was born, my parents and sister left the United States to live in Southeastern Asia, on the peninsula of Malaysia. After settling in the city of Malacca they began worshipping together as a family and invited people they met to visit them and study the Bible (except for Muslims, with whom it was illegal to proselytize). My sister was 7 years old and went to a Malay school, and learned the language along with English, which is the national language of trade and business. I’ll never forget stories of her and the other children being gathered into the school from the playground when a tiger had entered the city out of the nearby jungle. Malaysia is very much a part of my life today; I was conceived, but not born, there. In 1973 my family came back to Tennessee for my birth, and at 6 weeks old I was taken back to Malaysia, where my family then settled near the capitol of Kuala Lumpur. In 1975 the Islamic government forced all Christian missionaries to leave. Most left when the orders were given, but my parents were the last to go, staying until the last day with their new family in the church they had established.
I don’t have any memories of actually living there as we left when I was two years old, but growing up with all of the objects my family had collected, the pictures, slides and super 8 movies Dad drug out from time to time, and the retelling of stories, this lore shaped my childhood. Also, we traveled there on mission trips about every 5 years when I was 8, 12, and 18, for about 6 weeks at a time; entering the country with tourist visas. During these trips I was able to connect stories with people and places, and I believe my parents nurtured within me an exploratory spirit. I love the country and the people, and have always felt pride in my mother and father who chose such a strange and remote place to work in.
After returning to the United States my father took a position preaching in a church in Pinellas Park, Florida, where I “officially” grew up. There I formed my first memories, in that house with all the furniture and pictures from Malaysia, the Chinese masks over my Dad’s desk, the carved elephant my Mom carried in her lap on a train returning from a trip to Thailand, and the giant glass jars from a wax factory (one of which I later broke). Having been born in December, in Florida I was able to start Kindergarten at 4 years old. Either I was precocious at home, or as my mother says, I was just ready to go at that early age. This caused me to always be a year younger than all my friends. During the eternal summers off and the afternoons I ran around the neighborhood barefoot, often with no shirt, playing by myself a lot or with two girls who lived up the street. At some point around the 4th grade I got glasses, which invariably affects any young kid. Also, my sister left for college, and being 8 years older than me, I felt like an only child growing up.
A noteworthy story from my childhood involves the 4th of July. I don’t remember what year it was, but after a picnic and day at the beach that ended in a thunderstorm and flat tire while I was riding home with my best friend Brian. His Dad and older brother Joe got out of the car and were walking up the road to find someone to help when Joe was hit and killed by a drunk driver. I remember being at the hospital and later at someone from the church’s house with sparklers when they told Brian his brother was dead. From then on Brian and his sister were spoiled, never disciplined, and today Brian, my best friend in my youth, is doing life in prison for an armed robbery where someone was killed. We had quit hanging out somewhere around 10. This experience always caused me to question the social responsibility of those who not only drink and drive, but people who would let somebody get into a car drunk to attempt driving. From early on I felt that those who enable dangerous behaviors are also to some extent responsible.
Religiously, I learned somehow during my youth to be ashamed of my family’s faith, and my father’s profession as a Church of Christ preacher. I tried to hide it from everybody, perhaps because I invariably argued about religion with anyone who found out. I’m not really sure why I felt this anxiety. I just laid it on myself. In 1986 my parents decided to move back to Tennessee, and my father took a job at the Eastdale Church of Christ in Chattanooga. I took this opportunity to get over my fear of people knowing about my religion and felt a great difference between acceptance of religion in Tennessee compared to where we lived in Florida.
One of the only truly integrated churches, Eastdale was an incredibly important place for me. I was very used to being around black people, having been bussed to formerly black schools in mostly black neighborhoods in Florida. I was amazed when we moved to Chattanooga to see almost all-black and all-white schools, and wondered how the public school system was getting away with such segregation. I also never realized before how divided a city could be, with the black parts of town and white—though I just probably never realized this was going on where I lived in Florida. I became interested in civil rights and race relations due to these experiences, which probably led me to study Sociology during my college career. However, none of this made much difference in my life at the time since I was enrolled in an almost all-white private Christian school for the first time in my life in January of 1987 at 13 years old.
I eventually formed friends at my new school, but it took quite a while. For a lanky 13 year old, with ugly glasses, bad clothes, and weird personality, I ranked very low in the social scale at a private school. Almost even more tragic, a few years later with a coincidence of getting contacts, hand me down clothes, and being in the 8th grade, I did a complete flip-flop, going from the lowest of the nerds to being a fairly well accepted member of the social elite. In High School I was in the “In” crowd, which by its nature had to pick on others. This was always difficult for me, and I did whatever I could to help bridge that gap. I remembering hugging a particularly large girl in our class in public and being dragged aside by one of the other “cool” guys who said something to the effect of, I don’t ever want to see you touching that girl again. Sadly I probably never did.
The cruelty of being young lessened in the last couple years of High School, but during that time I become known as a troublemaker among the faculty. I wasn’t an athlete like all of my friends, so when we all got caught doing something, usually very stupid and immature but not illegal or immoral, somehow it was always only me who took any serious punishment. It could be said that my leadership abilities started in pulling giant pranks at our school, from systematically disorganizing our the library, to a scavenger hunt of school materials that were collected in lockers until the items had to be stored off site, to an incident with a stolen school bus that we pushed nearly a mile from the school before we finally all got tired of the theft. I rebelled more and more, my logic being, Hey, I’m getting in trouble anyway, I might as well have fun. Later I was dating the only known drug user in our school, throwing drinking parties at my house whenever I was left home alone, and opposing my teachers in class which brought me very close to expulsion just before graduation. Yet, somehow I made it out alive with a diploma, and there were a few bright spots in my education that have been very important to me since.
In an 11th grade English class we were given an assignment, probably just as a time killer, to write a descriptive scene about a certain situation. While most of the class, at least the guys, tried to write asinine stories full of innuendo, I took it seriously for once, and my teacher read my work to the class—after which I rushed out, not wanting to take any heat or even praise for having done the work. Even though I’m certain she hated me, my teacher selected me for AP English the next year, helped me focus and tighten my writing skills, and eventually awarded me the yearly creative writing award which I still have in my desk today.
My first week of college was a big transition. Instead of moving off and leaving home, home moved off and left me. The church at Eastdale broke up during my senior year of High School, leaving me pretty disillusioned. All of the remaining white families decided to move to a white church, leaving the black families with an enormous building they couldn’t afford to keep using. I began questioning the relationships these groups had supposedly had. I felt like it was very unethical to sever all ties, as though everything this group had been through together meant nothing. If our core values are to love our neighbors, it shouldn’t matter if they are black, white or purple. Of course they had the right to leave, but it didn’t strike me as just. I also questioned the leaders of the church who were also all white. It all seemed counter to our supposed common values of equality and love.
Another church in town gave my father a short term job working with the white families who had come over from the disbanded Eastdale. During the first week of classes at UTC, my Dad accepted a position with the Morrison Church of Christ in middle Tennessee, and moved there. That week I moved into the UTC Christian Student Center. Moving into the Christian Student Center was not any part of my plans when getting ready to go to college. I was 17 years old and just planning to party with my friends, when my Dad suggested I stop by the CSC and ask about a room, where he’d known students from the Church of Christ that stayed there in the past, who paid no rent. Thinking it would never actually happen, I stopped by, asked about a room, somebody was moving out and I could move in immediately. This was the first of many doors that seemed to open before me, doors which proved very influential on the changes that would take place in the next few years of my life.
Students living at the CSC were given the title student directors and were expected to participate in the operation of center. I took it on myself to organize fun events, most of which were outdoor activities related to my own interests—hiking, camping, and rock climbing. This proved to be a big hit with the crowd at that time and I was surprised at how many people had never done any of these activities. We were also expected to lead students in Bible studies, devotionals, and other spiritual activities during which I kept a low profile--at least until after that first year.
During the summer after my freshmen year I went on a mission trip to Chinle, Arizona on the Navajo reservation. We worked with a church there that has struggled for years to keep its doors open, when most Navajo were not interested in their own traditions, much less converting to Christianity. While alone one night I was able to do a lot of thinking about my life and realized for the first time that my religion was not my own—that I had never listened to, or thought seriously about religion. Epiphany! I think until then I had a pretty warped sense of salvation, basically considering myself damned to hell because I never could measure up to the expectations I felt others had of me--certainly not those of my administrators in High School, nor my parents. But I determined that night to explore my own spirituality, to interact with God on a more real and reasonable level, and to study the scriptures I had taken for granted all my life.
Slowly I began to develop a new understanding of myself and my responsibilities to serve my fellow man. I was l