Now or Never

It was one sentence. Ten simple words. No more than five seconds.

But it’s impact on my life melded all that is eternal with all that is common, ordinary, everyday.

Now, where to begin? Childhood? Why not? It’s as good a time & place as any.

I was a goody two shoes. We went to Sunday School & Church every week at the Evangelical United Brethren Church in Watertown, South Dakota, precisely six blocks from our house. I learned about sin & I thought about sin & I worried about sin. I was so concerned with the subject, at one point I asked my mother about the age of innocence vs. the age of accountability.

She told me the age was thirteen. I seriously considered offing myself before that particular birthday arrived.

From third grade on, with the exception of P.E. classes where everyone was automatically given a C unless they went out for sports, I was a straight A student.

Yeah, I was obnoxious. And I always thought I was right.

In 1968 they changed the name of our church to Ninth Avenue United Methodist. I didn’t like it. Who would change their name from something so warm & cozy to something that sounded cold & institutional?

In sixth grade, I attended confirmation classes with our pastor in the basement of the church. I have oft regaled folks with the tale of how I learned precisely three things in those classes:

First, I learned that there were sixty-six books in the Bible. (We didn’t worry about the Apocrypha. We were Protestants.) Full disclosure, I didn’t actually learn that from the classes I took. I learned it from my second oldest brother’s class. During worship, our pastor quizzed them in front of the congregation. When he asked the number of books, no one could answer. After several anxious moments, he responded, “Don’t you remember our slogan? Phillips 66?”

What can I say? It stuck.

The second thing that I learned was that, if I brought M&Ms to class & started tossing them across the room before we got started, the other kids would chase them.

The third & most important teaching I gleaned from my time there was that if you ask the pastor, “How do we know that this is all true, that someone didn’t just make it up & is right now rolling over in their grave laughing about the wonderful practical joke they’ve played on everyone?” you have to hire a contractor to repair the roof. ‘Cause the pastor’s gonna go straight through it. Doesn't matter that our class was in the basement.

I still managed to get confirmed into full membership in the church.

By seventh grade I was a confirmed agnostic. Go figure.

By that time, I had a paper route. I delivered The Watertown Public Opinion to all the subscribers on route four, which ended at our house on the northeast corner of town. This gave me a lot of time to think “deep thoughts”.

Before, when I was walking home from grade school, I would spend those fifteen minutes or so pondering how many sins I had committed that God had written down in “his” big black book, most of which I would not even be aware. It staggered my mind, simply trying to calculate the volumes it must take to list them all.

Once I was delivering newspapers, I focused on much deeper questions, like who or what made God? (I know, interesting question for an agnostic to ask.) I would try to imagine traveling back in time through the whole of human history, back through the dinosaurs, before the earth itself was formed, then the cosmos, & finally, God…,

I kept on trying to travel back before God existed. Before long, it was as though a fuse just burned out in my brain. (Pondering unanswerable questions has a tendency to do that to me.) I would be out for something like fifteen minutes, continuing to deliver papers on auto pilot, before I’d come to. Then I’d have to count the remaining papers to confirm I hadn’t missed anyone.

I always thought that was kinda cool.

Around this time, I read Hal Lindsay’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth. In it he declared that the Bible mentioned flying saucers. I found that notion fascinating & decided to investigate. I began where one usually does when one wants to be thorough: at the beginning with Genesis.

I had no idea I would have to read over one thousand pages of King James English before I’d get to those wheels within wheels full of eyes all around which moved in any direction without veering. (Why didn’t I look back for the passage good ole Hal referenced. Now why would I do that?)

Long before I got to that first chapter of Ezekiel, I’d forgotten why I was reading. But I kept on with it anyway.

Ninth grade. I went by myself to the Plaza Theater to watch “Jesus Christ, Superstar”. At nine o’clock, I began the two mile walk home in the dark, weeping the entire way, asking, “How could we do that to him?”

I bought the album. I memorized every word of every song, kneeling on the hard tile floor of my bedroom in the basement next to the record player I owned. I gathered some of my best friends from orchestra to listen to it after school. I told them we should perform it.

They looked at me as though I was nuts. They told me so, too.

But I was hooked, a changed man…, okay, a changed boy. That summer I read my KJV Bible all the way through for the first time. Then, before school started again at the end of summer, I read it again.

I carried it with me everywhere, continuing to read in every spare moment I had. Of course, I didn’t bother trying to comprehend the passages I didn’t automatically understand. I was content with those I could. But I knew the answers, just like always. And I was a fundamentalist. Ignorant, but a fundamentalist. “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!”

My wife came up with a term for what I was. A young fogie. Set in my ways, certain I was right, couldn’t convince me otherwise.

It fit.

So much for setting the stage. (You never dreamed it could be so complicated, did you?)

By the time I entered college I knew I was called to become a pastor. But the guy who recruited me for Yankton College wanted me in the music department—vocal & cello. So, I signed up for a double major: Applied Cello & Pre-Theology. (In case you’re wondering, there were literally only eight credit hours the two shared. It was like going to college twice in the same four-year period.)

I don’t remember my advisor’s name freshman year. He recommended if I was serious about Pre-Theology, I should go somewhere else. Nice, coming from the head of the theology department.

Sophomore year, Dr. Robert M. Fowler became my advisor. I remember him well. He’s the one with the single sentence, ten words, five seconds max. (And you thought we’d never get here.)

The first class I took from him was Practical Logic—you know, deductive, inductive & hypothetical reasoning, Venn Diagrams, that sort of thing. Dr. Fowler’s master’s degree was in mathematics. Practical logic is essentially applied mathematics in word problem form. Great! Right?

Wrong. The first words to the class out of Dr. Fowler’s mouth were, & I quote: “I have never taken a class on practical logic. I have never taught a class on practical logic. We’re just going to have to muddle through this together.”

Please understand, I have long ago come to appreciate such frank honesty. But back then, I was a real…, well, “prick” wasn’t on my approved vocabulary list at the time, so I wouldn’t have used it. Why don’t we just stick with “obnoxious”?

I was really obnoxious. To hear that kind of confession from a teacher for me was like blood in the water to a shark. Math had always been my best subject. I was ruthless.

Every day without fail, for the first half of the term, I corrected his teaching in front of the whole class. I did so with great arrogance & glee. I enjoyed humiliating him.

Just in case you were wondering, he hated me.

But what could he do? I had yet to make a single error, either in class, on tests, or in my homework. And I always showed up early for his three days a week 8 a.m. compassionless torturing. Until…,

…the day of our midterm exams. I woke up with a cramp in my calf thinking, “Rats! Now I won’t be able to get back to sleep.” My second thought was...,

“Why is it light outside?”

I grabbed my alarm clock. 8:50 a.m. The test had just concluded.

I ran to his office as fast as I could & explained the situation. Now, I probably shouldn’t tell this portion because I’m sure she wouldn’t appreciate it—so, okay, I won’t use her name. Let’s just say that she was one of the exceptional beauties on campus who had absolutely no interest in me.

Dr. Fowler looked up at me with the most peculiar, satisfied-looking straight face he could muster & said, “That’s funny, [insanely beautiful woman] just called with the same excuse. I wonder if they’re connected.”

A bit flustered & confused, all I could muster was, “No…?”

To this day I wonder if he ever understood the unimaginably enormous compliment he had paid to me, his arch nemesis, & how terribly offended she would have been if she had ever discovered he had asked it.

He told a friend of mine, if I hadn’t come in right then, he would have flunked me on the midterm, no questions asked, no excuses allowed.

He didn’t like me. You get that, right?

And could you blame him? I was treating him with more disrespect than I had ever treated a teacher (or anyone in authority, for that matter). Forget teachers, there were very few people I had ever treated with greater disdain.

Still, I wasn’t accustomed to having teachers despise me. I was much more used to being the teacher’s pet. So, I was becoming a bit anxious over what was increasingly a precarious position for me. All he needed was an excuse.

And then came Venn Diagrams. To me, they weren’t problems to be solved. They were artwork. Absolutely no challenge whatsoever. Just make them look as pretty as possible.

Dr. Fowler asked for volunteers to put them up on the chalkboard. I volunteered for number one. He gave me number two. (Any double entendres you might be thinking would certainly be appropriate here.)

As we headed to the front, I found myself still thinking number one. As we arrived at the board, I thought, “Wait, that’s wrong.” I turned to the person next to me & asked, “You have number, one, right?” He replied, “Yes, & you have number two.” Both of us turned back to the board…

…& I still put up number one!

Once I had returned to my desk, the entire class tried to get my attention to alert me to what I had done. By the time I understood, it was too late. Dr. Fowler had begun to go over the problems with us.

All the time he was going over the first solution, I was figuring out how to explain & correct what I had on the board. When he finished & turned to mine, I started right in on how to correct it.

But he wouldn’t allow it. He just stared at the board & said, “Randy Knock made a mistake?”

I started right back in, but once again he cut me off, this time a little louder.

“Randy Knock made a mistake?”

For the third time I tried to explain & for a third time, even louder yet…,

“Randy Knock made a mistake!!!!?????”

And I suddenly thought to myself, “Randy, shut up. You lost the battle, but you won the war!”

We actually kinda grew to like & appreciate one another after that. Even if I was still a…, well, let’s just stick with obnoxious. It’s worked for us so far.

Fast forward to the class with the five seconds.

We had interim classes between the two semesters, during the month of January. It was an opportunity to learn underwater basket weaving & anything else the professors had once dreamt of teaching. I’d taken a class on parapsychology one January. Our choir went on tour through the great states of South Dakota, Colorado, North Dakota & Minnesota another year. (Aren’t you jealous?) My senior year, the music & theater departments put on “Pippin”. I’d broken my leg playing football over Christmas break, so I didn’t get to participate. The guy who played the Leading Player, we were each other’s doppelgangers, though he had considerably more talent—acting, singing & dancing.

But the year in question, Dr. Fowler taught a class on “The Apocalypse”, focusing on the books of Daniel & Revelation as well as the small apocalypses of Jesus contained in the Gospels.

Now, one of the things about young fogies is we’re absolutely consumed with trying to figure out the apocalypse. It doesn’t matter that we know even Jesus said he wasn’t in the loop as far as the planning or timing of the doggone thing. If there’s a book that’s been written about it, we want to read it. If there’s a movie, we want to watch it. If there’s a study, we’re signing up.

For me, it was a no-brainer. No other offering so much as caught my eye that particular January.

After discussing all the biblical passages, with a few outside accounts tossed in, we were given our final assignment: write our vision of what the apocalypse means to us. During the final week, we would each take turns presenting our ideas to the class.

Each day after three hours of papers being read aloud, we asked Dr. Fowler what his thoughts were on the subject. Each day he refused our pleas.

Until the last day of the term when he finally relented. We sat there intently focused, waiting for the ultimate revelation from our guide.

He told us, “When I was your age, I was all caught up in trying to figure this out, just like you. I took a class just like this one, during which we also begged our professor to share his opinions. On the final day of class, he gave in & said to us, ‘Jesus either comes today, or he doesn’t come at all.’”

That was it. One sentence. Ten words. No more than five seconds.

But it unlocked something inside my soul. It freed me, not only to believe, but to begin to follow.

However you want to put it—

“Live for Jesus now”;

“be true & live as you believe you should, beginning this very moment”;

“don’t wait, love one another, live love today”

—it doesn’t matter. When the end comes, we’ll be ready.

At that moment, Dr. Robert M. Fowler was no longer my advisor, or teacher. For me, he became & has remained a divinely appointed messenger who helped me begin this journey into discipleship, fully aware of my failings, every day trying to live just a little more fully into the love & grace that God has for all creation.

I disdained him. I learned from him. I came to like him. I looked up to him. But ever since that one day with just one sentence, ten words, five seconds…

…I love that man.