I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, which is hardly the most interesting place to grow up. Or at least you'd think so. Drugs hit the midwest as hard as anywhere else, and my birth mother and father were quite the fans. I was the oldest, so I got to be the responsible one. At seven, I was the one taking care of making sure my younger sister and brother had something to eat, even if it meant sneaking money to go to the store for bread and peanut butter. I was the one who called the ambulance the day my sister couldn't breath. Turns out it was asthma. It also turns out the hospital wasn't too keen on a seven year old raising the little ones. Social services was called, found my parents had been neglectful as well as occasionally abusive, and whisked us away. We were lucky. All three of us got to stay together, moving in with a single nurse we'd met at the hospital who was between foster children. We were so lucky in that unlike so many foster children, we never moved around to home after home. When my birth parents' rights were terminated two years later, we became the last foster children that nurse took in when she adopted us.
After we moved in with Mom, life was a lot better. It wasn't a magical cure all though. It took a lot of adjustment and work to get caught up in school and learn how to act in a family. It was hard to let someone else parent me, or be the parent for my little brother and sister. My mom enrolled us all in Taekwondo lessons to teach discipline and got us active in her church. Her church was one of the more liberal in town, and I really found a home there. It wasn't always easy growing up to be a biracial kid living with a white single mom, but at church, I only found support. Through middle school and high school, I did well. I was never the top student in my class academically, but I was usually somewhere in the top half. I was involved with my church through youth group, summer camp, and eventually being on a regional youth council in high school. I sang in the high school choir and made friends with a variety of people. I learned the hard way how to respond to racist comments from both sides of the fence. I was biracial, but growing up with my Mom, I'd never really learned all that much about the black side of my heritage.
I graduated high school and started college. My mom works for the Creighton University Medical Center, so I got discounted tuition to go to college there. It worked out well. College was great, but nothing really exciting. I made friends, went on a few dates, even had a serious boyfriend for a time. Staying in Omaha let me stay close to my family, help out with my little brother and sister, and stick with the church that felt like home. I majored in Psychology, and I did alright in my classes. In the summers, I counseled at the same camp I went to as a kid. It was there, the summer before my senior year, that I finally decided what I wanted to do with my life. I felt the calling to go into the ministry and started to find information on seminaries.
In the end I chose to move to Chicago and attend Chicago Theological Seminary, a United Church of Christ school. I loved the city. I met some fascinating people and learned so much about theology, ministry, and myself. I would consider the three years there some of the best of my life, even though nothing major happened. After I graduated, I was ordained as a pastor by the UCC and got to have all the fun of job hunting. My first job took me across the country to New York City. In 2004, I became the associate pastor at Church of the Living Hope, a UCC church in the East Village. The pastor wasn't using the small apartment built into the basement of the church, so I moved in there. The next two years went by in a flash. I was learning a lot from the senior pastor and really coming to know the congregation.
November 8th, 2006 was a day that changed my life forever, like so many New Yorkers. I was on the south end of Manhattan that day, visiting an ill church member, when the blast went off. So many members of my church weren't so lucky, the senior pastor included. If my childhood hadn't made me strong, stepping up the plate then would have had to. I had funerals and memorials to organize, families to comfort with God's promises, both those from my church and too many others in the community. And I had a church building we could no longer use to not do it all in. For the next two months, I found myself sleeping on the couch of a pastor of a church in Brooklyn. We held those funerals and other church services in borrowed space, before and after they were used by their owners. The one thing I refused to do was let my church fall apart. We needed each other now more than ever. By the time we were back in our own space, I was no longer the associate pastor. I was just the pastor. I feel like I lived several years in just those first few months. Our first service back in the East Village was on Christmas Day. Even in the darkness, there was the hope of Christmas.
I won't say that things had settled down, but we had almost caught up on memorial services at least by the time that Nathan Petrelli gave his now famous speech. At first, I could hardly believe it. I'll admit that there was some fear in my reaction. But then I met the people behind the powers. Several members of my church confided in me about what they could do. And these were people I knew, people I had seen kindness and goodness in. It didn't take long for me to form the opion that the Evolved are people, with all the good and bad in them that the rest of us had. The fact that my younger sister was among them, well, I won't say that didn't effect my opinion as well. When the Linderman Act was passed, I felt that it was my duty, my calling, to speak out against it. I preached many Sundays on love for our fellow people, on justice, and on mercy. When the containment centers finally began to open, I knew I had to do something more, especially as my sister was sent to one. Just what more I could do approached me one day in the guise of the priest at St. John's Cathedral. He came recruiting for an organization known as the Ferrymen. I joined up, helping to move and hide the evolved, doing whatever I could. That little apartment under my church became not just my home, but also a stop when needed on this century's Underground Railroad. In whatever free time I had between ministering to my flock and working with the Ferrymen, I worked to brush up on the Taekwondo I'd studied for ten years as a child. I even learned from a fellow Ferrymen how to shoot a gun, or at least how not to shoot myself with one. I'm still hoping someday to find out exactly which center my sister is in and to find a way to get her out. For now, I will continue to speak up for the rights of the Evolved, to be a regular person calling for human rights for all humans, even if, or when, it gets dangerous.
