4 X sda my path Out-1

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On my mother’s side of the family, I was a fourth generation Adventist; on my father’s a third. This gave me a bit of cachet in the church, since my mother’s roots go back to within twenty years of the denomination’s founding. Many of my first and second cousins remain Adventists to this day. There was, for me, a certain smugness in this realization. It’s a bit like being a minor royalty in England.

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My earliest memories center around church and “Sabbath” school. After my birth, we moved to Colorado, my father’s State of birth. He sold books as a “colporteur.” Mostly they were books by Ellen White, the prophetess of the Adventist church. We rented a room from the Johnsons, a non-Adventist farming family in Fruita Colorado. Even at that young age, perhaps three or four, I knew we were different from them.

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Later, we moved to Denver where my father worked as a mental health tech at Porter Memorial Hospital, now Porter Adventist Hospital, and later as an occupational therapist. We lived on the hospital property which contained, in addition to the hospital, a nurse’s dorm for student nurses, a grade school through tenth grade Adventist school and apartments for staff. We were immersed in Adventist culture.

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When I turned seven, we moved from Denver to San Diego where we lived on the grounds of another hospital. On this hospital’s 100 acres, we also had a church, a grocery store which sold vegetarian meat analogs, a gas station, a “Book and Bible” store, and a school covering grades one through twelve.

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I had the freedom of the entire hospital grounds because it was a village nestled in a town, surrounded by a city. We were safe because everyone knew us. We got away with very little. There were always adult eyes watching our every move, or so it seemed.

I attended the school from first to tenth grade. My friends came from the school and church. We all knew the boundaries of the property and knew that we were “in” and everyone on the other side of the line was “out,” meaning that we Adventists were “saved” while those on the other side of the line, often just a narrow street, were not saved. Of course this led to a superior attitude among the adults and even we kids. Later, when we were free to travel outside the boundaries of the hospital property, we felt as if we were entering alien territory.

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Looking back with the insight of sixty years, I can clearly see how insular an provincial we were, both adults and children. I suppose the seeds of my rebellion in late middle age in leaving the church, began here, where all was black and white and everyone on the other side of the line was not of us. Exposure, in later life, to a State agency opened me to the possibility that there were nice people across that dividing street and that there were other ideas that could be more trustworthy than those within the safe walls of denominational creeds.

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