Michigan Churches

But for me, the daughter of a conservative Midwestern pastor, conversion passed almost unnoticed among other ordinary childhood moments. Somewhere between holding lightning bugs hostage in glass jars and sledding at mach speeds down Pennsylvania hillsides, I stumbled across the one referred to as God.

… A Southern Baptist pastor who wears navy blue dress pants for a living, Dad insisted that the disheveled, weed-lined graveyard across the street from our house was the neighborhood’s most attractive amenity. One day good Christians would rise from the dead, Dad pointed out, and we would have a coveted, front row seat to the Second Coming. I imagined our family settled comfortably into yellow and green striped vinyl lawn chairs as a zombie-studded Macy’s parade poured out from the cemetery gates. My brothers would hop up and down, eagerly announcing the moment when the marching band of corpses rounded the curve by our yard, throwing Tootsie Rolls and Laffy Taffy to curbside spectators like us.

The graveyard was not our property’s only amenity. Four maple trees anchored each corner of our front yard, spaced evenly apart as if grown specifically to serve as bases for our kickball and baseball games, which were allowed up to eighteen million ghost runners (when you live that close to a graveyard, there is no shortage of pretend ghosts). The trees themselves, my brothers and I imagined, sprang from an underground sea of make-believe magma, modeled after the kind we saw in Dad’s favorite science fiction movie, the original Journey to the Center of the Earth.

…To read the rest of Sarah’s reflections on growing up as a PK order the book here.

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