The second semester of my freshman year of college, I found Jesus. When it happened—it being when I came before the saints and admitted I was a sinner in need of a savior—all I could think about was how happy my mother would be. She’d been sending (tithing) her good, hard-earned money (disability and welfare checks) to every pompadoured, polished, bedazzled, fork-tongued televangelist for years in hopes of saving her wayward children.
I found Jesus because in the first semester of my freshman year, I’d found love. That fall, I slowly fell for a wiry, bespectacled boy from Chicago whom I’d mistaken for a professor because he carried a briefcase and wore a shirt and tie with impeccably creased dress slacks. He seemed taken at first sight of me. I was conceited with the stuff of youth, complaining but delighting in being the chosen object of his infatuation.
