I began my high school years with lots of optimism. I was growing in my relationship with Christ and was looking for an opportunity to share my faith. During my freshman year, I made several friends in the faith and we had a few small gatherings. By my sophomore year, more people of faith were interested in meeting together and, with a group of likeminded believers, we started Christians in Action (CIA) and began planning for the upcoming “See You At The Pole”.
The turnout for the event was amazing and exceeded our expectations. I had a friend play the guitar and lead everyone in a few worship songs. Then we broke up into groups and prayed for our school and our country. Several homeschool friends from church came out to support the event. From that day on, our bible study group filled the courtyard as we taught the bible to fellow classmates.
CIA would make great strides that year. My sophomore year ended up be a great year both spiritually with the new club and in soccer. I think a little bit of me was ready to move on, but I had two more years of school.
The last two years seemed more like spiritual warfare than the joyous Christian experience of the years prior. The school started limiting the exposure of CIA. There was a great fear that “other” groups would try to be formed due to my outspokenness. I remember have a conversation with the principal about this particular topic. As long as we flew under the radar all was good.
The school had a group of self-identified “pagans”. Believe it or not, I loved talking with them. We would talk about the Lord and debate back and forth – neither of us really bending in our belief. Not a lot of Christians could debate the Bible and Theology, but, because I had amazing teaching growing up, I could defend the Gospel very intelligently. Several times the group would interrupt our courtyard Bible Studies pretending to speak in tongues or some other noticeable invocation.
My senior year, I dressed up as Jesus for Halloween. My family talked me out of carrying a cross around school. However, I did get a little noticed. One of these kids saw me after class and just coldcocked me.
National Day of Prayer was the last event I did at Parkview. My good friend, defender, and buddy during this time was Jason Stalnaker. He also was very good at video editing. For the last event we decided to do a video announcement – a first for any Christian club. We interviewed students and teachers in preparation. Jason did an amazing job. We had the principal view it two or three times. We had to remove every reference to Jesus from the video, but references to God were okay. Our video was approved to show during the week leading up to Thursdays NDP. The video showed that Monday. The principal left town that day for the week and the VP pulled the video that afternoon and would not allow it to show. After several attempts to try and work something out, he would not relent. The video never showed again.