THE PROMISE - Chapter 6

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be offering a taste of my memoir, The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God, published by TouchPoint Press, here on my blog. It is my true story of first faith and first love and how the two became almost fatally intertwined. Keep checking back for additional chapters.

6 – The Mission 

1977 - 1979.

To me, there’s nothing more satisfying in life than knowing the Lord’s will and your place within it. My life now had purpose and direction. I trusted God completely. If He wanted me to marry Kathy, so be it! I was now a man on a mission, and I was definitely loving it. 

Through this period, one Bible verse kept coming back to me again and again. It was John 15:16-17: “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: Love one another.” Every time I opened the Bible, there it was. Every time I saw a preacher on television, or heard one on the radio, there it was. It soon became the thesis statement of my life. 

It also fit in perfectly with the mission at hand. 

The Lord had indeed chosen me, not the other way around. He wanted me to go forth and bear fruit. In the original context, that meant sharing the gospel. In my context, it obviously meant getting married and having children. To make sure those children appeared on the divine timetable, the Father would grant me anything I asked in Jesus’ name. What did I have to do in return? Love Kathy? 

That didn’t seem like much of a sacrifice. Sign me up.

What I had really done was take a perfectly valid Biblical passage with a wide interpretation and reduced it to one meaning within a single context provided by yours truly. That isn’t to say the passage didn’t have relevance to my upcoming relationship. It did. But by reducing my life to this one mission, I was further upping the ante unnecessarily. It was a mistake I would pay for later.

In the waning years of the seventies, however, I couldn’t have been happier. The Lord had given me a mission. Unfortunately, He didn’t tell me how to accomplish it. 

Obviously, in retrospect, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be marrying Kathy in the near future. My own parents’ youthful nuptials notwithstanding, we were both too young, even if we were both so inclined. Of course, I didn’t let such concerns bother me. I wanted to get on with the mission. The question remained how.

I knew where she lived. I knew her phone number. I could have very easily walked up to her door, or called her on the phone, and asked her out on a date. 

Yeah, right. Not going to happen.

I’m a Rosenberger. Remember?

I was way too shy and emotionally guarded to do that. In fact, I don’t think I ever honesty considered doing that. I needed another plan, so I examined my strengths and weaknesses. My major weakness was fear. Despite the encouragement God’s unexpected message gave me, I was still frightened she would say no if I asked her out. My major strength was that we were friends. We could talk easily. I had no problem talking with her in a pressure free environment. Therefore, I resolved to put myself in that very setting. 

I decided to place my faith in the chance meeting. I figured if the two of us just happened to end up at the same place at the same time, we could talk with no pressure. My first chance encounter with Kathy caught me by surprise. I was riding my bike up by Northern Parkway Junior High School with Charlie Woods and found her playing tennis on the courts out back. We had a pleasant chat. Believe me, I rode by those tennis courts often afterwards, but I never spotted her in that location again.

Rats. My strategy was proving to be a failure. Hamilton was too big. Baltimore was too big. The State of Maryland...Ah, forget about it. The world was too big. I couldn’t hope to keep bumping into her unless I developed a better plan.

I decided that the only place I knew for sure where she could be found was her own house. I resolved to walk by her house every day I could with the hope of seeing her. I couldn’t do it every day, especially during the summer. I spent most of those days with my friends and I couldn’t connive of a way to get them to walk down Westfield Avenue every day. Anyway, if I was with them, I probably wouldn’t do any more than wave to her. I wouldn’t want to do anything to give my feelings away. My romantic interests, and their decidedly odd religious inspiration, were strictly private. I never discussed my feelings for Kathy with any of my friends until after we started dating. Even then, they never knew about the efforts I made to reach her.

I rarely socialized with my friends on school nights. That’s when I would take my walks — usually between 4:30 and 6:00 pm. It was a three-to-three-and-a-half mile round trip between my house on St. Helens Avenue and her home across the street from my grandparents on Westfield Avenue, depending on the route I took. I rarely took the same route two days in a row, not as a result of any strategy, but rather to break up the routine. 

I didn’t want anyone to know why I was walking around that area. I had two cover stories prepared if anyone saw me and asked what I was doing up in that neighborhood. Only one of my close friends, Bob Burgess, lived near Kathy. If he saw me, I would tell him I was either heading to or from my grandparents’ house, depending on which direction I was walking at the moment. If a relative spotted me, I would say I was heading to or from Bob’s house, depending upon which way I was going. It was all very cloak and dagger, but my cover stories ultimately proved unnecessary. Neither Bob nor any of my relatives seemed to have spotted me during this period.

What’s odd is that I didn’t find any of this strange at all.

Here I was, walking three miles a day, five days a week, hoping to see a girl that a voice in my head told me I would one day marry. Was I crazy? (Don’t answer that.) For all I knew, the poor girl had no romantic interest in me whatsoever. Still, I knew to whom that voice belonged. I had a simple, child-like faith that if I trusted Him, He would deliver. I simply resolved to put myself in proximity to her and let Him do the rest. After all, this was His idea, not mine.

I had my first chance encounter with her early that fall. I think she was walking into her house. I said hello. She invited me over and we had a lovely chat for about fifteen minutes or so. Then she broached a question to me: “Do you think Charlie Woods likes me?”

Yikes. Looks like the Lord hadn’t had the same discussion with her. Still, I was absolutely delighted she felt comfortable enough around me to ask that question.

I don’t specifically remember what I answered. If Charlie Woods was interested in her, I’m sure I would have told her. I couldn’t see myself lying to her, despite my self-interest. Fortunately, Charlie Woods never expressed any interest, romantic or otherwise, in Kathy around me. He knew her brother Dan, but I never heard him talk about Kathy.

I could certainly see why Kathy would be interested in Charlie. He was charming and charismatic. He was the natural leader of my small group of friends, but our days in his orbit were slowly coming to an end. 

Jim Jackson, Bob Burgess and I, and some of the other guys from our old St. Dominic circle, followed Charlie, but, as we moved through our high school years, his behavior became increasingly erratic. He exhibited disturbing outbursts of anger. While waiting in the basement, we would hear him have screaming matches with his parents and his aunt Deb, who was also our age and had attended St. Dominic with us. I felt horrible about the way Charlie treated his aunt, especially when he would steal her diary and read passages about her romantic longings to us, but I never said anything.

Once, in a moment of anger, Charlie grabbed a three-pronged garden tool and drove it through the front of one of my tennis shoes. The metal prongs miraculously missed my toes, but it got me thinking. Something was seriously wrong.

Even the pranks Charlie devised took a dark turn. His idea of fun was to go to a public place, like the grassy divide between the east and westbound lanes of Northern Parkway, and have three or four of us pretend to beat him up. He’d lie on the ground taking our feigned punches and kicks while cars would stop to watch. We’d keep up the charade until someone finally got out of a car to intervene. Then we’d all run off together laughing. Once, however, when the time came to run away, Charlie deliberately ran off in a different direction! The rest us spent about a half hour cutting through yards and hiding in shrubs to avoid a determined do-gooder. That was the last time we played that game.

Charlie’s interests soon shifted toward biology. Whenever we’d go over to his house to play our traditional poker games we’d find ourselves surrounded by cages of mice. He selectively bred hundreds of them to bring forth one attribute or another. He kept meticulous notes on everything. It was harmless enough, but the cages made the place smell like we were playing poker in a monkey house.

Charlie’s biological studies were short-lived. More disturbing were his studies in chemistry.

Most kids seek forbidden fruit like drinking alcohol. We only had a very brief period of underage drinking. For a few months, a stolen bottle or two of Southern Comfort, mixed with Coca Cola, diverted the crowd. I did not partake. I had lost my taste for alcohol as a child when my brother Doug and I decided to purloin some open cans of beer during a party at our house. When I took a drink from my can, I discovered someone had been using it as an ashtray. The revolting residue permanently eliminated my desire to both drink and smoke! And smoking came next to our little circle. Marijuana soon followed and supplanted the alcohol — very quickly. Charlie became a pothead overnight. For a couple of months, he tried desperately to get me to indulge as well. Then his attitude suddenly and surprisingly changed. He began to admire my willpower, and would confess that he wished he possessed it as well. Before long, PCP was being sprinkled in with the pot. Things were getting serious.

Jim, Bob and I quickly started seeing less and less of Charlie. A new group of acolytes began gathering around him. They tended to be younger and more open to the drug culture than we were. I think Charlie always felt the need to be a leader. As a result, he made an interesting progression through my family. Originally, Charlie was my brother Doug’s friend, but that group of guys had too many alpha males to suit his taste. Then he started hanging out with me. Now, my doomed younger brother Mark fell into his orbit. Sadly, many of the people Charlie started hanging out with would have their lives cut short by drug overdoses or suicide.

I warned Charlie about the dangers of drugs to no avail. He was very intelligent. He didn’t just take drugs. He studied their chemical properties intently. Charlie repeatedly told me he knew far too much about drugs to ever become addicted to them. He probably wasn’t the first person to feel that way. He certainly wouldn’t be the last.

Charlie was soon manufacturing LSD and other arcane drugs of his own design in his basement. Jim and I went over to his house one final time to play poker and found him with a group of his new followers. They were flying high on acid, talking about how the walls were melting and discussing the meaning of various Doors songs.

“Mr. Mojo Rising, he’s talking about his Johnson, man!"

Oy vey. First, drugs. Now, The Doors. Please.

The evening came to a quick end when Charlie told me he had slipped acid into the iced tea I was drinking. I freaked out. It was probably the first time he saw me angry. He quickly admitted he was only kidding. He hadn’t put acid in my iced tea, but that was it. I never ate or drank anything at his house again. From that point onward, Jim, Bob and I would watch Charlie’s steady descent from a distance.

It was very sad. He was one of my best friends. He was like a brother, but now he was gone. Where he was going, I could not follow. Or should I say, I would not.

It would have been so easy for me to fall into the drug culture. Most of my friends were dabbling to varying degrees. It was perfectly acceptable. It was certainly harder to say no than to say yes. “Yes” was the road to popularity. “No” was the road to Loserdom. One would think with my inherent shyness, I would say yes just to win the approval of my peers. It was that impulse that compelled me to be an extrovert: An attention-seeking performer. But I couldn’t do it. Not this time. I chose instead to be a loser.

I often wondered why the Lord gave me that revelation about Kathy so long before I would actually start dating her. Now I think I understand why. He wanted me to know that He had plans and goals for my life. The Lord wanted to keep my mind and heart occupied so I would avoid these temptations. It worked. I had a lovely young woman waiting for me just beyond the horizon.

I had no time for drugs. I had to keep walking.

My strategy of unforced meetings wasn’t proving to be a rousing success. I would say that I only saw her four or five times over the course of nearly two years. Still, I didn’t feel I wasted a minute. Eventually, my daily walks were less about seeing Kathy than expressing my faith in God. Those walks were quiet times of prayer and meditation. I remember them fondly, particularly during the fall when the leaves were turning and the smell of change was in the air. 

I often found myself humming the 10cc song The Things We Do For Love. “Like walking through the rain and the snow when there’s nowhere to go and you feel like a part of you is dying.” Yes, I had walked through the rain and the snow for love, but I didn’t feel like a part of me was dying. I was alive.

I had purpose. Meaning.

More than that. I felt immortal, or at least temporarily indestructible.

Here’s the way I looked at it. God was sovereign. He had given me a mission. I accepted the mission. Therefore, since the Lord controlled all of the circumstances of my life, I would survive, no matter what, until I accomplished the goal He had set before me. Once, when hanging out with the guys in Bob Burgess’ basement, I made that very point without, of course, discussing any of the supporting details. They thought I was crazy. Maybe I was, but I would find myself putting that theory to the test on a lonely mountain road in a few years. And I survived.

Those were great days. I was happy. In every sphere of my life: school, friends, and my prospects for the future. Well, almost every sphere. There was one very large dark cloud looming on the horizon: The destructibility of my Grandfather Murphy. 

A hard drinker all of his life, Paul Murphy was beginning to suffer from liver failure. I was in a panic. He was my role model. I watched him, hoping to learn from him and imitate his style, attitude and demeanor, with the exception of his drinking, of course.

I knew he was dying, and I was positively distraught. I prayed incessantly. I told God I couldn’t handle his death emotionally now. The Lord responded, saying He wouldn’t take my grandfather until I could handle it. I immediately interpreted God’s word to suit my purposes. Personally, I didn’t think I would be able to handle my grandfather’s death until I was married and I had settled down with a family of my own. God had given me no such assurance. 

Perhaps sensing the coming demise of my grandfather, in the winter of 1978 the Gardiners invited the entire Murphy family over to their house for a sit down dinner. All of us: my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, their spouses and children. It was quite a crowd. We filled a number of tables all over the first floor of their house.

I have a number of photos of the party, and even some Super 8mm home movie footage. After the death of my grandmother Margaret in 2006, I, being the family archivist, was given possession of her photo albums and I have been scanning the photos to share them with all of my family. I found the photos from 1978 and 1979 particularly poignant. With each turn of the page, my grandfather, normally a large, robust man, grew thinner and sicker. That’s the way he looked at the party.

My grandfather would be the first to go, but so many other people at that party would follow him: my grandmother, my father, Kathy’s father, my siblings, Laura and Mark, my Uncles Brian and Doug, my Aunt Dhu.

The wash of time. It comes for all of us. 

There were also some photos of Kathy in the album; even one with me in the same frame. The camera never caught me sneaking a glance at her. No. I was way too careful at guarding my feelings to let anything slip in front of our families. Or even her for that matter. I don’t remember any specific conversations I had with her that evening. Maybe I didn’t have any, aside from the normal pleasantries. But I discreetly hovered around her, enjoying the sound of her voice, smiling when she smiled.

Looking back on the photographs, I found myself drawn to her face. Was that the face that launched a thousand ships? Pretty, yes. Bright-eyed, yes. Inviting, yes. I can recall many reasons to be drawn toward her, but now, in retrospect, I have to ask myself what was the driving force behind those years of longing. Was it her inherent and plentiful qualities as a human being? My desperate need for companionship? Or was it primarily the voice I had heard in my head?

Even today it’s hard to say.

Other Chapters:
Chapter 1 - A Photograph
Chapter 2 - My Death
Chapter 3 - Childhood
Chapter 4 - Saved!
Chapter 5 - The Promise
Chapter 6 - The Mission
Chapter 7 - Mission Accomplished

You can get a copy of the whole book here:

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