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By Dion Shattuck
Who am I?
My name is Dion Shattuck. I live in Santa Cruz, California. I grew up in a
liberal, non-religious household.
and other southern states, but one kid I met was from San Diego. While by
no means were they all this way, most of the people seemed very reserved
and collected. The girl who had invited me to the dinner was quite articulate
and maintained good eye contact with me when we talked and scrambled to
make me feel welcome. It was a refreshingly joyous atmosphere, but I did
sense a tension that I wasnt used to. Personally, I feel this may be because
the people were different than who Im used to. My rambunctious friends
swear, make vulgar jokes, talk about girls, and are generally very open about
anything that comes to their mind. In contrast, I observed a level of
containment and maturity with everyone at the dinner. I found myself being
quite reserved as well, but more out of fear because I didnt want to offend
anyone by saying I wasnt religious. When we finished dinner, things settled
down into small groups of conversation soon after a guy with a speaker
called our attention and introduced one of the group members to tell
everyone about himself.
The boy stood up, introduced himself, and began to tell his life story. When
he was younger, he was a trouble maker. He would do crazy things to get
attention from his friends and he made the point that he was living for that
attention and it was one of his main motivations. His story transitioned into
him finding his religion and God. When he was younger, it had been less a
part of his life, but as he grew up he found a lot of purpose in it. He spoke
about the satisfaction it gave him and how it took the place of all the
reckless, attention-seeking things he would do before. At the end of story he
did something that Ive found many Christians do. He ended with giving
thanks to God and everyone in the group. For me, this was a particularly
interesting moment because the ending was when I could see the boys most
intimate moment with this thing in his life he calls God. I felt that it was
certainly a different way of living than mine. I thought about how it would be
to have an all-powerful figure like God in my life who I could talk to and rely
on. At that moment, it was a powerful thing to realize that everyone here
poured their hearts out to this figure, this savior, this father. After the first kid
was done, another member stood and shared her story with everyone. It was
a similar account of hardship, confusion, and the trials of being young and
how she gradually found God and the support he gave her. After the
testimonials from both of them, text from the bible was spoken and we broke
into small prayer groups.
I sat cross-legged on the dirt with five others huddled in a circle. I looked into
the ground as everyone settled down to pray on a topic that the leader had
designated for us. I felt out of place and a bit uncomfortable. Id never really