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I’m glad things worked out the way they did, but in hindsight, there’s no doubt I could’ve done so much better. I had much more to give, but back then, I really didn’t know how. I only knew what it took to survive. That’s what my childhood had taught me to do best. Survive.
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I made it to Florida and began my first real full-time job. But as pumped as I was to be there doing work that I really loved and felt passionate about, during my first six months as area director of the youth ministry, every workday brought with it the same question: How many more hours before I can talk to Kelly again? Every night, we’d linger on the phone for hours at a time, and the next morning, I’d wander, bleary-eyed but blissful, into the office. Then by noon, I’d be eyeing the clock again, counting down to the next call with her.
St. Petersburg was brimming with old architecture and old people, and while the beaches were beautiful, it was often dreadfully hot. My early days were filled with recruiting volunteers, getting to know the students I’d be working with, connecting with the ministry’s board members, and just getting the lay of the land. I made a couple of friends and was on my way. Setting up the ministry wasn’t too difficult. As a volunteer in Waco, I’d learned from the best, so I just mirrored what I’d been taught.
That July, Kelly and I returned to her hometown of Tyler, Texas, to say our vows, as our families made plans to join us for the big day.
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The ceremony was beautiful, and we were lucky to be surrounded by so many people who loved us, but everything around it was a struggle. Suffice it to say that having all of our parents back in the same room for the first time in years was enough to create many moments of tension and emotion. And then in the middle of it all, my dad, with my stepmom, stepsister, nephew, and pregnant sister Bonnie in the back seat, got into a head-on collision. Thankfully, and most important, they and the other driver involved escaped death and serious injury, albeit narrowly. I found all this out just moments before the wedding rehearsal when I received a note from my aunt telling me that, though okay, my dad and family had been in an accident but that they wanted me to go ahead with the rehearsal. Kelly and I decided to trudge forward.
Later, after being released from the hospital, my family made it to the rehearsal dinner and we all basically limped our way through it. The next day the wedding went off without a hitch, and the following morning, Kelly and I boarded a plane to Mexico for our honeymoon. Given the whole insane ordeal, we joke that it’s a miracle we ever returned.
Once we got back to the States, Kelly joined me in St. Petersburg. As we started our life together, far away from anyone we knew, the first reality of our marriage came into sharp focus: we were on our own. There would be no clear path, no set of rules, no master artist who would hand us The Grand Design. We were two young kids, figuring out how to live together and start a career in a new city. We had no clue what we were doing, but we did have each other. Together, we’d figure things out.
As much as we loved each other, the early months of married life came with challenges. Kelly and I are opinionated people. We both care how something looks, how something feels, how something smells. And we also experienced a lot of loss in the course of growing up, which can cause you to cling to what’s most familiar, even if seemingly trivial. Early in life, I’d mastered the art of setting things up around me to work just how I needed them to. I had strong beliefs and an ability to hold on to them for dear life. But marriage is about letting go. Letting go of all the ways that you would do it and being open to how someone else might do it. I still struggle with it to this day, but marriage has whittled away at me in the best ways. I also happen to have chosen the best person to walk alongside me on that path. I realize that even more clearly now than I did during our first days of married life.
Kelly soon got a job at the Gap and I continued my work as an area director, even though it wasn’t quite satisfying me like I thought it would. When a couple of my ministry’s newest board members, Frank and Dawn, floated the idea of us moving to Europe with them to be part of a postmodern church plant once I was done with my current contract, we were incredibly excited. I wasn’t even sure what a “postmodern church plant” involved, but if it meant living abroad with Kelly and doing ministry that we were passionate about, I was in. So we prayed and searched and talked and finally decided we wanted to go. Problem was, I made the mistake of sharing my plans of moving to Europe once my contract was up with my board.
A couple of months later, they let me go. To be fair, they had asked that we all be honest with one another about our plans and goals and how we were feeling about the ministry . . . okay, maybe I went a little too far a little too soon, but still.
It’s weird to be a newlywed with an expensive college degree and no job. The precariousness of the situation really hit home when I landed the first job I could find cleaning toilets as a church janitor in the winter of 2002. For the record, janitors are great. Without them it would be a horrible, smelly world. But because I had more than $50,000 in college debt, being a janitor wasn’t my plan. After janitorial life, my next job was as a junior high minister, which was basically the same gig: smelly, with a lot of messes to clean up. Being able to play the guitar and lead worship did come in handy, although by this time the fervor I’d had for a performance career had started to fade. I still loved music, and thought maybe one day I’d get back to it, but right then I needed to keep a little cash coming in. I started picking up handyman work, installing air-conditioning ducts, toilets, tile, crown molding, you name it.
That whole period was a test of our new marriage. Kelly and I were scared about money, and the way we argued reflected it. We were defensive, each trying to preserve those little bits, even the meaningless ones, of the life we’d dreamed of. We fought one hell of a battle over exactly how to put a new trash bag in the can. And one day we even had it out in the middle of the grocery store, in a scene I like to call “The Butter Offensive.” We were checking off items from Kelly’s thoughtfully made list when she said, “We need butter, Clint.”
“I got this, Kelly.”
“But, Clint, get the stick butter, okay?”
I was suddenly rankled. We argued for a bit until I finally laid out a proclamation. “Well, my mom has always just used tub butter even when baking,” I announced, “but I guess we can just go ahead and have this luxury.” Wrong choice of words.
Through angry tears, Kelly delivered the line I just might engrave on my tombstone: “A ninety-nine-cent luxury, Clint. Great!”
At the height of our financial anxiety, we also found ourselves excited about joining the church planting group. And no doubt it sounded better than sweaty twelve-hour days of caulking. But for me, a young guy filled with wanderlust, one sentence early on from our mission leaders Frank and Dawn sealed the deal: “You’ll be living in Amsterdam and Paris.” I was like, Where do we sign? Kelly and I were passionate about doing mission work and probably would have gone just about anywhere. But Paris? It felt like it couldn’t really be true. They then explained that we’d have to raise our own support if we wanted to make it happen.
When it came to our decision to move to Europe, our friends were split in their opinions. Some advocated waiting until I’d paid down my student loans, and others supported the move as a great opportunity before we had kids. In the end, we made the choice to go, and we’ve never regretted it.
But first we needed to raise the money. In October 2002, we moved back to Texas to rally supporters. We figured it’d be easier to ask for funding in the state where Kelly had grown up and where we’d both attended college, and where several of our friends had settled. I got a part-time job as an account manager at a mortgage licensing firm in Dallas, which was ninety minutes west of Tyler. When my shift was done, I’d spend the rest of the day making calls and sending out support letters. Kelly was a nanny and taught home school for a local family.
On Sundays, we’d go around to churches and try to explain o
ur mission. I wasn’t a spiritual scholar, but I now understood what the postmodern movement was, in part, about: welcoming skeptics. Our new church would encourage congregants to question their faith and search for understanding. We’d be all about creating a community of searchers and allowing them the space to explore their own conceptions of God. No doubt this was some different theology than what we’d grown up with. And the fact that we were oftentimes asking for funding from mostly conservative Christians—those with some of the same traditional beliefs I’d been raised with, along with very little desire to learn too much about the postmodern Christian world—didn’t make our path easy. On top of that, we weren’t exactly going to some war-torn or third-world country with a desperate need. I’m sure a few of our listeners were trying to make sure we weren’t just looking for a reason to move to Paris. But the truth was, we were genuinely excited about the ministry, and those we talked to could tell. For us, it seemed like the ultimate combination: doing meaningful work while also exploring a new world that seemed as fascinating to us as it did foreign. Many loving people reached into their pockets and helped make the way for us to go, and we will always be thankful for that.
Our initial goal was to raise $30,000, the minimum amount we’d need to live abroad for one year. We intended to stay for five. We hoped to gather enough seed money to fly to Amsterdam, begin working, and then take it one season at a time. With the exchange rate what it was in those days, we knew that even $30,000 was bare bones, but we believed in the mission so much, we were willing to survive on a tight budget.
By late spring of 2003, and after seven months of raising support, we were still short on committed funds. Very short. “Should we go and just try to make it work?” I said to Kelly. Neither of us was sure. But that’s the gift of youth. With few precedents or set-in-stone rules, you can just step out, wide-eyed and hopeful, without overthinking things. A few weeks later, on a hot day in July, we boarded a plane to the Netherlands.
We make our blueprints. We dream our dreams. And even when our sketches are loosely rendered—or we haven’t done all the homework—we end up someplace new. As Kelly and I would come to discover, rarely does that place match the one we envisioned. And yet for reasons that can seldom be predicted, we end up exactly where we ought to be.
CHAPTER 5
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Raw Materials
Raw materials are all around us. Whether at a store, in a lumberyard or dumpster, or still growing in the forest, the wood we need can be found. Once I’ve sketched out a design, I take the time to think through what kind of material I need. If, for instance, I’m building an outdoor table from teak, I’ll call up my hardwood supplier and put in an order. If I’m building from reclaimed wood, I might go in search of some pallets or old barnwood. Those times when I can order exactly the wood I need, at the size I need it, are great, particularly when I’m on a deadline. But those times when I can work at my own pace and use what I have? That’s when I find the work most fulfilling.
In the Netherlands, we moved into the top floor of a three-story house, crammed in a row of other homes just like it. To save on rent, we shared our two-bedroom quarters with a single American who coincidentally hailed from Dallas. Tight quarters, yes, but when you’re as over the moon as we were to be doing our dream job, you hardly notice the squeeze. Our house was in The Hague, where the church plant ministry was headquartered. From there, we commuted to work in Amsterdam every day for three months to complete our mission training.
We loved The Hague, or Den Haag, as they call it there. For starters, the residents were among the friendliest people we’d ever met, and though Dutch was the official language, most of them spoke English, too. That eased our transition, big-time. Secondly, everyone rode bikes, and I do mean everyone. More bikes were parked outside the grocery store than cars. As summer and fall gave way to winter’s freezing temperatures, Kelly and I, fresh from the Texas heat, were plenty cold. But pedaling around the city over bridges and along cobblestone paths lined with gorgeous tulips warmed us right up.
On our half-hour train commute into Amsterdam, I plowed through the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. Once in town, Kelly and I stood shivering, hands plunged deep in our pockets, waiting for a bus to take us to the church where we were interning. I’d wander over to a food truck to grab an oliebollen—a kind of dense doughnut just bigger than a golf ball, fried and covered in powdered sugar and served piping hot in a brown paper bag. One could last you an entire day, but by the time our bus approached, I’d easily thrown back a couple. Again, I tell you, I like to eat.
At the church, I was assigned to lead worship while Kelly’s organizational skills were put toward managerial work. Ninety days and a ridiculous number of oliebollens later, our training was complete and we moved on to Paris. It was insane. I mean, who gets to live in a centuries-old apartment building, right smack in the middle of the city’s 5th arrondissement, called the Latin Quarter, and steps away from where Ernest Hemingway once walked, as depicted in A Moveable Feast? Well, us. We lived just a ten-minute stroll from Notre-Dame, and Luxembourg Gardens, the famous tree-lined park with immaculate lawns, was practically our backyard. Our first days were devoted to learning French (Je suis désolée, je ne parle pas français—“I’m sorry, I don’t speak French”—is all I have to show now, years after those courses) and working with our team to found this thing we called a church community. On the side, I began training for the Paris Marathon, which felt like coming back to my roots; though I’d continued to run since college, it had been five years since my last race. After the marathons I completed as a freshman and then a junior at Baylor, Paris would be my third.
Soon after moving in, we decided to paint our apartment. It was a fun time, as we were really getting our first chance at making our place our own with a little paint and sweat. “For the kitchen, how about a deep, rich chocolate brown to match the mint green tiles?” suggested Kelly, embracing the bold. Sounded wild to me, and I had my doubts, but we went with it. For the other two rooms, we agreed on something in the neighborhood of a pale yellow. The next morning, we rode the metro to a home improvement store and struggled back onto the train hauling five-gallon buckets of paint. Kelly was exactly right, and the kitchen color turned out great, but the living room and bedroom walls were a disaster. Two different but equally horrible shades of yellow later, we finally settled on khaki. With the aroma of fresh paint still in the air, the IKEA furniture we’d ordered arrived. Box upon box filled our apartment, and I got to work constructing our bed, armoire, chairs, and tables with an L-shaped Allen wrench the size of my pinkie. This was our new home.
By the time we arrived in Paris, the lid on my own personal spiritual rigidity had already been loosened. Thanks to Kelly, and a handful of eye-opening experiences, I was now amenable to stepping further outside my adherence to the stricter conservative Christian practices. (A quick note before I dive in: I’m making no universal judgments here. What one person believes is totally up to him or her. While I was growing away from many of the things I was taught in my younger years, I understand that many people still hold tightly to those beliefs. And that is their prerogative. For me, it all boils down to holding whatever beliefs we have with a gentle love, allowing for the reality that ours might not be for everyone, and remaining open to and accepting of those we differ with.)
Now where were we? Oh yes, that’s right . . . back home in the Bible Belt. There, things were, well, a bit stricter than they were in Europe. Let’s put it this way: at home, no cussing; no drinking; no smoking; and, for crying out loud, people keep their clothes on! In Europe, as we were quickly learning, everyone seemed to be smoking, it was borderline rude to refuse a drink, and people said the word shit the way we say shoot. And when it came to the human body, nakedness didn’t really shock anybody there. On magazine covers and billboards and beaches, in TV ads and shop windows, bare skin was unabashedly on display. Quite honestly, it was like background noise; be
cause it was so out there, no one seemed to care. At first, given my conservative rearing, I found all of it a little shocking. But the more time I spent in this culture, opening my mind to the way other people see the world, the more I found myself accepting and loving others regardless of their lifestyles or differences. I’d never make an argument for rampant nudity in the world (let’s be honest, there are just so few of us, myself included, who ever can or even want to be showing off any of that!), and you’ll probably never catch me with a cigarette in my mouth (mainly because I have a weird thing about certain aromas and personally smelling good, but who cares about that). But I did start to see things from a new perspective.
And then there was the reason we were in Paris in the first place: to plant a postmodern church community. Our team pastor, Frank, and his wife, Dawn, who were married with three children, lived in the apartment right below ours; the loose plan was for Kelly and me to essentially be their lieutenants. We all thought that, armed with our enthusiasm and a bit of an edgier brand of Christianity, we’d have a decent shot at sparking a movement. The trouble was, we couldn’t even strike the first match. Our premise: the French were hungry for a spiritual awakening. The reality: the average Parisian we approached didn’t care as much about church as they did about just basic human connection and relationships. Can you blame them? We managed to organize a few parties for locals in Frank and Dawn’s apartment (we had no church building) and made connections with people who did seem to be in need of a community. But other than that, it was really slow going.
We did, however, get one thing right. “Have any of you heard about the church just off the Champs-Élysées that feeds homeless people?” Dawn asked at one of our team meetings. I hadn’t. But desperate to make some kind of tangible contribution, and realizing that Paris was filled with homeless people, Kelly and I went to investigate. There, we met the leaders of another ministry that served meals to anyone who dropped by. From then on, one day each week, Kelly and I, often with at least one or two of our fellow team members, joined the soup kitchen crew. Walking into the hundred-year-old kitchen housed in the church basement was like stepping back in time. We’d throw pans onto the old cast-iron gas stoves and brown the meat for a spaghetti lunch. Once, when the bottom of my pan got coated with burnt meat and gristle, I thought I’d screwed up. “Just pour some wine into the hot pan,” a Frenchwoman told me. And voilà, that’s how I learned the art of deglazing, which I use to this day. During our entire stay in Paris, our church-plant team cooked in that soup kitchen. And long after we’d left the city, our team continued to volunteer there.