It was the summer of 1970. A crazy and turbulent time to be twenty years old in America. The Viet Nam War was escalating and the returning body bags were on public display every evening during the 6:00 news. April brought the death of four Kent State students and nine others were wounded during a protest against that war. The Beatles broke up and  Richard Nixon was in the White House and so what was to became of us we wondered. Throw into the mix the Jesus Movement which began in the late 60s in California  and swept  across the continent. And for all of us who were young and idealistic and wanting to make a difference,  we wondered – what does that look like?

Paul and I had just finished our sophomore year in college. In one of our classes we had connected with a couple of Christians who told us about an “evangelistic tour” they were planning through the southwest over the summer where they were going to share the gospel on various university campuses and would we like to come? They were radical, passionate and fiercely committed to following Jesus. So we signed on, if somewhat skeptically.

“We’re gonna all travel on a bus, stay in churches who have opened their doors and spread the love of Jesus,” they said. “We’ve got it all planned out.”

Sort of.

One guy said, “We’re all meeting up to get on the bus in Colorado Springs (which was about 30 minutes from where we lived) so we can swing by and pick you up on our way south.”  Great!  Except eight hours later, still no bus – which should have been a clue. Eventually the guy drove down to Pueblo, picked us up in his car, and took us back to Colorado Springs where the rest were still waiting.

We got to the designated meeting spot (somebody’s parents’ house our ride explained) and there were people mingling about:  some sitting on the floor singing while a guy played a guitar, some reading their Bibles. Some laying out snacks on a table. We saw a rather large group huddled in a group behind a grand piano. We asked what they were doing. “Praying.”  Oh.  What are they praying for? “A bus.”

A BUS!!. Really?? We don’t have a bus??!!!?  Granted no one had ever SAID we would be met by a uniformed driver standing next to a chartered bus, but still. . . .

It was the first of many wrong  assumptions we had made.

After many more hours an old yellow school bus with Ignatius Loyola School District No. 11 written on the side pulled up in front of the house. You will understand when I say that I did not join in the chorus of “Hallelujah-praise-the-Lord”s when I saw that the inside of the bus was completely empty save for the exhaust system which lay in pieces on its floor.

“Okay – everybody spread out your sleeping bag and we’ll pack the luggage (we were each allowed one small bag) in the back against the door and as soon as it’s dark we’ll head out.”

As soon as it’s dark?

“Well, the bus overheats during the day so we’ll travel at night when its cooler.”

Gotcha. So when the temperature dropped and the sun went behind the mountains, all fifty of us hopped on (except for the guys who had to push it to get it started). The starter didn’t work which proved to be a bit problematic every time we stalled at a red light and a designated team would jump off, wait for the light to turn green, push us till the engine turned over and re-board. We loaded up the one car that we were bringing, and we were off.

Our first stop was to be Las Cruces, New Mexico. And eventually we got there – after a six hour breakdown in the desert. But one of the guys who knew something about cars – sort of – patched us up and got us going again. That morning somebody passed around a bag of peanut butter sandwiches and one of donut holes with the instructions:  “Take one half a sandwich and one donut hole.” The other half, we would find out later, was for lunch.

When we got to Las Cruces we went to a park and a couple of people left in the “follow car”.  Where are they going? we asked.  “To go find a church for us to stay in.”

Gotcha. Another part of the “plan” we had misunderstood.  We didn’t actually have churches lined up – we would just show up and see what turned up.

But here’s the thing:  we went to five different cities that summer and though we spent some long days in parks, we never slept in one. By nightfall a church would open its doors and let us sleep in their Sunday School rooms and gymnasiums, cook in their kitchens, eat in their fellowship halls. I have no recollection  where we took showers. Maybe we didn’t. I do remember once washing my hair in a gas station bathroom.

We talked to people about Jesus on campuses, in the parks, on the streets, and then, if they were interested in talking more, we invited them back to the church where we ate hamburger gravy over toast (it was like hitting the lottery if you found a piece of hamburger in your gravy) and sometimes they just hopped on the bus with us and went to the next town. We slept on floors and took turns taking each other’s clothes to the laundromat or grocery shopping or cooking or cleaning. We held all night prayer vigils and opened our hearts to a broken world. It was 1970.

In the same way that the country was in a time of upheaval – so was the church. We were  learning to throw off our old ways and take the message to the people and to love them where they were. We were learning to welcome the stranger and see what unites us instead of what divides us. We were learning what it means to live in community and what Jesus meant when he said, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me.”  Or maybe it wasn’t the church who needed to learn those things – maybe it was just us.  And that summer was where it started.

In hindsight, that summer was ill-conceived, ineffective and unorganized. We suffered from a lack of leadership and maturity and understanding and training. We wanted so desperately to make a difference to a broken world that we were unteachable and over-confident and sometimes did more harm than good.  But for Paul and me, it was a turning point and maybe God just protected us from the bad stuff – knowing we would grow up and grow out of the worst of it.

As the summer drew to a close, we prepared to go back to our real lives – back to school and jobs and we pondered how it would all look in light of the summer.

But the truth was we were spent. We were the only married couple who had traveled this adventure and we had been married less than a year. A little frayed around the edges, we went for a walk to get some alone time (community is great and all that but still. . .).

At the beginning of the summer we were told that everybody was just pooling all their money into one big pot and we would have all things in common. Those who had more money would give more and those who had less would give less and everybody would have what they needed. Communal living in the truest sense of the word. We put some money in but, because we weren’t as spiritual as the rest, we also kept some in reserve so we could slip away once in a while – to go get ice cream and regroup.  (I always had a sneaking suspicion that everybody else did the same thing). Maybe that’s where our conviction came from that there always needs to “ice cream money” in the family budget.

But on this night we were down to a $1.38 – literally. We bought a bottle of Pepsi and a bag of Beer Nuts at a gas station and there was no change. We had no money. None. It felt a little vulnerable and a little scary and very sacrificial. And then I dropped the bag of Beer Nuts in the gutter and they spilled out and I just stood there and cried. I had sacrificed everything for Jesus and now this!  Okay – maybe a bit of an overreaction.

We did return home – back to our “real” lives where we now had to learn how to grow into our passion, our zeal, our desire to make the world better. And we had a lot of growing up to do. We made a lot of mistakes, figured out how much we still didn’t know and how far we still had to go. And we learned what real sacrifice looks like – as opposed to sleeping on the floor and beer nuts in the gutter.

Over the next forty six years, (with a lot of help and love from a host of others, but that’s another story for another day) we would start three churches and open our home and our lives to hundreds upon hundreds of people. We would raise our children in the student slums of university towns so that we could be a part of the community we were reaching.  We would welcome strangers who turned into family – some of whom “hopped on the bus” with us and went to the next town – and together we would work to build His kingdom.

I sometimes wonder if we would have gotten to the same place we are now if it were not for the summer of 1970. If this is where God was leading us all along and that was only one of many roads that would have brought us here. I think maybe that’s true, but I don’t know. I do know the world had gone crazy and we wanted to make a difference. But maybe, in the end, it was us that needed to be different.