Dale Fincher - Living with Questions

INVERT

YOUTH SPECIALTIES

LIVING WITH QUESTIONS
Copyright 2007 by Charles Dale Fincher

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

ePub Edition August 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-86737-1

Youth Specialties products, 300 S. Pierce St., El Cajon, CA 92020 are published by Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Ave. SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49530.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fincher, Dale.
Living with questions / by Dale Fincher.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27664-7
1. Christian teenagersReligious life. I. Title.
BV4531.3.F547 2007
248.8'3dc22

2007017042

Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Web site addresses listed in this book were current at the time of publication. Please contact Youth Specialties via e-mail (YS@YouthSpecialties.com) to report URLs that are no longer operational and provide replacement URLs if available.

Creative Team: Dave Urbanski, Laura Gross, David Conn, Brad Taylor, and Anna Hammond Cover Design by SharpSeven Design

07 08 09 10 11 12 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To
My mother
Lois Ann Fincher
Whose life taught me to live with questions

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

CONTENTS

CJ lived next door to Max since the fifth grade. In those early days, the whole world seemed to lie right outside their front doors. Theyd ride their bikes to the grocery store to buy baseball cards. On weekends theyd sleep at each others houses and build forts by draping sheets across their bedrooms. They played video games when homerun derby in the street got rained out. As they grew into their teenage years, the games didnt changethey only got more complicated.

When the pair pulled CJs silver Cadillac into a parking lot by the beach, a parking attendant from the nearby restaurant shouted, Get daddys car off my lot!

Max waved his arms out the passenger window and shouted back, This isnt his dads car! Its his! CJ screeched the tires as they bumped over the curb and headed back into traffic. Driving the Caddy embarrassed CJ, even though he was the first one of his friends to have wheels. So to make up for not having a sports car, hed rev the engine in neutral and then kick it into drive to make the tires squeal.

CJ received his moms hand-me-down vehicle when he was 16the day after the dentist removed his braces, in fact. The car even came with cloth seats and imitation wood trimthe complete package. CJ used his Christmas and birthday money to rig the car with subwoofers in the trunk. It thumped down the street so loudly that Max nicknamed it The Trunk of Funk.

On the weekends, CJ and Max spent a lot of time with Stephen and their other friends just leaning against the hood of that Cadillac in the parking lot of Taco Bell.

What are you guys doing? kids would ask as they pulled up.

Nothin.

The usual reply. If theyd been doing something, then they wouldnt be standing in a parking lot. But it was a good place to plan, hang with the people, and meet girls.

CJ grew up with his mom and younger sister. His father moved out when CJ was six. His sister pestered him endlessly at home, always annoying him from his bedroom doorway until he was angry enough to knuckle her on the arm. Then shed tell their mom, and that usually earned CJ a reprimand.

Worse than home, though, were CJs weekend visits with his dad every couple of months. When he went to his fathers place in the country, he felt stuffed inside an alien world. CJ just wanted to hang with his friends back in his neighborhood, not feel trapped with grown-ups.

CJ liked Max because he was one of the few friends who didnt insult CJ when other guys were around. Max also didnt compete with CJ or try to prove he was better than himunlike many of CJs other friends. They didnt even compete with each other in sportsCJ was the basketball player, and Max was the football player.

They saw the world in the same way, too, which made CJ trust Max even more. And when it came to laughing, they generated enough inside jokes and sayings to make a recording on an old cassette tape. They were equalsblood brothers for life.

Though CJ attended a Christian school, he spent little time with his classmates off campus. His neighborhood friends were far more interesting. They grew up together through elementary, middle, and now high school. His friends attended public school, and they came home with stories that sounded like headlines from a newspaper.

Did you hear about Stephen? He got so drunk on Friday that he was puking in the back seat of Ashleys car! Theyd all laugh about it together.

CJ wondered what it would be like to get drunk, and he wondered if Ashley was laughing, too.

One day, before the Trunk of Funk era, Max took CJ to his dads bedroom closet. Inside were piles of pornographic magazinesstacked in rows that towered above their heads. There were more magazines than clothes.

Something deep in CJs gut rebelled.

This isnt right! he thought to himself. But Maxs dad thinks its fine. And Maxs dad is a war veteran, a strong guy, and he still lives in Maxs house. Do these pictures bother Max? Why are we sneaking around? What if we get caught? Is that the front door opening and closing? Max had better hurry up anyway.

Max navigated the closet as though hed done it before. He pulled down a magazine and thumbed through the pages. At that moment, CJ knew he was the only sheltered person standing in the closet.

Max is all right, CJ thought. He sticks with mebut my stomach aches. I shouldnt look at this stuff . But Im curious. Just a little curious. It wont hurt me to just look.

They took a few of the magazines and put them in Maxs closet. Two months later, CJ turned 15.

Through those years, CJ and Max savored the more complicated pleasures of their self-made world. They listened to rap music from a ghetto-oppressed African-American culture they pictured in their heads. They enjoyed military-themed movies and hitting mailboxes with baseball bats. They loved the idea of civil rebellion and hatred of the police, although they never attended a protest and rarely encountered the authorities.