It took me a few tries to find the right college.
I started at community college and lived at home but that didn’t exactly exude the happy, exciting college experience. Students were older then me and we didn’t share similar interests. It was basically a snooze fest.
The next year I left the security of my parents’ home in the Detroit suburbs for the Philadelphia College of Bible (later Philadelphia Biblical University), in the heart of a dangerous and exciting East Coast city.
Philadelphia College of Bible had all the strictness that goes with so many Christian schools. No blue jeans in class. No dancing, drugs or alcohol. I could handle those rules, but the one rule that tripped me up was the witnessing rule. We were required to tell the stories of Jesus, and our salvation, to five different people each week.
Imagine how weird this was for me, a young woman of 18, walking around downtown Philadelphia and striking up conversations with complete strangers for the purpose of witnessing. My total number of converts was zero. Every week we were required to fill out a small sheet of paper, stating we had witnessed. After checking the boxes, we signed our names, confirming our truthfulness.
Here is my truth: Bible College turned me into a liar. I just couldn’t witness to five new people each week, so I lied.
After becoming a liar, it didn’t take long for my life to go completely downhill. I started wearing jeans to classes when I knew the overworked professors wouldn’t notice or care about my clothing choices. Unfortunately, I didn’t consider the campus snitches — students who reveled in their power to report fellow students to the dean. After receiving a few white slips for rule transgressions, I received the ultimate punishment: I could not leave my dorm room except for classes, meals or work.
This is where things took a strange turn. My job was to watch first-graders in the afterschool program at the Salvation Army Settlement House. My 25-year-old married boss was a College of Bible graduate. He took the opportunity, when I was grounded, to call the dean and tell her I was needed at work. With the permission of my dean, I left the dorm and went out for drinks with my boss. I was 18. No one ever asked for ID or questioned my presence. My boss had set the captive free!
How naive could I be? It was just a handful of times. Thank God things never progressed beyond cocktails.
It wasn’t a giant leap in badness for me to take up hitchhiking. My friend Darlene and I took the subway to the end of the line in New Jersey, then hitchhiked to the beach. We bathed in the glorious sunshine and warm sand. We believed that getting a sunburn was the first step to a golden tan, and a sunburn is what we got.
That night we walked through a lovely residential neighborhood, waited for the lights to go off and chose a comfortable, carpeted front porch to sleep on. At sunrise we hitchhiked back to the subway, then made our way to the dorms. Once again God protected me from my own youthful ignorance. We were safe.
Then came my arrest for holding up a Wawa convenience store. I was walking back to my dorm with two of my college friends. They were both Black and I am white. We walked by the Wawa store and looked in the large windows.
We saw everyone in the store with their arms up, like a holdup in a movie. Then we saw the guys with the guns. As we looked at the robbers, they looked at us and turned their guns to point straight at us. We ran.
We were outside the dorm when a police car sped onto the sidewalk. It stopped in front of us and two officers jumped out. They grabbed my Black friends and said they were arresting them for the robbery of the Wawa. Righteous indignation filled me. Why had they arrested only the Black women and not me?
I screamed at them, “I was with them the whole time!”
Apparently one officer thought I was confessing, because he yelled back, “Then you’re coming too.” He grabbed me and pushed me into the back of the police car with my friends. As we sped away, I turned back to see the dean of women with her hands cupped to her mouth.
“I’m coming to get you,” she cried as loud as she could.
We were placed in an empty room. After an hour of quiet uncertainty, the door opened. We were free to go. What? That’s it?
Eventually we learned that witnesses saw us running from the scene of the crime and tagged us as the robbers. When police talked to the victims in the store, they were told the real story of how we looked into the store and ran away, trying to save our lives. The actual robbers were under arrest and everyone was safe.
True to her word, the dean of women was at the station, waiting to drive us home. On the drive I started thinking. Maybe Bible College wasn’t for me.
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