👞 TREE 611: JG – the foot that tapped

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Here’s another Bill Gothard story.

I was 18ish and at a conference for students in Bill’s home school program. There were about a thousand of us, smiley and blue-suited, learning how to save the world. One of the well-meaning things we did was to visit the poor neighbourhoods in Indianapolis to help. I can’t remember what we were supposed to do. Maybe knocking on doors dressed in Mormon missionary suits and big manufactured smiles was supposed to end systemic poverty? We got out of our big Ford van, looked around at the black people, and the kid in charge – everyone was crazy young – decided to have a little prayer circle time before we went visiting. In the middle distance someone was blasting gangsta rap.

(If you are spotting racism, white messiah complex, sheltered kids leaving their bubble for the first time, and more in that first paragraph, you are seeing correctly.)

I mentioned before that Bill believes music with a beat is the devil. It leads to things like dancing and having sex and weak muscles and the conjuring of demons. To be a true disciple of Bill, you have to stick with hymns and some classical music. This position is not backed up by anything in the bible, not even in the obscure bits. My family never paid attention to this particular teaching of Bill’s.

So there we were in our circle, heads bowed, praying, and then everyone went quiet. I looked up to see why. They were all looking at something on the ground inside the circle. I looked down too and discovered that MY FOOT WAS TAPPING TO THE BEAT OF THE DEVIL’S HIP HOP.

I stilled my offensive foot. The circle broke up. Another student clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s happened to me before too.’

If this doesn’t get you tapping, are you alive?

Grow slowly
Jeff