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CHAPTER ONE: My StoryKit McDermottI have always been someone willing to poke around in stuff offering the promise of freshair. The unusual or atypical or even the
avant-garde
never failed to appeal to me. What would Ifind or experience? Exploring in areas that just drew me seemed in my bones. Not that I wouldtry
anything 
, mind you, because I wouldn’t, even before I became a Christian. Hurtling down theInterstate at 125mph on a cycle without a helmet didn’t appeal to me then, and it doesn’t now.What did appeal was that much of life’s zing for me promised to be discovered on the less trod paths.When I surrendered to Christ in 1973 by myself in a friend’s VW Beetle hurtling upInterstate 84 back to Boston, the draw to discover lost little potency. I came into the faith azealous jazz musician and stayed that same course for the next 7 years. During those early yearsin Christ, I also got involved with Christian music and influenced the band I was playing with toexplore modes of musical expression Christians had not associated with music ministry. We pushed the envelope. People did not know where to fit us. I loved the discovery and rigor andwildness of pushing into new territory even when it proved a struggle.In my 30’s, God apparently decided it was time for me to make a new discovery I wouldhave never made on my own. I was blind-sided by the One who cannot be planned for. He pulledthe ground out from underneath and yanked me toward the unfamiliar. I have felt lost manytimes in my life, but never this lost. I was enrolled in the school of his sovereign re-tooling and Iwasn’t auditing the course, thank you very kindly.1
 
As it turns out, the years of my third decade were to be a time of personal, spiritualupheaval: sometimes bewildering, often excruciating, occasionally overwhelming. I wouldabandon the creative life of the jazz musician I was nuts about, begin a family, receive the gift of tongues and other spiritual gifts, pray with 4-5 brothers in the wee hours of the morning 3 days aweek for 2 years, hear a call to ministry, find and leave another career (equipped with tools for the ministry ahead), go back to college, wrestle through deep healing to my masculine soul for ayear, begin Klesis Ministries, assume the leadership of the Center For Renewal retreat ministryand move with my wife and family to the retreat center, and go back to college to study religion.All the while God was tearing up the hard ground of my soul, breaking clods into a growingmedium that could receive the seeds of genuine godly masculinity. To tell you the truth, I wouldhave been happy to stay in boyhood, if left to my own.Somewhere near the age of 37, I also learned to listen to God. My brother-in-law, Steve,a painter, told me about a book (Mark Virkler’s
 Dialoguing With God 
), he was reading thatrevolutionized the way he had been praying. Steve had been a man of prayer for many years. Hehad credibility with me. He told me that through listening prayer he had been able to “dialoguewith God” about, among other things, the frustrating problems he would encounter in his artwork and God would help him, sometimes in ways that were breath-takingly new and creative. He gotmy attention because my prayer life was wilting in the noonday heat of sameness. I knew praying was essential to a relationship of any substance with God, but hadn’t gotten there withany real depth.There were times when I yearned to know Jesus in a way that drew Him far into my lifewhere I really lived and made him a partner in how I sorted out each day. I was eager to testwhether listening prayer would be a way to find that. So I read the book, got myself a light blue2
 
spiral notebook, and began listening on November 19, 1986 in my pre-dawn living room on PrattStreet. I was not sure what I was looking for as I sat in the silence on the couch, but I began toget the intriguing sense that I was being invited into something fresh and alive. It felt as if I wascoming to God in trust like a young boy with his papa, not afraid, but believing he had goodthings waiting to tell me. I was eager to know him better. At the same time, I also came to him asa young man seeking to set my life squarely in his will with no looking back. The trail wascleared and I was on my way.Virkler’s book described a process whereby a person could sit in God’s presence andconverse with him as with a friend. He helped me see that God spoke quietly through myspontaneous thoughts in response to questions I had or concerns I brought to him, and that it was possible for me to discern him in those thoughts. Virkler showed me how to write out my“dialogue” with God and his responses to me in a journal. He gave me a simple tool for learninghow to take time with God in the quiet and actually commune with him in way that feltauthentic. Although simple, it was not easy or simplistic. I would still have to battle withlaziness, a mind filled with noise, occasional doubt, and the need to develop discipline with prayer. But I had something tangible to grab onto.The first entry in my journal, solemnly named
Communion and Dialogue, Volume One
, isdated November 19, 1986. It begins with my prayer to the Father avowing my love for him because of his character and ways. I move to thank him for the life and family he had graciouslygiven me. I end by affirming that because he has given me a hope and a vision in Jesus, I couldmove out from “the sorrow of a world in dread of its death.” I am not sure why I said that, butover the years I would revisit the themes of life and death in its varied forms. Becoming a man asGod ordained from the beginning a man should be, would be a formidable struggle for me, and3
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