Jeff: My name is Jeff. I am 58 years old. I am from Plainwell, Michigan.
Karen: Hi, my name is Karen. I am 68 years old. I am from Spring Lake.
Jeff: I grew up in Georgia and people tell me I still have a somewhat of a southern accent.
Karen: You do, actually.
Jeff: I will own that. I moved away in 1984. I grew up in a lower middle-class family. My dad was a truck driver. My stepmother worked at a Piggly Wiggly. Same job, my first real job. Nobody in my family ever went to college and I was not ready to do that either. I'm like, how do I get out of the trailer park that I'm living in? So, I did what a lot of young people do is I went off and joined the military. I ultimately wound up enlisting for six years right off the bat. Been all over the world. The last three years, I found myself up at Great Lake, Illinois. The Naval base is just north of the city of Chicago. That's where I met my wife, had a little girl. And this is 30 years ago now. I had nine years of active duty as an enlisted sailor. I'm like, I can't do this anymore because I have a young family and opted, I put myself through college in 1997 I landed a teaching job at Joliet Junior College. It's the historical first junior college in the nation. I had an administrative job there. I retired as faculty after 27 years this summer.
Karen: I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I've only moved about 30 miles west and nestled right up against Lake Michigan and you'll have to pry me out with a crowbar to get me any further away from the lake now. But I lived in a fishbowl because I lived within the very small kind finds of a Dutch Christian Reformed Church community.
We went to church not once, but twice on Sunday and we had catechism and we had Christian schools. And then I went off to the flagship Christian college that the denomination supports with its ministry shares.
Jeff: And for me, I was christened in a Methodist church as a baby. My dad got custody of me when I was two years old. My sister was nine at the time, but he and my stepmother would make me go to church with relatives. He didn't go, she didn't go, but they sent me to church, and it was Southern Baptist Church.
I met a young lady when I was in the Navy. She and her family were Catholic and I'm like, well, this sounds cool. So, I went through full blown catechism classes. The whole thing got confirmed as a young man, 21 years old and really enjoyed the ceremony of it all.
But then I met my current wife and that's where the Buddhism came in. I practiced pretty firmly for, I don't know, a dozen years or so. Fortunately, my wife is supportive. She's like, you know, I can't make you believe something, I guess. So, for me, I don't know what's right. I don't know what the truth is. And I'm not comfortable telling someone they're not right about their religion. If I were to say that my faith is correct, by definition, the others have to be incorrect, and I can't go there.
Karen: Mm-hmm. I met my first husband while a student at Calvin and he was from Ontario. We got married. We went back to his hometown of Chatham, Ontario. And again, we just started going down the same path that each of our respective families had raised us in. You remember this is the Christian Reformed Church, baptize our kids when they got older, they were going to go to Christian school.
And then something happened. And that was that the economy tanked in southwest Michigan. This was in the early 80s. He and his father were doing construction work. That dried up, so he decided to go back to Calvin and finish a degree that would have allowed him as well to become a teacher. So, we come back, two small children, I get pregnant with a third. He was going to go back and teach in Ontario and I'm like eight and three weeks pregnant and I look at him, and I said, “We are not moving right now.” So, what we did instead is have him start substitute teaching in the Grand Rapids School System and then the rest of his history, he became a teacher in the Grand Rapids Public School System.
My whole point of that is that along the way, because the marriage fractured and we divorced, I had my first true excursions, if you will, out of that bubble. I stayed in the Christian Reformed Church until it became an unworkable situation because they were going through a very tumultuous time regarding the role of women in the church. And at that point, as a single woman, after a not very happy marriage where a lot of that patriarchy had been present, I went there's got to be a more abundant way of living. As a woman, whether I'm partnered or not partnered, that recognizes myself as an individual with equal rights and gifts.
So, I left the Christian Reformed Church, but now I am a member of the Episcopal Church. And the Episcopal Church has a very liberal element to it. And so that also encouraged some of that movement I was making more left. My second husband is not a Christian. He's like you and agnostic more or less and that doesn't grieve me at all.
Jeff: You evolved in your faith, but then your second husband's like, yeah, that's just not my thing. But the two of you are cool with it, which is the same thing with my wife. We’re like, yeah, just like, I wouldn't even say agree to disagree because it's not even that. Right. This is what you do, and it helps you become a better person.
Karen: Exactly.
Jeff: This is how I approach life. And I would like to think that it makes me a better person.
Karen: The Navy experience. You said you went all over the world. Tell me more about that.
Jeff: Yeah. I was in the Navy from 1984 to 1993.I had never been on a plane before until I went to boot camp, you know. My family didn't do a lot of traveling. If we did, go to a beach in South Carolina. So, you drive there five or six hours from Georgia. When I was growing up, I never seen a Hispanic person in my life, not in person or any other nationality, right?
And so, when I went off and joined the Navy, was like, Oh my gosh. Because there's a lot of Filipinos in the Navy because of our relationship 30 or 40 years ago. I started to meet people that were different when I was stationed in Bahrain, which is a little Island over in the Persian Gulf. Our ship was scheduled to leave the Gulf and go to Japan for some work in the shipyard. And on the way over, we stopped in the Philippines.
Going there and going off the naval base and going out into Olongapo City, it made me realize just how wealthy we are in this country because they didn't have running water and this was 1988. You did your stuff and there was a trough, and it went out to the river. It was just insane to me. It was a city, but it was just so far back in time.
Really, super nice people. You know, the locals. That type of stuff made me realize when you travel, you get to meet people that don't look like you, don't think like you. I still have friends that I grew up with from high school that have not left the zip code. To me, there's nothing wrong with it either if you can be open-minded and meet other people.
Karen: During COVID, I just started doing extensive reading and that's where I got really involved in these pro-democracy activities.
Jeff: I'd like to know more about exactly what it is you're doing.
Karen: I'm trying to make sure that the democracy of this nation as it's gone through all these many evolutions continues in a forward motion so that the promise of what America is as a democracy, which if we're successful in realizing its promise, will be the world's first multicultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, egalitarian pluralistic society. That's a real strong vision for me because it mirrors what I believe the call of Jesus on my life is, which is the call of the blessedness of all nations, of all people that I care and can't thrive, whether I'm a Christian, agnostic, Buddhist, or Catholic, unless all my neighbors thrive. And so, to the extent that I can help create a more equitable future for more people, the happier I am.
So that's why, when I talk with people about my pro-democracy advocacy work, if I'm able, I bring my faith into it. But for the most part, it's basically one and the same. Just, I don't need to talk about it in a faith perspective because they mean kind of the same thing to me.
Jeff: Right. And I would think people see it in your actions and the way you speak.
Karen: One hopes, right? But we've really become beset by a lot of issues in my own community is that I'm not living very far away from that Dutch Christian-reformed church nucleus. And so, there's a lot of that really rigid way of thinking about what is Christian, what is not, what is right, what is wrong that is now cropping up in political ways in my community. And it's really creating harm for some of the more marginalized communities.
Sometimes when I'm trying to engage with someone and trying to find common ground, I just start with at least common language that is faith related, because that seems to resonate with them. But I'm finding that those conversations don't go very far before our different interpretations of the way we live out our faith become more of a logjam than they do an opening. And that's been very painful for me to realize. If I'm having a very difficult conversation and it feels like it didn't go anywhere, I tried to give myself that picture of, but seeds were planted in both of us. The seed planting is what gives me hope for the future.
Jeff: We both seem to be people that are not hung up on being right. I'm willing to take in new information and change. You know, I think I was a decent person at 18, but I'm not that same person. But I have people that I have conversations with that they're proud that they haven't changed over the last 30 years. They're the same person they were. And I'm like, I'm not sure about that. How can you live and not evolve? To me, it would be a very death dealing existence not to be able to embrace change and be excited about what you could learn tomorrow that you never thought about before. I literally wake up in the morning expecting to learn something new. I mean, if I don't, I feel little disappointed. It doesn't have to be a big thing, just a small insight. Anything, those are the days that I really celebrate.