Episode Thirty-Eight: Pastor Keith Lewis

I guess they were expecting about they were expecting high numbers of casualties the first day of the ground war.

They were expecting basically that they were going to get hit with gas and all kinds of stuff going through on that first day of the ground war.

And so I had to go do a couple of things.

I was in a place called Alcanjar,

It's in Saudi Arabia,

And it was kind of like a logistical base.

And I had to make a run up to an area that would we probably for lack of a better term call the staging area for the morgue.

And I rolled up and here are hundreds upon hundreds of stretchers with zip body bags on top of them.

Hi,

My name is Keith Lewis.

I'm 54 years old.

I am a pastor to youth and families at the United Church of Los Alamos.

I am father to 11 year old Madison and then I have two bonus daughters from a previous marriage,

Shelby and Allison.

I'm a Marine Corps veteran and I am still a kid at 54 trying to figure out what they want to do with their life.

I have a wealth of life experience.

I get excited over over silly things.

An example pre pandemic was watching this little kiddo go to the Los Alamos Medical Center.

He was three years old and he was excited that he got to punch the button for the elevator and it was like standing in line for Dumbo ride at Disney for him.

And I thought to myself,

You know,

Life should be so cool that you never give up that excitement.

I'm still looking at things now kind of going with kid vision going,

Hey,

You know,

Life's grand.

Hey,

Can I walk a walk the length of that log there and balance myself on the log?

Is that is that cool?

When it comes to who I am,

I'm still I'm still a kid.

I'm probably more realistic now than I was obviously when I was a lot younger.

My dad was a pastor.

And the thing for for me is I was really lucky.

My parents got it.

You know,

I was a kid in the 70s and 80s.

I graduated from high school in 84,

Grew up on college campuses because both my parents have college educations and advanced degrees.

And so,

You know,

All the things that were going on in college in the late 60s and 70s into the 70s to be around that setting growing up in a pastor's house.

My parents didn't put a thumb down on me when it came to what I thought or how I was beginning to perform my own face,

Maybe because they were really young when I was born.

But it was a rock and roll household.

I remember my dad coming home with albums and putting them on.

And I remember listening to the Allman Brothers and Creedence Clearwater Revival and going to concerts.

My parents were dirt poor college students,

You know,

Sitting up late watching Midnight Special with my dad and doing all kinds of cool stuff.

Well,

The thing was watching him,

Watching him and the way he interacted with people.

It was watching my dad have people that would come in that coming off the streets that needed money for something to eat or something like that.

And he always had a couple of dollars in his pocket to hand out.

And part of that stemmed from the fact that he had a he had a difficult childhood and he knew what it was like to be in need.

And that was the thing you always talked about because,

You know,

When you're a kid,

You don't have a filter.

So I would say,

Well,

Why are you know,

You only have five bucks.

Why are you giving that guy five bucks?

And my dad would go,

You know,

There are angels among us and you don't you just don't know.

And watching my dad do ministry is kind of on the job training.

And I guess I just didn't know it.

My dad's father left the father's household when he was little.

My grandma,

My real grandfather was alcoholic and was an abusive alcoholic.

My granddad on my mom's side was a farmer and a master draftsman.

And they were from Ohio.

My dad was the first person in his family to really have a professional vocation.

Go to college.

He has a doctorate in ministry.

And some of the things that he did with us as a family when I was a kid came from his background growing up in an abusive alcoholic family.

It wasn't one of those things where,

You know,

Growing up in the Bible Belt,

You know,

There's folks are we don't drink.

Well,

It wasn't that in our house.

We didn't have alcohol because my dad was afraid that that would be something that would pull in that kind of behavior from his childhood.

So I don't think we had a beer in the house until I was already 21.

But it formed his way of working with people.

It was kind of that lesson.

You know,

You don't know where people are coming from.

You don't know what people need better to err on the side of,

You know,

Helping someone and pay if they go and they buy something else with that money,

You give them more than that's okay.

Did your parents meet in college?

They did my they met at this podunk Bible College in Tennessee.

That was the only way that my dad could go to college because his mom his family had no money.

He went to that Bible College because that was the only option he had to go to school.

He knew he had to go to college to get away and get out of things.

And so he was the chauffeur for the president of the college.

My mom,

My granddad had lost his job with the city of Fort Lauderdale.

They had cut their master draftsman and my mom was supposed to go to University of Florida.

All of her friends are going to University of Florida.

She was going to be a Chi Omega at University of Florida.

And because it was church related institution,

She could go this little podunk school in Tennessee,

Not too far from Pigeon Forge.

They were there at the same time they met.

They met because my dad insulted her.

My dad asked her,

He saw her come through and he said,

Oh,

Are you the upstairs maid?

And my mom goes,

I'm no one's maid.

I'm the secretary for the president's wife and my dad goes,

Oh,

And that was that was at their first date was listening to a radio broadcast of an LSU football game on a radio.

And he still has at the house.

My mom said,

I didn't care anything about a radio.

I didn't care anything about listening to LSU football game.

I just cared about being around your dad.

I was brought up in a,

We would say progressive,

Other folks might say liberal theological household.

So I'm always skeptical when things come along and they seem too easy.

I grew up at a time when we were very skeptical of the people on the religious television channels too,

You know,

The high pink hair and you know,

The big fingernails and the whole nine yards and being able to say Jesus.

And it was like a 25 syllable word.

But by the same token,

You know,

I think one of the things that's most interesting is,

And I believe it to be true,

Is that sometimes your faith is the only thing at the most crucial points in your life that you have whole have to hold on to.

Most of the folks in the Marine Corps are roughly about 18 to 21 years old,

The younger enlisted.

And so I was on the,

I was on the tail end of my enlistment for the Marine Corps.

So I was kind of old.

And when we were in Desert Storm before the ground war kicked off,

We got a box of what looked like business cards and on it was the 91st Psalm on one side.

And then it was another,

On the other side it was this little small Baptist Church in Florida that had,

Carry this for your protection.

And it was kind of on a Saint Mary's kind of whatever.

But you know,

In my helmet liner,

I had that with me.

Well,

The thing is,

I guess they were expecting about,

They were expecting high numbers of casualties the first day of the ground war.

They were expecting basically that they were going to get hit with gas and all kinds of stuff going through on that first day of the ground war.

And so I had to go do a couple of things.

I was in a place called Al-Khanjar,

It's in Saudi Arabia,

And it was kind of like a logistical base.

And we had everything there from aircraft,

Food,

Basically beans,

Bullets,

And band-aids,

The whole nine yards.

And I had to make a run up to an area that we probably for lack of a better term call the staging area for the morgue.

And I rolled up and here are hundreds upon hundreds of stretchers with zip body bags on top of them.

They've already got them ready.

You know,

The thing for me was that made a huge impact on me and it wasn't so much,

You know,

The visual of that was huge.

When I came home for me,

It was one of those things.

It wasn't so much just the miracle that we had made it through relatively unscathed after everything,

The invasion and everything like that of Kuwait,

But also that reminder of how precious life is.

I think maybe through the pandemic,

Hopefully we've all been reminded,

All of us reminded of how precious life is as we've survived it.

But fast forward about 25 years later,

I'm at a Institute for Youth Ministry seminar in Princeton,

New Jersey and a guy that I read a lot that writes about youth and youth ministry.

He was speaking and his thing was talking about getting a letter from his,

One of his former students who was,

This was during our time in Iraq and it was right before the big,

I guess this would have been 2003,

2004.

He was looking at and asking himself the question.

He got a letter from his kiddo.

It was sent on a piece of cardboard because in a war zone,

You can write any letter you want and you can write free in the upper right hand corner and they'll mail it.

And when he got that letter or that card,

He was wondering what he'd given this kid in his time at church,

What he'd given this kid that would carry him through the most traumatic time in his life.

Because this kid was talking about listening to artillery rounds,

Being fired out and things like that.

And you know,

At church,

We do youth groups and things.

We do silly games with whipped cream and we do all of those kinds of things,

Which is great.

That's group building.

But what things do you do with someone that at the most important times in their life,

They have that solace that they know,

No matter what else is going to happen,

I'm going to be okay.

And that dumb little,

That dumb little card from the 90,

You know,

Of the 91st Psalm from some little Baptist church in Florida came around because I thought,

You know,

What a generous gesture,

Probably not someplace I would visit on a Sunday morning because our theologies might be very different.

But you know,

That's kind of what had guided me through not so much the story of a miracle,

But the idea of a presence bigger than myself.

And the other thing is that on that side too,

That doesn't mean that God wasn't with other people on the other side during our time out there either.

When it came down to me,

As far as pulling me into ministry,

I debated whether I would go and do work in a church.

That was something I hadn't really thought about.

People would ask me if I wanted to be like my dad and I'd say no.

But I was looking at going to law school after I graduated from college and I just kind of got pulled into different side gigs along the way.

If you get into ministry for money,

Unless you are Joel Osteen or somebody like that,

It's not something that you're,

You know,

You're going to amass wild amounts of wealth from.

But somehow in the summers when I was doing stuff with camps and doing things with kids,

I always had what I needed.

I always had the financial means that I needed to pay my bills or do whatever.

And I always looked at that as kind of being a small miracle in itself,

You know,

To be able to kind of go,

You know,

Whatever else is happening,

Things will be provided for and I'll be okay.

If we're going to talk miracles though,

I guess I'd probably say the best miracle was when my kid was born and being there when she,

Because she was a C-section.

So I got to be there when she was born.

From that time until all the way until today,

I have loved every age that child has been,

You know,

The ability to see a young little thing grow from a newborn to a healthy 11 year old.

That's a miracle.

I feel for families and for people around the world who have had not had that blessing.

And I guess the other part of my job,

I see the miracles in people within the walls of the church where I work or the walls of churches where I've seen outstanding men and women who would never want to be recognized for what they do through their either acts of kindness and generosity or for the gifts that they have that they share that,

You know,

They would never want anyone to know lives are either made much better or the church,

You know,

Carries on.

And I think I may have heard it in one of the podcasts that I listened to or it may have been something that you said,

But you know,

There are miracles around us every day that we don't ever acknowledge or look at as a miracle.

We kind of blow it off.

During the Marine Corps,

Let's see,

I joined in 86 or I went to boot camp in 86.

So I was 20.

I was still a couple of years older than most folks,

But I'd gone to college kind of on the jumbilushi plan,

Which was,

You know,

Go to college,

Fell spectacularly.

When you when you get a 1.

25 for your first semester in college,

My dad opened up my grades.

TCU had a thing at the time where they sent your grades out and they were famous for arriving on Christmas Eve,

No lie.

So that whole week before we got,

You know,

Before grades came,

I was meeting the mailman or I was watching the mailbox trying to see if I could just pull the grades out of the mailbox.

And I thought we'd slid by because,

You know,

It's Christmas Eve,

We're getting in the car to go to the Christmas Eve service with my mom,

My dad,

My sister,

Myself,

We get in the car,

We pull out what the end of the street.

It's almost like a TV movie.

My mom says,

Oh,

There's the mailman.

And I'm like,

And she's like,

Let's wait a minute.

We'll see who we got Christmas cards from.

This was before we care.

You know,

Now you can't do anything with your kids since they're 18.

But at the time,

TCU didn't care.

They just wanted the money.

And so they go through and my mom's looking through the Christmas cards.

I'm like,

Okay,

Don't see it.

They don't,

Don't see it.

Gonna make it.

And the very last thing it's TCU.

My,

My dad's like,

Hey,

Let's look at this and let's see.

And I'm like,

I knew I was dead.

So we opened it up.

My dad looks at the grades and it's like 1.

25.

Did you do that all by yourself?

Cause you got to have help to make a 1.

25.

You know,

I couldn't argue with them.

I'd be,

I would be ticked too.

It was a private school.

It wasn't,

It wasn't cheap even in 1984,

But I knew after that first year that college was no place for me.

I worked a second year to make sure my grades were good.

And I went on what was called the delayed entry program.

And then I went into the Marine Corps and then when it came time to get out,

They extended me over my end of active service date for desert storm.

And so when it came time for me to be able to get out to the war was over,

They're like,

You know,

Would you like to absolutely you,

You're sure.

Absolutely got out and went back to college and it was a miraculous thing.

Some had speaking of miracles.

I somehow got through college and decided that as,

As,

As Dean Wurmur tells Blutarski,

Hey,

That dumb and stupid is no way to get through college.

I survived.

Thanks so much for listening to episode 38 of Bite Sized Blessings,

The podcast all about the magic and spirit that surrounds us.

If only we open our eyes to it.

And whether you choose to listen to our Bite Sized offerings for that five to 10 minutes of freedom in your day or the longer interviews,

We're grateful you're here.

I need to thank Pastor Keith Lewis for sharing all of his stories today,

As well as the creators of the music used Sasha End,

Raphael Crux,

And Alexander Nakarada.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite Sized Blessings website at bite sized blessings.

Com.

On the website,

You'll find links to people,

Art,

Artists and books I think will lift and brighten your day.

Thank you for listening.

And here's my one request.

Be like Keith,

Large or small,

Recognize all the miracles around you.

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Thanks again for listening to Episode 38 of Bite Sized Blessings.