Faith & Doubt by John Ortberg

Author:John Ortberg [Ortberg, John]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-02T20:00:00+00:00

8

When Doubt

Goes Bad

Life is just a dirty trick

from nothingness to nothingness.

Ernest Hemingway

If you were to ask me who largely shaped my faith during my most formative years, the answer would be easy . He was a middle-aged professor of Greek in my college named Jerry Hawthorne . He had a big shock of red hair, so we called him Megas Rodos, Greek for Big Red . Learning koine Greek at eight o’clock in the morning might seem tedious to some . But it was a highlight life experience for the circle of guys I hung out with: Chuck, a premed student who became my first and best friend when we were fifteen years old; Kevin, whom we hung around with because he was funny and charming and because we hoped to pick up the girls he discarded; Tommy, who could make a stone laugh; and the Ox, a prelaw student who had a gift for falling asleep in class without being noticed and still getting A’s . We used to say that Ox would one day try cases and sum up: “Your honor, the defense rests . Zzzzzz . . .”

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Faith & Doubt

Over time we became not just Megas Rodos’s students, but his friends . We would have donuts together on Wednesday mornings when there was no required chapel (chapel attendance on other days was monitored by students fondly known as “chapel spies”) and on other mornings when we were using up our skip days . On Friday afternoons we would meet in the student union . Someone would prepare a paper (not for a class, just for the joy of learning), and we would all discuss it . Big Red would invite us to his home . He followed our careers, officiated at our weddings, guided us to graduate school, and warned our girlfriends and later our wives about us .

He was the worst joke teller I have ever known . He would spoil the punch line long before getting there, interrupt himself repeatedly, turn bright red in anticipation of how funny it was going to be, then jab mercilessly with a bony elbow at whoever was sitting next to him to elicit more laughter . He would recite Monty Python routines in a horribly inept falsetto British accent . His favorite involved a British middle-aged housewife proving to another woman that she knew the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre by calling up Sartre’s home long distance and getting Mrs . Sartre:

“Hallooo . Is this the home of Jean-Paul Sartre?”

(Mrs . Sartre) “Yes .”

“Is Jean-Paul free?”

(Mrs . Sartre) “That’s what he’s been trying to figure out for thirty years, dearie! Ha, ha, ha, ha . . .”

We all adored him . There was something about his character, something about the way he took both his subject matter and his students so seriously, something about his earthy sense of humor and his deep humility before God that made everyone around him want to be a better person . He introduced us to great scholars and great books .

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