The DeJongs: Piercing the Veil
Terese DeJong has spent ten years of her life—a full decade—putting her husband through the last half of a B.A., two master's degrees, and a doctorate. She is a crack legal secretary who can keep code numbers and deposition details in her head without missing a whereas at eighty-five words per minute. Neither she nor her husband intended to be in the pastorate; Paul had had enough of that growing up as a minister's son. He rather wanted a Ph.D., and Terese wanted to see him get it. Toward that end, they endured the usual stresses of seminary, he soaring into the academic stratosphere (but also working as a part-time youth pastor) while she earned most of the income—and had a baby. They passed each other in the apartment complex hallway more than once. Communication time was spasmodic. Terese remembers: He'd come home and try some of his far-out theological ideas on me—and I had this little fundamentalist faith. I couldn't even understand him half the time. We went to church together, of course, but I really wasn't growing spiritually. Paul frankly accuses seminary in those days of being a head trip that drove people apart rather than pulling them together.
It wasn't that I didn't respect Terese for her knowledge. But I had suddenly become the fount of all truth. It was the worst possible strain on a marriage.
I had hoped to go on to graduate study in England, but during my last year she became pregnant again, and we couldn't afford it. That was a good thing; any more study probably would have killed us.
So for the time being, the DeJongs came to First Reformed Church of Smyrna, Delaware. Their little girl was born in May, Paul received his M.Div. in June, and they moved the first of July to a town of four thousand. The first ...
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