You Make the Road as You Walk
Rodolpho Carrasco
April 1, 2000
In the spring of 1990, like Morpheus in the movie The Matrix, John Perkins offered me the truth about something, and I took the blue pill. It was simple enough: a two-year internship working with the on-the-move founder of half a dozen community development ministries. Deep down, however, I wanted more. I grew up fatherless, and I wanted a Christian father. Not just a father figure, or role model, or mentor, but an actual father. It was a personal need, an emotional and psychological hunger that determined my moods and bent my will.
I admired John greatly. The previous summer I had visited yoke of Calvary Ministries in Jackson, Mississippi, as a work group volunteer, and I was amazed at what I saw. Christians were marrying an evangelistic, Jesus-saves gospel message with tangible social action. Perkins was not afraid to talk about race, economics, politics, social justice, or anything else that was shunned by the conservative evangelical circles I was raised in. He was my hero. So as I negotiated the opportunity to live with and serve my hero as his personal ghostwriter, I dreamed of feeling close to a father, receiving the love of a father, glowing in a father's approval.
John failed miserably. He didn't want to hear how I felt, he just wanted me to do. He was emotionally unavailable. When I asked him to pray with me about my issues, he prayed instead about the work to accomplish. He regarded my bouts of depression as wasteful introspection, navel-gazing. He rarely asked how I was doing. When he sought me out it was because he had a task for me. But one day I shook my head and, like Nebuchadnezzar, was restored to my right mind. John never promised to be a father. He never said he would be part of my inner healing. He never ...
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