I grew up in as Christian a home as you will find anywhere in the world. We went to church every time the doors were open, at least 4 services a week (more on the occasion of a special meeting) starting well before I was born. The main reasons behind the choice to home school were educational, but ensuring a spiritual education came in a close second. As you might expect, we had a class devoted to studying the Bible. Although we didn’t have much money, for every dollar we earned God got at least 10 cents, a policy that stood for both adults and children. My father was a long-standing deacon, the treasurer for longer than I’d been alive, served temporarily as Sunday School teacher, and started running the sound system as soon as the church got it. My family didn’t watch dirty movies or TV shows, no one swore, there was no alcohol, we dressed modestly, shunned Rock ‘n’ Roll, etc. We even spent our family vacations every year traveling 400 miles to Ypsilanti, Michigan for a Sunday-Friday Old-Fashioned Baptist Camp meeting, where I was one of the most distinguished Bible verse memorizers in the history of the camp.
Because my mother needed womanly amounts of time to get ready for church, my father did the shopping on Sunday mornings, taking all of us kids with him to give her the necessary time. Every Sunday morning there we were, a 6-person train chugging through the Dodge Street Hy-Vee dressed in our Sunday Best. Over time our conduct garnered the affection of many of the employees across most of the departments. The deli even gave us free beef/cheese sticks, and the bakery gave us free cookies every week for years. I think it was the floral department that nicknamed us “little angels,” since the group decision making on which flower(s) to get mother that week was when we were at our cutest. Growing up in that kind of environment, seeing the way people lived, hearing their stories of what God had done for them, had an effect on me. Religion wasn’t just a ritual or a group we belonged to, it was a way of life. And it wasn’t just my parent’s religion, but mine as well. From as early as I could remember I had no doubt God was real, and wanted to be saved.
However, while we may have been dubbed “little angels,” we were quick to adopt the saying “we rest our little halos on our little demon horns,” and I was indeed an adequately monstrous child. Growing up in a rough part of town with a boarding house down the block from us that earned a police visit at least once a week, and next door drug-dealers on one side. A couple houses the other way was a grumpy old man and his grumpy old wife whose names we never learned, but were referred to as “Mr. and Mrs. FourCars,” a term my mother came up with for the couple that took up more than their share of the limited parking space on the block. The only thing I remember about them was that he once lied to my father that we’d had our dog jump on his wife, knock her down, and then laughed at her. Fortunately, my father knew the dog better than that. We weren’t allowed to go outside alone, and very rarely played with the other children in the neighborhood, who were mostly considered bad influences. That meant playing with each other, and that regularly meant brawling in hatefully instead. Or, if you were my brother Paul it meant chasing me with the butcher knife with serious intent to harm, something that happened on multiple occasions.
Being poor, free entertainment venues were our only entertainment venues. In the summer we would spend the mornings at a city-run program called Playground, where Prescott, the elementary school near us, as well as various other sites across the city were manned by workers with a couple of crates full of balls, hockey sticks, playing cards, and other recreational material. I managed to get kicked out of Playground for varying amounts of time, every year I went, across multiple parks and multiple workers, for getting into fights. One time when my brother John, 2 years older than me, and I were at Prescott playing baseball with tennis balls, we played with some kids we didn’t know, and afterwards they knowingly walked off with two of our bats. I went after them with the one remaining bat, threatening the three or four of them with a savage beating followed by police action. I didn’t know what to make of it when they handed over the bats, and still don’t, but that’s what happened. A family with 5 boys and 1 modest income had enough means to meet most needs but scarcely any wants, which understandably led to a lot of conflict. We fought so much that my mother’s default reaction was to ignore it. While two children were fighting she would just instruct a third. All that fighting, usually against stronger opponents, built an indomitable spirit. “Never give up, never surrender” was my official life motto, and I might as well have added “never back down,” for all the delicacy with which I picked my battles. I don’t think it’s fair to say living in a rough neighborhood creates Mr.Hydes, but it certainly does give food for that kind of nature to grow, and I was no exception.
Tigger and E-bounce were my nicknames when I was young, and most people knew me as a vibrant, lively, and generally happy child. Few would have guessed that I struggled with chronic depression and had serious suicidal thoughts starting somewhere around the age of 7. My parents, particularly my father, were disillusioned with psychology, so no diagnosis was ever made, or any type of treatment applied. Every bit of me was conflicted, every fiber of my being at war with itself, every characteristic that defined me had to be qualified by a similar tendency for the opposite characteristic. I existed solely at the extremities, and found tenuous balance by alternating those extremes. While I loved to be truly obedient and reap the rewards that came with it, there was also a distinct pleasure in rebellion, leading to a double life of sorts, eating my green vegetables by day and stealing cookies by night. While I learned young that lying was never worth it, ever, I became extremely proficient in masking crimes in such a way that there was never an investigation, in creating distractions/diversions, or finding ways to let others draw the right conclusion for my interests. While I craved learning and felt exquisite pleasure growing my mind, I viciously despised all of my studies except reading, and found ways to dodge them more often than do them.
As I aged, the extremes became more and more pronounced, the pendulum went further with each swing, going further yet traveling slower. The swings were long and growing longer, lasting months or years. As I took another swing through depression, I became acutely aware of how miserable I was in life even when my brain chemistry didn’t force me to be. In part because I had never made one single friend, in part because the quality of life for a family bordering on poverty was horrendous, and in part due to frustration at perceived failure stemming from an uncompromisingly ambitious nature in a competitive environment. One night during a particularly miserable slog, the heat was too bad to sleep in the second story of our house that lacked air conditioning. As I did my best to sleep, I planned out my suicide. I would go down to the kitchen, pick the long knife with the marbley-white handle with my right hand, place it against the refrigerator, count to three, and with one motion push my head and hand towards each other, stabbing myself through the temple. Only I can know how committed I was to this plan, and the intervention needed for me to somehow fall asleep before I went to enact it.
My internal conflict came to a head the Summer of 2003, when I was 10. Our church had rented out a campgrounds an hour or two away from Dubuque for a relaxed camp to bond together and pray about getting a bigger church building, as we were starting to exceed the capacity of our current one. One night during the services there was a powerful message that made me ready to get saved, but it didn’t feel quite right, something was missing, and I knew it. I didn’t go forward, I just sat there, thinking. I didn’t want to pretend to get saved- I was dead sure of that- pretending would be both a lie and a failure. I came to the conclusion at some point (before, during, or after that evening I can’t remember) that what was missing was God, or more specifically the Holy Spirit, the part of God that touches the heart and pulls the strings of the soul. While I was ready and willing, “the One that time means nothing to” wasn’t ready and/or willing right then, or so I figured.
A month or so later, we took our annual vacation trip to Camp Achor in Ypsilanti. As usual, I rocked the memory verses pretty hard, was a distinguished member of the trash pickup crew, and was a prime figure in 9-square. 9-square was a magnificent game that worked perfectly on the 9 squares of concrete that made up the camp’s basketball court. It was like 4-square, only bigger and better. The bigger court meant you could follow different paths to get from the last square to the first one, either a snake (zig-zag), or a spiral, depending on who the king/queen was. The king/queen would introduce their own laws unique to their kingdom, such as allowing certain kinds of holds, stops, and stomps on the ball, or demanding a new color or type of car be said by the person hitting the ball each time the ball was hit. More space meant more types of playable bounces, so you could also bring in different sized balls, ranging from volleyballs to balls three times the size of a basketball, which had a big effect on how the ball would behave. The size of the court also led to a decent amount of running around, making it a physical activity that people from as young as 7 or 8 to those in their 50s could enjoy. When more than 9 people wanted to play, a line would form behind the last square, and some days the line got as big as 20 or 30 people -I’m not exaggerating. Half of them could have broke off and played on the volleyball court right next to them, but 9-square was good enough that they didn’t.
As with most activities, the bad part about 9-square was the people. Kids can be cruel, and teens are half-kid, so when around other kids, they turn into kids that think they’re better than everyone. I was routinely cheated and bullied at 9-square, which was not only okay with Isaiah, our firstborn, 6 years my elder, and prominent member of the 9-square community, it was often instigated by him. The edge of this knife was blunted when adults were around, but even they would typically say something like “looked like it was in to me, but everyone else says out.” Years later, my brother John’s best friend K.B. confessed that they had targeted me for persecution intentionally. As you can imagine, it was agony.
On Friday, the last day of camp, I snapped. It was only for a second, but it was enough. Sometime in the afternoon/evening one of the older kids hit a slam on my square that landed in the grass several yards away, well out of retrieving distance. I walked over to it, picked it up, and hurled it with all my force and an angry grunt back into the court. More specifically, it went right into the face of Racquel Shock, who immediately went down and burst into tears. Part of the contradictory parts of my nature was that I always had to be first, always had to win, and that meant destroying opponents. Actually hurting people in practice however, filled me with horror and disgust for myself like nothing else. The instant the ball hit her face all my anger turned to pale dread. To make matters worse, her father was playing with us, having just moved into the square I had lost. Every bit of grief and trembling that wracked my being he doubled, simultaneously comforting her and torturing me. Something akin to the hippocratic oath was weaved in the fibre of my being, and when an event like this happened my spirit stretched to the breaking point, and my will was shaken for some time.
Earlier that day in one of the children’s services I had been a part of, the lesson had been on the Great White Throne Judgement. I don’t think I remembered anything particularly special about it (I already knew I was going to Hell) except a picture representing the event that stuck in my mind at the time. I payed reasonable attention to the message that night, but don’t remember a thing about it except that Frankie Hunt, a fire-spittin’ run & jump preacher, was the speaker, and I thought it was a good message. When the invitation came I felt a pull in my soul, I knew it was the time, but I resisted. I was afraid of something, I didn’t know what, and as I struggled on the front row I came to realize it was surrender. Surrendering was the ultimate evil because it meant you couldn’t move on to take first place. The one thing I was consistent on was not surrendering, “never give up, never surrender” was my official life motto after all.
It was a long invitation, even by camp standards. Everyone had their eyes closed, both to encourage prayer and to give some measure of privacy to those going to the altar. Pam Long, a gifted singer and wife of an evangelist sang the song “The Altar” multiple times, which contained the line “come quickly now, before they close the door.” That line reverberated through my mind, and I felt an ominous sense of foreboding that if I didn’t get saved here and now, I never would. I decided that this was a worthy exception to make to life policy. There was however, one final obstacle, one last boss to defeat: my mother.
My mother embodied everything that most people despise about Christians, the hypocrisy, the pushiness, the ignorance, etc. My father was mostly the opposite, embodying the good in Christianity, the reason why I could have faith in it. It was common practice for parents to follow their children to the altar for spiritual counsel, and with all the times we’d been alone in a car and my mother asked “Why aren’t you saved yet?” I didn’t want her there to ruin it. As I made my decision to surrender, and realized the need for her to be out of the way, I asked God to move her. A second later, my brother Paul, 3 years younger than me announced to my parents that he had been saved at the camp earlier that summer. They decided to leave the tent and discuss it with him outside. I had my chance.
I took one step forward, noting the surprise on John who was sitting next to me as I did, and sort of walk/collapsed the other step onto the altar. My pastor was also the camp song leader, which meant he would be on the platform the altar was an extension of, and I assumed he’d be on me within a couple seconds, but the time ticked by and there was still no Preacher (the informal name our church used for him). I began to despair. Was I just not worthwhile enough to bother with? I’m not an emotional person, and crying in public is just flat out of the question, but I couldn’t control it there, collapsed on carpet-covered platform. The invitation officially came to a close as the camp moderator (a humble term for the director), took a few minutes to come up to transition to the next speaker. When he did, Elisha, our youngest and six years my junior, making him 4 years old, came up and pulled on my shirt, telling me it was time to get back to my seat. As I reached back to pull him off and tell him to go away, my hand connected with him, and before I could say anything I heard Preacher’s voice say something along the lines of “you go back son, I’ll take care of this.”
He knelt down with me, putting his arm over my shoulder to comfort me as I lie crying and shaking. I assumed it was obvious why I was there, and was a bit surprised and slightly angry when he asked “are you lost?” He knew very well I was lost, and I wanted to say something smart, but just replied “yes.” Then he had the gall to ask me “do you want to be saved?” I wanted to hit him for being so slow. Of course I was there to get saved. What else are lost people blubbering at an altar after the invitation is over there for? I replied with a stronger “yes” that betrayed my impatience. He prayed with me, I don’t remember the words, but I agreed with them, and then he said “Amen. Did he save you?” I took a breath, and in that breath filled with the best feeling I’d ever had. It was warm, it was peaceful, it was comforting, but I didn’t know what it was, where it came from, or how to fully describe what it meant in to me in the background of my full life. An old gospel song goes “I can tell you the time, I can take you to the place… but I cannot tell you how, and I cannot tell you why.” In other words, giving the factual events is possible, but the details and explanations that actually matter about the event are beyond my ability.
We had breakfast the next morning with the McDermotts, good friends we’d made from going to the camp every year from well before I’d been alive, and they asked me how it felt to be saved. “Good” was the only response I could give, as I was still grasping my new self, for I had indeed changed in ways I yet had no conception of. The two halves of my being were still there, and the war was real, but one side was definitely in control now. I had my first friend, Jesus, corny and cliche as that sounds, and I was determined to do everything to make that friendship the best one possible; it was all I had at the time. In the two years following I not only caught up in the studies I was behind in, but got a little ahead, and by the time I entered 7th grade and started taking classes part time in the public school system had conquered most of my problems with violence as well. I was happy for years, and the fight with depression and suicide was so faint it seemed non-existent. I went from nearly destroying myself, to becoming the happy, intelligent, well-adjusted youth people thought I already was.
I made great connections with adults during middle school, but only decent ones with peers. I was only there for 2 periods of the day, but knew half the teachers in the building, facilitated partly by traversing the building for the school newspaper and being in all 4 sports (Football, Wrestling, Basketball, and Track), and partly through an aptitude for being friendly with adults. I got straight “A”s, did well in Football and Wrestling, and stayed out of trouble for the most part. Being hit by a car while riding my bike home in the fall of 8th grade, is how I’m able to remember when I first started playing Starcraft, real Starcraft. We’d had a demo of Starcraft for years which I enjoyed, but by spending some of the time during our weekly library visits researching it, I discovered it was both an affordable and intriguing game. I memorized data tables on damage types and values, which I hold with me to this day, before I even convinced Paul to pool his money with me to find a copy on Ebay and buy it.
With the time I had to take off from football, I spent playing Starcraft, enjoying it immensely, and was pained to leave it when my leg healed. One day I lost track of time and was late getting to practice because of Starcraft, and not for the first time. I realized in a flash I had let it take up too much of my time, as it was getting in the way of priorities. I quit “cold turkey” for a week or so until I was satisfied that I was in control, then I began carefully regulating how much I would let myself play it. If you are able to restrain yourself from the one thing you want the most, you are able to control yourself completely, and I did indeed develop overpowering self-control. Over the years, Starcraft’s rich variety of strategy games became an invaluable source of learning, developing my mind in new, exciting, and advanced ways which would be my most cherished asset in times to come.
I did much better making friends among my peers in high school than middle school. I’d learned a lot about the animal-like mind of the average kid my age, and learning not to introducing myself as a homeschooler was the biggest trick. Stereotypes are dangerous things, and I had to delay the news that I was homeschooled as much as possible to avoid them putting me in “a-social” category of people in their world. Once you get placed in that box, it’s difficult to get out because you can’t break out through any strength of your own, you have to make them want to let you out. As usual, I excelled in my classes, and did decently well in Cross Country, Wrestling, and Track, also getting involved with the theater crowd a little bit, and getting elected to student council at the end of my sophomore year.
The most impactful experiences from those 2 years at my high school were by far freshman wrestling and AP World history. I was never fat by any stretch of the imagination, but my freshman year I had to cut from 135 pounds (I was roughly 6 foot tall) to 120 pounds (technically 119 before Christmas break, 121 after). I’m pretty sure my coaches fudged numbers to let me legally go that weight class instead of 125, the next weight class up. Whether they did or not, managing my weight led to incredible binging/purging cycles and a variety of short-term health problems. My energy in living life went from exuberant to melancholic. The color drained from my skin, the moisture left my hands, feet, lips, and mouth, while my eyes sunk in.
What you can’t understand about hunger, real hunger, until you live through it, is that it’s depressing, and I don’t mean that in the colloquial sense of the word, but rather the the diagnostic definition. Everything slows down: your pulse, your metabolism, your movements, time itself slows down around you, and you’re miserable- everything good that happens is muted, and everything bad that happens is glaring. Because time has slowed down, the misery lasts longer, and because you’re miserable time slows down further, and you fall into a neverending spiral where the best thing in the world is non-existence, obtained daily in the form of sleep, but even that is broken by your stomach eating itself in the middle of the night, or the cold wrestling you into consciousness because your body can’t heat itself. The extra fatigue of sleep deprivation just weakens your immune system further and makes time slow down faster.
Putting one step in front of the other and meeting the minimums in every aspect of my life was about all I could do. No Warnke had ever missed weight before me, and I would not to be the family disappointment. Going to more grueling practices than my lively imagination had ever imagined, on the weakest condition my body had ever been in felt like a racecar trying to race on fumes. What’s more, Isaiah had earned the hardest worker award every year he’d been in wrestling, and the fire that drove me through life was to outdo everything he had ever done, so simply making it through practice and hitting the right numbers on the scale wasn’t enough. I hate the oppressive constriction of dry, suffocating atmospheric heat with a burning passion, but went to practice every day in sweatclothes or worse, often with a bag of ice on the thermostat to bring the temperature in the room up, occasionally over 100 degrees. I weighed myself multiple times a day, every day through the entire season, like an addiction to something I hated, monitoring my food intake and outgo to the minutest details, despite always being unhappy with the numbers on the scale. One time, in order to make weight I had to go from 128 pounds to 119 in less than 48 hours with one practice in between, with my typically high metabolism practically dead. I made it. Another time, at the end of Christmas break, with a meet the first day of school, I went with my youth group on a day trip to a place with lazer tag, a bounce house rated for teenagers, and other activities of that nature. Afterwards we went to my favorite restaurant, Ryan’s, a buffet with fabulous steak and a variety of other fantastic foods. I sat there, already hungry from a couple days of cutting, and watched others enjoy my favorite foods as I ate the muffin I’d brought with me, but I didn’t miss weight. It was the most physically trying period of my life, but I adapted and overcame.
We Warnkes always missed one meet a year, the one that occurred during our Church’s January meeting, the Jubilee, which had a Thursday service to attend. Maybe the extra couple days to make weight helped me break the binge/purge cycle, maybe all the jubilation going around gave me something positive to latch onto that just made things work out, maybe after 3 months of rigor my body had adapted, maybe the coaches trying to half-taper practice worked, and maybe all of them and more, but the last two weeks were distinguishably bearable, and at spots even enjoyable.
When it was over, I put back on all 15 pounds in 2 days (10-12 of which was on the first day) and put on another 5 in the next week which I kept around until I made the far easier drop from 145 to 135 the next year. If I had been exuberantly full of life before the ordeal, I was irrepressibly exuberantly full of life afterwards, it felt like nothing could even try to stand in my way. My grades were flawless, my running times improved well, I was popular, my starcraft prowess and reputation gradually rose to unprecedented levels, I did more and more with my church and youth group (even becoming the backup piano player), I made it onto BSA summer camp staff and did some great things while on it, I was on top of life, riding it with as much euphoria as anyone ever had. AP World History with Wulfekuhle was the gasoline on my fire of life. Wulfekuhle was a legend around the school, he had a way of teaching that captured you. Your time, your attention, your imagination, all of it. And by it I mean your being, your existence in and out of the plane of reality. My reasoning faculties blossomed in his class, and my ability to understand the forces that shape cultures and people bloomed similarly. While this may be a shorter explanation than wrestling’s, it was just as impactful.
Those were the best days of my life. I didn’t just get older, I grew in every dimension- wisdom, stature, favor with God & man. I developed my mind through serious application to my studies and Starcraft, integrating them into the way I interacted with the world. I developed my body through sports, learning more about the human body from cross country my freshman year than I did from Biology, and about food’s dynamics on the body from wrestling. I developed my spirit from the Crucible that was wrestling my freshman year, refining the tenacious, indomitable approach that characterized my doings. Through all these things my soul was developed as well; I became closer and closer to my Friend, and understood more and more what he expected of me, and why. With my ability to shape the world grew the compassion and compulsion to do so according to his guidance.
If you'd like to be a part of the Llama Llegion, subscribe below. Want more like this? Check out the affiliate links page, and see if there's a way for you to support the blog with purchases you're already making. Do you write relevant ramblings, or other creative content? Let's talk about it. New content every Saturday, sometimes more.
Just the fact you honorably belong in this family, is a blessing. Thank you for the honor and thank you for allowing a glimpse at You! So much and the ability in expressing. You are that gift and that honor.