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My
life began (9-months before) November the eleventh in the year of 1989 in
Vidalia, Georgia. No matter the fact
that it would only be another fifty days or so before the year 1990 would roll
around, I still consider myself to be an 80’s baby. Of course, when people talk about the year
1989, it is not known as the year that Joshua Otto Gale was born—instead
everyone talks about the Berlin wall falling, which apparently was a bigger
deal—and though I am sure Heaven rejoiced, here on Earth the resounding noise
was that of, well, the doctor scribbling his signature on a piece of paper that
is complimentary with any successful delivery.
Maybe there was the sound of the pounding of the second hand of a clock
ticking away, a baby book opening, or my family quietly rejoicing that the
sixth, and final, member of our family had been born.
I
say this because on that Veteran’s day I was just another child to be added to
the statistic of an ever-increasing human population on our planet—in the eyes
of humanity, the wheel continued spinning away.
My father was a pastor of a Methodist church in Lyons and my mother hard
at work at home trying to raise my three older siblings and me. My parents were from Savannah, and when my
father answered the call to go into the ministry, I would be willing to place
bets they were quite shocked to find themselves in the small farming town of Lyons
where its neighboring city of Vidalia would be best known, of all things, for
its immense amount of onion crops. I
spent the first seven months of my life there learning the ways of the farming
life as much as a toddler could.
My
father was then appointed to a three-charge church in Irwinton, Georgia, where
he would serve for the next thirteen years of my life before leaving the pulpit
ministry to start his own nonprofit ministry, Unto the Least of His, to do
mission work all over the world. With a
population of 583, Irwinton is also the place where I call home and where I was
raised. There is one public school in
the entire county, of which I attended as a part of the white minority. The church, located across the driveway, was
where I received my informal education in nearly all matters, such as how to
use the PA system for karaoke. Of
course, one of the best, and arguably the worst, of places I gained my informal
education from, besides my parents, was from my older siblings. I had two older brothers and one older
sister. It is mostly from them I learned
how to play the guitar and piano, how to juggle, how to throw a Frisbee and how
to hit a baseball, how to make paper airplanes and a plethora of other useful
things that any human being would probably be okay without ever learning. It is from all those unique people, places,
and things that I ever interacted with that I developed my Christian faith.
Never
did I have the pleasure of having a single moment that I could pinpoint as the
moment that I gave my life to Christ and was saved. In fact, because this somewhat worried me
during my second year of college, I made sure publicly reaffirmed my faith in
front of a whole church congregation…if for no other reason than to make myself
feel better. I consider my mother and
father to both be champions of faith in my life, because it is from each of them
that I can look back for as far as I can remember and see them exemplifying
genuine Christianity as I know it. It is
important to note that it is not only the words I heard them say that impacted
my life, but it is from their actions of integrity that they always drove the
points home and made the best impressions.
High
school came around and along with it came probably the first major struggle in
my life. All three of my older siblings
got married within one year and moved out of the house, my dad started the
aforementioned non-profit ministry meaning we had to move, and there were the
natural transitions that occur between middle and high school. Unto the Least of His offered a major
opportunity to spread Christ’s love nationally and internationally, while the
atmosphere of high school offered the opportunities to become very self-serving,
and my newfound loneliness begged of me to grasp hold of something. Fortunately, I found a solid group of friends
to become a part of, and with them I was able to find my identity as someone
who did not have to reject my morals to become accepted. It is there that I set that pace for the rest
of my high school and college careers.
My
faith, at that point, had yet to fully become my own, but it was evolving with
each new day. I declared studio art as
my major, not knowing the ideological confrontations I would find myself
facing. The reason, I found, that it
began to mature with each day, is that each day comes with its own challenge,
and in college those challenges became much more frequent. With every year my
choices as a Christian were put under more pressure and I really began
searching. I needed God as an anchor in
my life, but I felt as though the ground I had given Christ was beginning to
shift—I, and my faith, was becoming my own. I never abandoned my faith in God, but that is
not to say it was never tested. I began
to realize God would never back down from my questions.
In
early 2010, a variety of sour circumstances caused me to feel like the floor
had fallen from underneath my feet. I
had been diving into artistic theory and learning of human psychology at the
time and I landed myself at a low place where I felt as though I was stripped
of nearly everything I had ever known.
It is from there that I read the Psalms of David where God is put into
question many times, or read in places like Hebrews 11:6 where it says, “anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that
he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”
I went to the Dominican Republic that summer to do photography and
mission work in the Haitian bateys. It
is from there that I began to see God as an artist, painting the most elaborate
painting ever; the work of God like the pigment for what secular Joseph Beuys
wrote as the “social sculpture,” everything collaborating in unison to create
one large social work of living art.
The
rest of life is now at my fingertips—the paradigm is mine to shift. I am not completely sure what God has in
store for me to do with the talents and skills I have been given, but what I am
sure of is that I want to use them to glorify God and to further Christ’s
ministry throughout the world by working in the ministry and fighting for what
is right. Ignorance is rampant, and I
realize now that I have spent much of my life fighting against it. Unfortunately, the religious have become
infamous for being naïve to reality.
Many have become incapable of listening and discerning what they hear
and therefore have become their own worst enemy; their inability to see and
interpret the context of their actions is their own downfall.
Against
the odds, I have come from a small town and have not become trapped by
small-town thinking. Against the odds, I
left my tiny high school and have become the first of my graduating class to
receive a 4-year diploma. Against odds,
I have maintained my faith through a variety of circumstances and feel stronger
and more confident than ever. After
spending a month living amongst the indigenous people of Kenya doing work with
water wells this past August, I made my decision to apply to Candler’s MDiv
program because I became aware that there is still so much to the mystery of
God to unravel, and with the unfolding of each layer there is always another
beautiful discovery. Candler’s
reputation for being a place for open-minded people lines up with my own
educational experience thus far and is not only a place that I feel that I
would like to be, but is also the type of place that I feel I belong and need
to be.
