Is You Okay? (8 page)

It's easy to say that it's okay to be different, that it doesn't matter when you start, that if you don't make excuses and work hard on what needs to be done, everything will work out in the end.

But how? How do you do all that? I had no answers to those questions for a long time. I'm still not sure I do, if I'm being perfectly honest—I only know how
I
got to where I am today.

And for me, it really did start with faith.

My whole life I've been a Believer. I've had a personal relationship with Him. I've known the Word. I've had Faith. Actually, it
started
with Faith with a capital
F
(as in my religion), and then, as I got older and wiser, it turned into faith with a lowercase
f
(as in belief). It was when I found
that
faith that things really started to change.

I've been going to church regularly since I was a baby.

Churchgoing started with my parents, who were fairly religious and made sure my sister and I knew the Word. Being a music teacher, my mom taught me to play the piano and sing before I learned how to read, and the best place to develop that talent when you were as young as me was at church, so I sang in the choir at my mom's church, and at my school church.

When I got to high school, beyond being fairly religious, my parents also got fairly protective. They were always worried that the bad kids in the neighborhood would do something to us, or convince DeOnzell and me to join them in acting out, like we lived inside one of those antidrugs public service announcements. What this meant for us in practice was that if we ever wanted to do anything after school besides sit around the house and watch TV, it would have to involve the church. Church was where the good kids and the good influences were. (Plus they had snacks.) What more could you ask for as a parent? God was basically our babysitter, and my mom didn't even have to get in the car—the church would pick us up and drop us off, too.

Like any high school girl, I wanted to get out of the house as much as I could. If church was the only way that was going to happen, then so be it—I would take advantage. So I signed up to sing and play piano for any congregation that had room for me. Besides playing at my mom's church and school, I played piano in the youth choir, and I found other congregations with good music programs, too. That's another reason to go to a good church—those church members taught me more about music and performing and collaborating with others than anyone else. And they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.

One of those places that helped me learn how to perform was the youth choir at a traditional Methodist church run by a man named Pastor Davis. His church was the first time I felt a real connection—not only with God, but also with the people and the pastor, and
myself
.

I think what connected me to that church was the fact that I had found it on my own and decided to join it myself. I was a baby when I was baptized, so I didn't have the chance to make that decision, and then had no say in where my mom went to church or where I went to grade school. Those places of worship were chosen for me. Pastor Davis's church was
mine
.

Pastor Davis was old school. The church had a shop where girls learned how to sew and the boys learned woodworking or how to fix cars. I don't think you could get away with such strict gender roles today, but back in the day, Pastor Davis didn't care—he just wanted to give his young people skills.

Pastor Davis took to me right away. He loved my hard work and strong spirit so much he even wanted me to marry his son, Calvin.

Well, that's not true exactly—it's not that
he
wanted me to marry Calvin, it was that
He
did. “God told me you were going to marry my son,” Pastor Davis told me one day while I was still in high school. I was a good daughter, a good
student, and a good Christian—if God told Pastor Davis that I was going to marry his son, He must also have told him that everyone thought Calvin was a jerk, right? I wouldn't believe it, if He didn't tell Pastor Davis that, too. I sure couldn't believe it—the God I knew didn't test people like this! In retrospect, should I have questioned Pastor Davis's judgment a little right then? Possibly. But I was young, and this was Pastor Davis, and I was dedicated to his church.

I ended up playing for Pastor Davis's youth choir for several years—through the end of high school, while I went to community college and took care of my dad, then my first three years at UF. I'd come home every weekend most times just to play. I probably should have found a church up at the University of Florida, to have a chance at a more traditional college experience, but I didn't want to leave Pastor Davis's congregation, and they didn't want me to leave either. I was a young person playing for their young people. I was a role model for them. The church leaders respected me and were proud of me. I was somebody there.

My experience at Pastor Davis's church was the first time I can remember feeling within me a sense of something greater than myself. Having a talent was good for my self-esteem, especially when I was young (and different), but there are limits to talent for its own sake. If it doesn't take you anywhere, what's the point? When you attach that talent to
something bigger, though, that's when mountains really start to move. For me, playing at that church transformed my
crazy dream
of becoming an entertainer into
a purpose
that was completely attainable. I'd been doing it to packed pews for more than five years. Why couldn't I do it to full theaters or live studio audiences?

My Faith, I realize now, had helped me find
faith
. . . in myself. It was a great feeling.

Faith isn't a simple, uncomplicated thing, though. There's a tricky part to it that they don't teach you about in school or in church, and it's this: Faith can make you lazy. Faith can be so comfortable, like a warm blanket, that it lulls you to sleep; so grounding, it cements you in place; so self-affirming, it feels as natural as breathing. Faith makes it easy to go with the flow, without any worries about where the flow is going or whether you want to go that way.

This will probably sound as crazy to read as it was to write, but I first learned all that about faith by wearing pants.

In the summer before my senior year at UF, I had slipped comfortably into my routine back at home—helping my dad, playing with the youth choir—and without thinking, one
day I wore pants to choir practice. You would have thought I walked into the church wearing no pants at all. One of the older women in the congregation immediately grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me aside.

“Young lady, you are not allowed to wear pants in church,” the older lady told me. “Women shouldn't wear pants.”

Not allowed? Pants? Really?

After choir practice, Pastor Davis called me into his office. The walls were covered in portraits of Jesus and the Apostles. On his desk was a well-worn Bible.

“GloZell, I want you to read something,” Pastor Davis said. He turned the Bible around and slid it in front of me. “Deuteronomy 22:5.”

I found the verse and recited it as Pastor Davis nodded along in agreement.

“A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto Jehovah thy God.”

When I was finished reading, I just sat there. Pastor Davis looked at me, looked at my pants, looked at the Bible, then looked back at me again. It was like he was trying to connect the dots for me with his eyes. But I didn't need any help; I
knew what he was getting at. I guess he still wanted to make sure, because then he said, “Anyone who is going to marry my son needs to know the rules,” like he was letting me peek at the answer key in the teacher's manual to the textbook on Faith.

What is wrong with these people?
I thought.
We're talking about pants. Are they crazy? But wait, this is in the Bible, this is the Word, it can't be
that
crazy. Does this mean there's something wrong with
me
?

Today, especially in America, it might be hard to grasp the notion that a girl wearing pants could create this much turmoil. I mean, there is a whole series of books dedicated to a magical pair of jeans that fit an entire
sisterhood
of girls! How bad could pants really be? What you need to understand is this was a different time, and a different place, and issues like this were very real. They are issues that women in other parts of the world still struggle against, actually.

I truly was conflicted as I sat silently across from Pastor Davis, thinking about everything I had learned in church since I was a child, and everything I had learned over the previous three years at UF. I had been studying the history of costume and fashion while getting my bachelor's of fine arts in musical theater, so I knew a few things about clothes. For example, did you know high heels were first designed for
fancy, aristocrat
men
? Then I thought about burly Scottish men in kilts, and bearded Arab men in thawbs (those long, floor-length robes). Finally, I looked around Pastor Davis's office at framed pictures of all these holy men . . . all of them wearing liturgical garments, a.k.a., dresses.

Nobody would ever say a Scotsman in a kilt isn't manly—and certainly not to his face. No one would call an Arab man in a thawb a woman. And let's not even get started with Jesus or the Apostles, walking around the Holy Land in robes.

I wasn't going to debate Pastor Davis, though. Not only was I a little unsure of my arguments back then, but pastors are like fathers—arguing with them is useless. You're better off just nodding respectfully, taking from them what makes sense to you, and then ignoring the rest. Plus, I already knew what Pastor Davis would say:
That's different—Jesus lived thousands of years ago. Times have changed.

And that would have been exactly my point! It was 1996. Bill Clinton was the president. My girl Hillary was the First Lady—the queen of pantsuits! Everyone in the congregation probably voted for Bill Clinton. Were these people trying to tell me that it was okay to vote for Bill, but don't you dare dress like his wife? It made no sense to me.

My conversation with Pastor Davis had a deep effect on me. Doubt started seeping in—doubts about myself, and doubts
about the church. Times had changed, styles had changed,
I had changed,
even many biblical interpretations had changed
.
The only people who didn't seem to get the memo were Pastor Davis and some of the ladies in the congregation.

And so, in my last year at UF, I decided to stop going to Pastor Davis's church altogether. It didn't feel right to worship there anymore.

This made a lot of people very unhappy—mostly for their own selfish reasons related to the choir, I would say—but I realized I had to start thinking on my own and questioning what I had been taking for granted, or else the doubts would continue to grow. I was still a Believer, but I didn't believe what
they
believed. Their Word was not the Word I had come to know.

Leaving that church was a very scary thing to do, at least at first. The faith I found in that church was my foundation, the first foundation I chose for myself. Leaving it would be like flying without a net. What if I was wrong? What if I misstepped? If I fell, it would be a long way down.

What made the decision easier to bear was the uncomfortable fact that my Faith had started to shake the faith I was building in myself, right at the time I was beginning to recognize how important
both
were to me. I couldn't let one
jeopardize the other, not if the conflict was going to make me feel this way, which was horrible.

I know a lot of people don't have the same kind of religious faith I do, and that's totally great. When I talk about Faith with a capital
F,
I'm not really referring to religion, anyway. What I'm talking about is a belief in something bigger than yourself. It can be God, of course, but it can also be family, or people, or justice, or peace. It almost doesn't matter, as long as it is a source of good.

What
does
matter, as I learned from my experience in Pastor Davis's youth choir—both being a part of it and leaving it—is that faith in something bigger than myself was the true source for finding faith
in myself
. This gave me the confidence and inspiration to question everything around me and think for myself. It formed the foundation and the safety net that I needed to go out into the world, fulfill my purpose, and hopefully do special, amazing things.