I was on tiptoes on a chair hanging the paper drapes she and I had bought at Woolworth's in downtown Princeton. We were in the process of moving into "the Marrieds' Dorm" and she was seated on the side of the bed resting from her labours. There hadn't been all that much to move: the house we'd left in Toronto had been rented and furnished by the church, so we had few possessions. The common bathrooms were at the far end of the hall. We were doing a bit of mutual commiserating, Connie with her invariable good humour.
It had not been without a wrench that we had left family and friends and all our pleasant associations in Toronto. We were without any assurance of income.
Evangelical were, quite properly, suspicious of my orthodoxy, and the old-line churches hadn't yet taken a reading. Any romantic notions I might have had about the superior charity of candidates for the Presbyterian ministry had been disabused earlier that day when I was invited to join a game of touch football between returning students and "the new guys".
The word had been passed, "Get the Youth for Christer," and the game quickly became a contact sport. This was fine with me: I had played senior football and none of them had. When did jolt me was the fact that I had been judge a priori. I won't dwell on my three years at Princeton except to say that they were among the happiest in my life. I began the first semester filled with trepidation. I was thirty-three, ten years older than most of my fellows, and hadn't done any formal study in fifteen years.
Would I be able to handle the discipline? Could I meet the requirements? First-year subjects included Greek, hermeneutics, exegesis, homiletics, church history and ecumenics. Happily, after the first term I found little difficulty.
