Sand and Soil

A Memoir by Stetson Glass

I’ve started to think the soul is shaped like a map—creased, torn, smudged by the fingers that keep trying to fold it back into something neat. I’ve spent most of my life tracing routes someone else drew for me: church aisles, chalk-lined classrooms, marriage vows, griefs disguised as callings. Now I’m learning to redraw it—not to find my way back, but to understand where I got lost.

Some maps are written in sermons. Others in songs. Mine has both—ink and callus, prayer and noise.

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I. The First Coordinates

I grew up in central Florida, where the ground was more sand than soil and everything baked beneath the kind of heat that bleaches color out of the day. My world was humid and holy, stitched together by family, church, and the slow rhythm of summer afternoons.

My Pa preached at a small white church with green trim off Mud Lake Road—The Potter’s House. He painted everything those same two colors because he said they looked like peace. It wasn’t much more than a single sanctuary with a Sunday school room near the front and two in the back, but it held the whole world for me. Pa never took a dime from the pulpit. He said the gospel wasn’t a paycheck.

My Nanny sat on the front pew every Sunday, the holiest and most fearful person I knew. She saw the devil in everything: Pokémon, Power Rangers, long hair on boys, loud guitars. Yet she loved fiercely, and her faith made the air shimmer.

The church smelled of lemon polish and lavender carpet powder. On Sundays, it swelled with sound—people crying, shouting, speaking in tongues. It felt like touching the edge of heaven. I remember sunlight cutting through the green-trimmed windows, dust floating like prayers that never landed. I thought that must be what heaven felt like—a place where everyone was sure of something.

At ten, I preached my first sermon there, hands trembling from what I thought was the Holy Ghost. I’d preach to anyone—family, friends, even the dog—believing I was chosen. When I was eight, the church staged a play where I played a boy who never repented and went to hell. The flames were red cellophane and a box fan, but I still lost sleep.

Faith, back then, was a map I never questioned. But around fifteen, I felt the compass tremble. I didn’t know it yet, but that was the sound of unlearning.

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II. The Road to Calling

I never meant to become a teacher. I stumbled into it like someone opening the wrong door and realizing, somehow, it was home.

The classroom wasn’t much—blank walls, flickering lights—but I spent nearly everything I had making it warm and alive. I wanted it to feel like a place where failure wasn’t final, where curiosity could breathe.

I started in science, though my heart was in words. I discovered that learning, like faith, isn’t about answers—it’s about invitation. If I could make students want to come to school, growth would follow.

In those early years, I realized the classroom was its own kind of pulpit. Every lesson was a sermon about curiosity. Every student, a parishioner in search of grace they didn’t yet have words for.

As a student, my brain always made learning a battlefield. I’d forget directions but ace the test. Lose the worksheet but remember the story. I wanted to be the teacher who noticed kids like me—the ones who learned sideways.

I moved from middle to high school and worked from a Bachelor’s in Ministerial Leadership, a Masters in Theology, and eventually began my PhD in biblical studies, imagining I’d teach at a university someday. But every day in the classroom was already sacred.

I didn’t preach to students, but old habits lingered. Between lessons, I’d slip in small sermons about worth and respect. Some would roll their eyes. Most listened. I was good at getting through.

One student still follows me like a parable. She hated English, scarred by worksheets and lexile scores. She had ADHD and couldn’t sit still through long lectures. I recognized her restlessness—it was mine too.

To teach inference, I turned the class into a murder mystery. I dressed as Sherlock Holmes; students played suspects. That girl laughed for the first time in my class. A few weeks later, her mother found me at a volleyball game and cried as she thanked me—her daughter was reading for fun, writing poetry, coming alive.

That night, driving home beneath streetlights, I realized teaching wasn’t a detour from my calling; it was my calling.

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III. The Fault Line

The first crack in the map appeared when I was fifteen, flipping through the red-letter words of my Bible. A thought crept up and hit me:

“Jesus probably wouldn’t endorse a Republican.”

It sounds small now, but then it felt like heresy. In my world, faith and politics were braided like rope—pull one, and both unravel. I carried that thought in silence for years, afraid someone might see the doubt forming under my skin.

But once an idea takes root, it doesn’t die quietly. I kept reading the Gospels, hoping to prove myself wrong. Instead, the words undid me. The Jesus I found there blessed all the people I’d been taught to fear.

When I finally believed differently—and later voted differently—the repercussions came fast. Family dinners turned to interrogations. My name surfaced in prayers that sounded like warnings. I was still family, but no longer familiar.

Even Nanny struggled to understand. When I became a deacon in the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, wearing a clergy collar and carrying a theology that left room for questions, she couldn’t reconcile it. Tattoos were rebellion; collars were Catholic.

On her deathbed, she reached for my hand and said, “I hope I’ll see you in heaven—but I’m not sure I will, because of those tattoos and that collar.”

I didn’t argue. I just held her hand and said I loved her. That was the last sermon either of us ever preached.

For weeks after her funeral, I couldn’t open my Bible. The margins still carried her underlines—tiny notes in a trembling hand: Trust Him. I wanted to. More than anything. But all I could do was stare at the ink and feel the distance between our versions of faith widening with every page I didn’t turn.

Faith doesn’t return you to your past; it leads you through it. I began to see belief not as a fortress, but as a fault line—a place where the ground must break before it can shift.

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IV. The Marriage Map

We married young and full of certainty—two bright lights in the same revival tent, sure God had written our names beside each other’s. We were youth pastor and wife — as bad as that now sounds — preaching abstinence to teens while privately living our own complicated truth.

For a while, it worked. We built a life from prayer meetings and hand-me-down furniture, believing sincerity could sanctify anything.

When faith began to crack, so did we. We trusted God to give us a child, but infertility stretched a decade. Each year changed the way we prayed. We adopted four siblings who filled the house with laughter, but longing lingered beneath the noise.

Meanwhile, my mind unraveled. Overstimulated, volatile, restless, I was diagnosed with ADHD at twenty-five. It explained so much—and exposed more. I felt like a burden and convinced myself leaving my wife was mercy; was what love looked like.

I still remember one night, long before either of us said the word separation. The kids were asleep, the house dark except for the blue glow of a lamp. She sat on the edge of the bed, crying quietly, saying she couldn’t recognize the man beside her. I wanted to explain the storm inside my head, the way thoughts collided until I could barely hear her through the noise. But I just said I was tired, and turned away. That silence became its own language.

Eventually, I left. She begged me to stay. I couldn’t.

I found an apartment, dated, tried to quiet the noise. But when she began dating too, the pain I’d escaped returned sharper. We reconciled for a while—late-night talks, cautious laughter—but independence, once found, doesn’t fuse easily. A year later, she left.

That second loss broke me deeper. The first time, I left out of guilt; this time, I was left.

Months later, I came by to see the kids. One thing led to another, and we crossed that old line between grief and desire. Weeks later, she called, trembling: she was pregnant.

What ten years of prayer couldn’t accomplish, separation somehow did.

Apparently, God wasn’t done with us.

We reconciled again—this time, not with illusions of perfection but with honesty. We laid everything bare: exhaustion, resentment, hope. Healing came quietly, like dawn through blinds.

When our son was born, it felt like both promise and parable. Now, years later, we have him and another child on the way—a daughter. Our house is full of laughter, fingerprints, and a peace that doesn’t pretend to be perfect.

We still argue, still get lost, but every time I see her hand resting on her belly, I remember how love sometimes has to die to be reborn.

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V. The Return

After I left, the nights stretched endless. I’d lie awake, the room heavy with dread, haunted by everything I’d broken. I drank too much, rode my motorcycle too fast, tried to outpace my guilt. Mornings came too bright; hangovers too honest.

I missed my kids more than I missed God. Seeing them was joy and punishment at once. Once, my son asked why I came to visit if I wasn’t his dad anymore. The words split me open. As adopted children who had already been removed and placed, this was adding to their trauma. It broke me further — deeper than I knew I could break.

I went to church again, not for theology, but for rhythm. I played on the worship band and hid behind the drums—the only place I could still participate without pretending. The sticks became my rosary, the beat my confession. Every downstroke said what I couldn’t: I’m still here.

One night, sleepless, I found the Book of Common Prayer. The Daily Office gave me words when I had none. Those borrowed prayers carved a quiet path through the static.

Between that and my writing on The Apocalypse of John, I began feeling a slow pull again. Revelation had terrified me as a child—the blood, the beasts, the endless judgment. But now, studying it for my PhD, I found not wrath but restoration: a Lamb, not a lion. The Apocalypse wasn’t an ending; it was an unveiling. What burned away wasn’t the world, but illusion. I saw that holiness wasn’t about leaving the world behind, but learning to love it better.

I didn’t just write a thesis; it rewrote me. Each page became a mirror, showing that judgment looks a lot like healing, and resurrection happens through ruin, not after it.

Eventually, we moved to North Carolina for a slower life—pastures, parades, flea markets, and a new beginning. We found a small church with wooden pews and no lights to hide behind. I lead a young adult group and play mandolin now, stripped-down hymns before a plain cross.

Most days, God feels near. Other days, I wrestle—but I’ve learned wrestling is worship, the kind that leaves a limp instead of a halo.

Being human is holy enough. Holiness isn’t perfection; it’s proximity—to love, to purpose, to the quiet call to do good with whatever you have.

Sometimes I watch my son trace toy cars through the dirt behind our house. He builds roads that lead nowhere, then starts again. I see myself in that—how every ending I’ve drawn has only ever been a turn. Maybe that’s all faith is: the courage to keep redrawing.

At home, I’m surrounded by mercy: my wife’s strength, my children’s laughter, the faint flutter of the daughter we haven’t met. We still have hard days as a family did, but beneath it all runs a hum that sounds like grace.

I’ve stopped chasing mountaintops. God is just as present in the valley, in the classroom, in the silence after laughter fades. I write, I teach, I play music, I father.

That’s worship enough.

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Epilogue: You Are Here

The map isn’t what it used to be—creased, coffee-stained, written over with mercy. There are roads that dead-end and rivers that reroute, but when I trace it with my finger, I see the through line of grace.

I used to chase certainty. Now I chase honesty.

Faith isn’t about finding the right road—it’s about walking it awake. Every scar is a landmark. Every forgiveness, a new direction.

And somewhere in the margins, scrawled in the handwriting of every version of myself I’ve ever been, are the words that carried me this far:

You are here.