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I was 14 when I first tasted alcohol. I had only recently celebrated my birthday when my family went on vacation to the United Kingdom. It was Chevy Chase in a rented car with suitcases hanging out the windows and the whole works. We had just spent a harrowing couple of days with Dad negotiating the left side of the street when we stopped by the grace of God in one piece at Stratford-Upon-Avon, home of Shakespeare and a boy named Shandy.
Now, Shandy and his friends were cute, and my two sisters and I found an excuse to pal around with them for the better part of one of the days we were there. When my sisters and I arrived back late to the hostel to find Mom and Dad leaning meaningfully on their elbows out the window, we cast our infraction in light of having spent a valuable day gaining a cultural education. In the process, I let it drop that we had met—it was the funniest thing—a guy, some boy really, named Shandy who showed us all around the bless’d land o’ Shakespeare in his car with a few of his friends—and how lucky were we? Unbelievably, it worked. Encouraged by the insight into a different culture that his girls had received, my father, the holder of the keys to higher education, took it upon himself to add his own lesson: the meaning of Shandy’s name.
With his nose hot on the trail of an “educational moment,” Dad marched us all, women-and-children, the very next day to the nearest pub where he promptly bought us one. To share. With the five of us huddled around a table in the heart of Merry Old England, we passed around a single pint: half beer, half lemonade.
We kept the bender in England on the down-low from our friends. As Mom and Dad had pointed out on the way back from the airport, they might not understand. If they found out that we had partaken of alcohol, it might encourage them, too, to experiment and before we could blink, half of my class at the Christian school would be living in the gutter and drinking from paper bags as they slid slowly downhill toward the fiery lake. Did we want that kind of responsibility?
Excerpted from Devangelical
