Sandy Wylie, B. D.
After I spent 44 years serving in the United Methodist Church, mostly in Oklahoma, my wife Susan and I moved into a house we built on Lake Windsor in Bella Vista, AR, in 2011. Or at least I moved in then. Susan kept driving back and forth to St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa until Dec. 2018, when she finally retired as administrative supervisor of St. Francis's heart hospital.
Our older son Benjamin and his wife and two children live in Lubbock, where he's a chemistry professor at Texas Tech. His B.S. was at the College of William & Mary, his Ph.D. was at the University of Illinois, and his post-doc was at Columbia University.
Our younger son Micah, now, 38, came to live with Susan and me temporarily a year and a half ago. He graduated from Northwestern University in 2002, then worked in several endeavors in New York City, Los Angeles, and Denver. He has finally decided to work on a master's degree in speech therapy at the University of Arkansas.
I regularly tutor at the Literacy Center of Benton County. We have about 44,000 adults in this big county who are functionally illiterate! All of my students have had a learning disability or are learning English as a second language. I have a tremendous love for our English language and find this work highly rewarding. I do lots of reading for myself and for a book club that's attached to an Episcopal Church. Lately I've been reading Elaine Pagels' books on Gnostic Christianity as I gain an appreciation for the perspective that those people brought to Christian faith. Orthodoxy had won the battle with gnosticism by 200 A.D. Maybe that's just the way it was going to be or had to be, but I've always found orthodoxy to be too confining, closed, and sure of itself.
Don't ask me about my own religion. My United Methodist Church is going through a nervous breakdown right now. I don't feel that I have a home with about half of my brethren. I attended Episcopal Churches for several years, but now I sit home most Sundays and read the morning newspaper. Occasionally I get asked to preach somewhere, and that always picks me up.