Calculating Grace Prologue

Prologue – Calculating Grace

Below is the prologue to my memoir Calculating Grace: Learning Love Across the Social Divide

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Prologue

No Tickets at Will Call

The parking lot at Blossom Music Center in northeast Ohio was a country music fever dream, a carnival of American longing spread across acres of cracked asphalt. Pickup trucks with Confederate flag bumper stickers sat next to lifted Jeeps, their speakers competing to blast Jason Aldean louder than their neighbors. Groups of women in cowboy boots and cut-off shorts clutched red Solo cups, their laughter rising and falling in waves across the lot. Men in sleeveless shirts played cornhole between their tailgates, the hollow thunk of beanbags punctuating the chaos. The smell of grilling burgers mixed with cigarette smoke, marijuana, and spilled beer—a distinctly American incense rising toward the evening sky.

I sat in my Honda minivan, completely out of place, waiting for what I knew would be a devastating phone call.

Twenty minutes earlier, I had dropped Deb and Diane at the entrance to the venue—Deb pushing Diane’s wheelchair while Jenny, their housemate with cervical cancer and a fresh black eye from getting beaten up the week before, walked beside them. They were heading to the box office with two hundred and twenty dollars they didn’t have, ready to buy last-minute tickets to see Jason Aldean, the country superstar Diane believed she was engaged to marry.

For years, she had been “dating” him online. All that time she had received daily messages from someone claiming to be Jason Aldean, along with his supposed best friend James, who claimed to be engaged to Deb. Deb and Diane had lived in a world with a double engagement, wedding plans, and promises of life on the tour bus. An entire edifice of intimacy, built on digital sand.

And now, on the night when Jason Aldean was performing just twenty minutes from their broken down home, there were no VIP tickets waiting at will call. No backstage passes. No tour bus pickup. Just three women with disabilities and a lifetime of being taken advantage of, standing at a ticket window with what little money they had, trying to buy their way into a fantasy.

* * *

The drive to Blossom had felt like a pilgrimage toward inevitable disappointment—though not, perhaps, like any pilgrimage described in Scripture. Not the road to Damascus, where Saul was struck blind and arose transformed. Not the road to Emmaus, where grieving disciples encountered the risen Christ in the breaking of bread. This was a journey toward disillusionment that I both dreaded and believed necessary, undertaken by travelers who didn’t know they were lost. Nonetheless, I had hoped this journey would lead to the scales falling from the eyes of these two women as they were about to have their dreams broken.

We were barely five minutes from their house when I decided I couldn’t stay silent any longer. The anticipation from the back seat was almost unbearable—Diane smoothing her shirt, adjusting her hair, Deb rehearsing what she would say to “the boys” when they finally met face-to-face. Jenny sat carefully neutral, her bruised face a reminder of the violence that lurked at the margins of their lives.

“I need to tell you something,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road. “I’m quite nervous about the concert.” I paused, gathering whatever courage remained. “I’m nervous for you. I don’t believe you’re going to this concert.”

The words hung in the air—simple, devastating, irrevocable. In my peripheral vision, I saw Deb’s head stay rigid, staring straight ahead, refusing to meet my eyes.

“What do you mean?” Her voice was quiet, controlled, the voice of someone who already knows the answer but needs to hear it spoken aloud.

“I don’t believe there will be tickets waiting for you,” I continued, my voice steady but gentle. “I don’t have any reason to believe these men are who they say they are, and I don’t believe they’re going to be able to get you tickets to this concert—especially VIP tickets in the front, backstage passes, everything they’ve promised. I don’t believe any of it is real.”

Complete silence followed. Not a sound from any of them—not a protest, not a question, not even a breath loud enough to hear. The only noise was the hum of tires on pavement and the distant throb of country music from a car in front of us at the stoplight. That silence stretched for what felt like an eternity but was probably three or four minutes. I didn’t fill it, didn’t try to soften what I’d said. I just drove, occasionally glancing at Deb’s face, which had settled into an expression I couldn’t quite decipher—some mixture of pain and concentration, as if she were working through a difficult equation whose solution she feared.

In that silence, I found myself thinking about delusion—not as pathology, but as a fundamentally human response to unbearable circumstances. Cervantes understood this when he created Don Quixote, the knight-errant who saw giants where there were only windmills, castles where there were only inns. We mock Quixote, but there is something noble in his refusal to accept the meanness of the world as it is, something almost holy in his insistence that enchantment persists despite all evidence to the contrary. He was mad, of course. But his madness contained a truth that sanity often lacks: the recognition that the human soul cannot survive on bread alone, that we require meaning, purpose, love—and that we will construct these from whatever materials lie at hand when the genuine articles seem forever out of reach.

4^th Century Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God—inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. Watching Diane stare straight ahead through the windshield, I wondered whether her years-long romance with a phantom Jason Aldean was simply one more expression of that ancient restlessness, one more attempt to find rescue in a world that had offered her so little. The scammers who had captured Diane’s heart knew nothing of Augustine, but they understood the same truth he articulated: human beings will sacrifice almost anything—money, dignity, the respect of others—for the promise of being truly seen, truly chosen, truly loved.

Finally, Deb spoke, her voice barely audible. “I guess we’re just nervous too. We don’t know what will happen.”

It wasn’t what I expected her to say. Not denial, not defense, not anger—just an acknowledgment of nervousness, as if she too felt uncertainty about what awaited us. As if some part of her had always known, had always waited for someone to speak the obvious truth she couldn’t speak herself.

I nodded, not wanting to push further. “I understand. And I’ll be right there with you, whatever happens.”

* * *

As we approached Blossom Music Center, the contrast between our somber car ride and the carnival atmosphere surrounding us couldn’t have been more stark. The parking lots had transformed into a massive country music tailgate party—trucks with lowered tailgates displaying elaborate spreads of food and beer, groups of friends in cowboy hats and boots laughing and singing along to portable speakers, the smell of barbecue smoke and beer mixing with the evening air. Under different circumstances, the scene would have been infectious. There’s something uniquely American about the ritual of tailgating, the way strangers become temporary neighbors united by shared musical tastes and the promise of a good show.

But sitting in my minivan with three women whose evening was about to unravel in devastating fashion, the revelry felt like a rebuke. All around us, people had paid their money and received their tickets—the simple transaction that makes concerts possible. For most of them, tonight was entertainment, a pleasant diversion from ordinary life. For Deb and Diane, it was supposed to be apocalypse in the original sense of the word: an unveiling, a revelation, the moment when the hidden becomes manifest. A decade of messages and promises and hope were supposed to become flesh tonight, embodied in the appearance of two men who would claim them as beloved.

I managed to get permission to drive down to the reserved drop-off area, explaining to the security guard that I needed to help someone in a wheelchair. The guard was friendly and accommodating, directing me to a covered pavilion area not far from the security checkpoint. As we pulled up, I could see other families saying their goodbyes, couples heading hand-in-hand toward the entrance, the general buzz of anticipation that precedes any major concert.

“I’ll drop you off as close as possible,” I told Deb and Diane. “Then you should call James and Jason, tell them exactly where you are, and ask about the tickets.”

Deb nodded, gathering her things as we approached the drop-off point.

“When you call them,” I added, “if they can’t get you tickets for some reason, I want you to ask them exactly why. I want to know exactly why you can’t get tickets to this concert.”

“I will,” Deb promised.

I pulled into the designated area, helped get Diane’s wheelchair out, and watched as Deb secured their belongings. Jenny stood awkwardly nearby, looking overwhelmed by the crowds and noise, her bruised face drawing occasional stares from passersby.

“I’ll go park and then come find you,” I said. “It might take me a while—traffic is crazy. If you get in before I make it back, just text me.”

Deb nodded, already pulling out her phone, presumably to call James. Watching them walk—and roll—away from the car toward the venue entrance felt like watching someone head into surgery. You know it’s necessary, you know it might ultimately be for the best, but the immediate future holds certain pain.

* * *

I got back in the van and headed toward the general parking area, my heart heavy with the knowledge that no tickets would materialize, no backstage passes would appear, no reunion with “the boys” would occur. The parking situation was even worse than I’d anticipated. Cars stretched in every direction across muddy fields, with more arriving by the minute. I finally found a spot at least a quarter mile from the entrance and began the long walk back, surrounded by groups of concertgoers laughing, drinking, and singing to Jason Aldean songs blaring from speakers mounted in truck beds.

I called my wife to update her on the situation.

“They didn’t say much when I told them,” I explained, navigating around a particularly rowdy tailgate. “Just silence, mostly.”

“That’s not surprising,” she replied. “It’s a lot to process all at once, especially when they’re so invested in believing it.”

“I know. I just hope I didn’t make things worse by bringing it up right before the concert.”

“You did the right thing,” she reassured me. “They needed to hear it from someone who cares about them.”

As soon as I hung up, the phone rang.

“Dr. Duff?” Deb’s voice was excited but controlled. “We got tickets. We’re going in.”

I stared at a group of college kids doing shots off a pickup tailgate, processing what she’d just told me. They had actually found tickets. For one hundred and ten dollars each—money they absolutely couldn’t afford—they had bought seats nowhere near the stage, nowhere near the VIP section where their fiancés had supposedly arranged everything. Diane and Deb were going to their first Jason Aldean concert, the one where she expected to reunite with her beloved.

“That’s… that’s great, Deb,” I managed to stutter. “I hope you have a wonderful time.”

Two hundred and twenty dollars. The cost of maintaining a dream when reality proves too expensive. The price of admission to a fantasy that would never deliver what it promised but at least allowed another night of believing that rescue was possible. I thought of all the ways the poor are exploited—payday loans, rent-to-own furniture, lottery tickets, romance scams—and how each one trades on the same desperate hope: that somewhere, somehow, there exists a shortcut out of suffering, a ticket to a better life.

* * *

As I hung up, I realized this wasn’t the ending I had prepared for. I had expected collapse, confrontation, perhaps tears in the parking lot as the final hope of tickets evaporated. Instead, they had purchased their way into the venue with money designated for groceries and medication, extending the delusion by at least another few hours. This was just the beginning of a much longer reckoning with the stories we tell ourselves, the dreams we refuse to surrender, and the complex dance between faith and delusion.

In retrospect I thought about the woman at the well in John 4, how Jesus had gently but directly confronted her with the truth about her life. “You have had five husbands,” he told her, “and the one you now have is not your husband.” He didn’t shy away from difficult truths, but he delivered them with compassion, with an eye toward healing rather than simply exposing. She had come to the well at noon—the hottest part of the day, when respectable women stayed home—because she was avoiding the judgment of her neighbors. She had constructed her life around a series of relationships that promised rescue but delivered only more brokenness. And Jesus met her there, in her avoidance, in her shame, with a truth that set her free.

Could I offer anything like that? Or was I just another voice pointing out the obvious while having no power to heal the wound beneath the delusion?

I had met Deb twenty-three years earlier when she was a student in my biology class at the University of Akron. She sat in the front row of a lecture hall that held a hundred and fifty students, always eager to discuss whatever topic I’d covered that day. During office hours, she asked me directly whether I was a Christian, and when I confirmed that I was, she declared me her “unofficially adopted brother.” I had been claimed, whether I wanted to be or not.

What followed was nearly a quarter-century of phone calls—sometimes monthly, sometimes after a year-long silence—in which Deb would update me on her latest struggles, relationships, and dreams. I helped when I could, avoided when I couldn’t face it, and carried a persistent guilt about the gap between my comfortable Christianity and the messy reality of hers. Now here I was, standing in a muddy parking lot surrounded by country music fans, having just watched two women spend money they didn’t have on tickets to see a man who didn’t know they existed—and somehow this was supposed to be ministry.

The truth was making its slow, inevitable approach. No amount of believing, hoping, or pretending could change the fact that there were no tickets waiting, no backstage passes, no Jason and James eagerly anticipating a reunion. There was only reality—sometimes harsh, sometimes kind, but always, eventually, undeniable.

To understand how four adults ended up in this van, heading toward heartbreak—how I became “Brother Duff” to a woman whose life couldn’t have been more different from mine, how a decade of deception had constructed an entire alternate reality complete with celebrity fiancés and adopted daughters—I need to go back twenty-three years. Back to a lecture hall where a student in the front row asked too many questions. Back to a phone call that interrupted my comfortable life with someone else’s desperate need. Back to the beginning of a journey that would teach me more about grace, delusion, and the strange mathematics of Christian love than any theology book I’ve ever read.

Deb and Diane had built their hopes on the image of two men who existed only in texts and fabricated photos. I had built mine on the comfortable assumption that helping occasionally—when convenient, when the need wasn’t too messy—constituted genuine Christian community. We were all waiting for a rescue that hadn’t arrived. We were all, in our different ways, sitting at will call, hoping for tickets that might never come.

Get Your Copy

Available in paperback wherever books are sold March 14th.

Paperback, 260 pages | 6 × 9 inches | ISBN: 979-8-9951621-0-0 | Price: $18.99

Publisher: Two Books Publishing

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