You can never quite get inside what really happened to someone else. You can try, I guess, but how far can you really go? How much can you really know?

When I met him, he set me up in my room in the men’s dorm when I first arrived early that misty fall in the Bay Area for seminary. He was middle-aged but young in spirit, kind and warm, a soft-spoken Robin Williams, a graceful soul, with a nice full trimmed beard and twinkling eyes. He was an ideal first impression of a school for training pastors and preachers.

In time, I learned his story. One dark day in his past, he awoke in a hospital from a coma, having been found two weeks earlier in the trunk of a car, badly beaten.

He had no memory of his life prior to the incident.

He also had no identification. A local APB drummed up no leads that explained his circumstances. An scan of ensuing local missing persons reports for several weeks left him unknown and unclaimed. He did some therapy. He was lost and confused. And he had to start over, a man with no identity.

He took his new last name from a sign that he saw on a hardware store. He selected his new first name from a book in the New Testament he did remember and did like. And when he was out on his own again in a little while, after completing physical and speech therapy and adjusting to his absent history, he gravitated toward God and ministry. He applied as a special case to attend a California seminary- and after passing a test that said he had equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree, he was granted admission for graduate studies at the school.

And when I attended the school, he had been there a short time before I had arrived. He had taken a job as the campus housing director. He lived in a nice, moderately larger dorm setup than the regular dorm lodger, and he made it like a home. He was well liked by students and professors and administrators alike in the school, and also had a good reputation in the local community. He was popular enough to be elected student body president while I was there. His story preceded him, which probably helped a bit. At one point, the local paper met him and captured and then shared his story as a feature one weekend, with his face smiling across the issue’s front page under the story lede. He worked with ill people at the hospital in the city. He was a good minister, and a good student, and a good housing director.

After I had graduated and moved on, he completed a second Masters degree at the school and I didn’t stay up with him- mostly because that’s me.

I can’t remember when I heard about it, but at some point, a few things lined up, and the story found me.

After a number of years at the seminary, our conservative Christian school, he received a call to pastor at a church out of state. And he didn’t go into it at all with his colleagues and friends at the school, except letting them know he had been offered a pastorate, and that he would take it. He was feted and cheered and wished well by his school compatriots and local friends who truly loved him, and he moved. And that’s when things started to tilt a bit.

The man who had amnesia, who had earned a few degrees at a Southern Baptist seminary in California, went to Texas to lead a congregation. And it just turned out the church was for a predominantly gay congregation. And in his clarification of calling, it was made known he was a celibate gay man.

It also turned out that viewing the man who preached a sermon to the leadership of a church which was considering him for leadership was an old acquaintance of his, an old friend who had met him 16 years earlier at a Bible camp. The friend was in touch with the amnesiac’s family, and dominoes began to fall, one by one. Soon, the amnesiac was off to meet his mother in a private reunion, and then other family members. And as his past began to flood back into his life, so did request for interviews from news people. Because his story became intriguing locally, and then regionally, and then nationally.

Because before he had been assaulted and knocked out cold and thrown into a trunk and later fortunately found, he had been a Doctoral student at Texas Tech University, studying art. He had also been a Church of Christ youth minister. And he had also been married, and he had a daughter.

When his past had disappeared with that coma, his wife had lost a husband and his newborn daughter had lost a father. He had disappeared with it. In time, he was pronounced dead, the marriage was dissolved, and his wife received payments from their life insurance. At least she had that, if she lost he husband.

But soon, connection to the past re-established, word got out that he was alive, and that he was back in Texas, and his wife learned about it and happy and hopeful and full of faith- and confused. She had never remarried. His daughter, who had not known her father all of her life, received a first phone call from him on her 17th birthday.

He and his former wife met and talked.

And questions arose, from her. From others trying to reconcile his stories. From those who discovered his new name and social security number had another owner as well, also in Texas. From those who tried to understand his old and new sexual orientations. From those who tried to understand what had really happened.

The press circled, near and far.

Under scrutiny and in the spotlight, his church released him from his job on a vote of no-confidence.

His story made the national weekend what happened news shows.

He found another, smaller church that desired his leadership, and he pastored again, quietly, for awhile while the circus around his story clamored and settled some.

He did not return to his wife.

He was cordial to his daughter.

Until it was too much, and he resigned and moved back into the anonymity of California.

It’s quite a story. And he was- is- quite a fellow. But the story. The story.

What really happened there? What happened inside of you?

If you were accosted and stripped of your past, how sad and devastating.

If you weren’t, and feigned the whole thing- if you crafted this entire immense play to eject you from a life you did not want- how sad. How devastating.

I don’t judge you. I just wonder what happened inside of you, considering both potential arcs of the story of your life, and if you took the latter, wow.

Wow.

There are always questions about what we did at times in our lives, and then there are deeper, often more murky questions about why we did what we did, which can be harrowing to truly answer.

I’ve revisited this story a time or two as my life has moved forward, wondering about the man who was my friend- a friend to all- back at that Baptist school, wondering where life took you, and wondering what really happened.

I still have a few copies of the newspaper with your story in it, with you smiling warmly on the cover. I saved them as a reminder of my good times at seminary, times which you were a part of. Times which also featured this kind man of mystery.

Sometimes you do what you can to get by. And sometimes you do what you have to to make the life you want. And sometimes, for some people, you hope all the truth comes out. And sometimes, for others, you hope it doesn’t.