My First Play: An Easter Story AND Deleted Scene From My Book, “Wayward: A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare & Sexual Purity”

⏱️ 11 min read | 🎧 Audio version coming soon

I love deleted scenes, don’t you?

In the spirit of Easter, what you’re about to read is one of several deleted scenes from my book, Wayward: A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare & Sexual Purity. I’ll be sharing more here on Substack over the next few months.

This scene was originally the opening of my first chapter — one of many openings I played with during the editing process. It was ultimately one of many cuts I made to my manuscript when whittling my word count so that my book would be under $20 to buy. (Fun fact: My original manuscript had over 300,000 words. In the publishing world, this is a trilogy! My finished book is just over 120,000 words long!)

You might also think of this scene — an Easter play — as an introduction to Christianity. If you’re lucky not to have been raised a Christian, terrified of hell and burdened with the calling of global colonization, let me tell you what it’s all about.

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People would always say I took things too seriously. My faith in particular left no room for mistakes. I could never remember a time when I formally accepted Jesus into my heart, a void that troubled me greatly — I never had a born-again testimony to share at sharing time. It felt like I’d simply been born a Christian. Even as a toddler, the gravity of what faith in God meant sat heavy on my soul.

I was born in Walnut Creek, California on February 6^th, 1986. Almost three years later, my parents felt called by God to leave their home in the suburbs of San Francisco to become full-time missionaries in Asia. They were part of the Foursquare Church back then, a Pentecostal denomination that stressed the importance of bringing the gospel of Christ to those who had never heard it. My father, a police officer, turned in his badge. My mother, a former concert pianist, gave up her music career. There was only my little brother Teddy and me at the time, with Madeleine on the way.

We lived in Nepal and Thailand when my earliest memories began to stick. I can recall the gold of a temple idol in Kathmandu and the prickly skin of a Thai rambutan, my favorite fruit. We lived overseas for nine months. When the funds supporting us from our church back in California ran dry, my parents took it as a sign from God that we were to return to the States. Dad received an offer to pastor a small church in Rockford, Illinois. He accepted the position as an open door from God.

I was three when we returned to America. Dad says he and I had a conversation about what it meant to be a missionary on the plane ride across the Atlantic. He recounted the story many times throughout my childhood. Up in the air, Dad explained to me how we’d been in Asia to help Hindus and Buddhists know the love of Jesus so they could have eternal life in heaven when they died. One of the flight attendants, an Asian woman with a gleaming braid, interrupted to ask if we wanted anything to drink.

“She’ll have a ginger ale, please,” Dad told her. He knew ginger ale was my favorite soda pop.

“Are you a Christian?” I asked the flight attendant.

“I am,” she said.

She and Dad laughed at my candor. Dad popped open the green can of ginger ale and handed it to me.

“Not all Asians are Hindus or Buddhists,” he said. “Some are Christians but most of them still need to hear about Jesus.”

“Or else they go to hell?”

“Yep. The Bible says the only way to heaven is through Jesus Christ.”

The enormity of what that meant hit my heart with a dreadful urgency. We were leaving the people of Asia to die and burn in hell forever without having the chance to know the way to heaven.

“But who’s gonna tell them, Daddy?” I asked.

Dad stared at me, sensing a premonition I’d be a missionary myself one day. “Maybe you will,” he said. 

I acted in my first play when I was four. We had lived in Rockford for eight months when Dad decided to turn his Easter Sunday sermon into a living reenactment of Jesus’ last days. My family left our parsonage on the church property after breakfast and carried our stage props up a grassy slope to Alpine Foursquare Resurrection Life. The words felt large and lumpy in my mouth, so I just called the little brown A-frame we gathered in “Dad’s church.” He always corrected me to call it “God’s church,” but I never saw God standing at the pulpit. Just my dad. Every Sunday I handed out bulletins to the people coming through the church’s double doors. The pamphlets I gave out that Easter were crinkled from my excitement. Hunting for a basket of marshmallow Peeps earlier didn’t compare to the thrill of purpose I felt waiting for the performance to start.

Dad played Jesus. He stood in the church foyer swathing himself with ivory bedsheets when I realized he’d miscast himself.

“But Daddy,” I said. “Jesus has long hair. You don’t have long hair.”

“You’ll just have to imagine that I do,” he said.

Dad’s short, black crew cut and clean-shaven face made it hard for me to picture him with long tresses and a beard. Even so, my imagination came to life as Dad made his way down the church aisle pretending to ride our wooden stick horse, Scout, as a donkey. I committed to my role as a child of Jerusalem. The heavy palm fronds I carried threatened to knock me off balance, but I managed to keep up with the other kids as we lay them in front of Dad’s feet while chanting our lines.

“Hosanna, hosanna in the highest,” I shouted.

That was what people in the Bible said when they welcomed the son of God into the Holy City. I didn’t know the Hebrew word hosanna meant save, or that I would be wanting to save Dad myself when the other actors started whipping him. Dad cried out as an angry-looking man lashed him with a rope. Bright red streaks appeared on his back as if by magic.

“Stop!” I cried. 

Mom shushed me. Her freckles came close to mine as she whispered for me to keep quiet.

“But they’re hurting Daddy.” 

“It’s only make-believe,” she said.

It didn’t look like make-believe. Make-believe involved forts in the living room made out of blankets and pillows. Teddy looked suspicious himself, but my two-year-old brother wasn’t crying like me. Neither was my infant sister Madeleine who slept in the crook of Mom’s arm.

I struggled to remind myself Dad was only pretending when men dressed like Roman soldiers nailed him to a cross on the floor. His screams made me want to run over and stop them. When the soldiers were done hammering, they strung Dad up for everyone in the congregation to see.

“Father, forgive them,” Dad groaned. “They know not what they do.”

Then he went limp. Someone stabbed him with a spear.

“Don’t worry,” Mom whispered to me. “Jesus comes back to life.”

I wasn’t convinced until I saw Dad awake several minutes later, when he walked out from behind a piece of furniture covered with a blanket to look like a tomb. He was once again swathed in white. At last, the play ended with a round of applause.

Dad smiled as he walked to where Mom, Teddy, Madeleine and I were sitting. He bent his lanky frame downward to scoop me up in his arms.

“I heard you crying,” he said. “Daddy’s alright, see?”

I traced the red stripes on his skin with my finger.

“That’s just magic marker,” he said. “Like the kind you draw with at home. It’s not real blood.”

The men who played the soldiers smiled at me and gave little waves of reassurance. I didn’t trust them.

Dad pastored Alpine Foursquare Resurrection Life for a year and a half until he felt God close its doors. God was always doing that, opening and closing doors. He never wanted my family in one place for long before He led us to uproot and resettle somewhere else. My parents embraced the change. Never ones to conform, they would later say the prejudices of belonging to a denomination made them feel restricted. Church policy stifled the spontaneity of what God put on their hearts, and they craved a freer expression of their faith. Mom and Dad wanted a relationship with God that felt personal. Alive.

My family joined Vine City Fellowship shortly after my little brother Bryant was born. The congregation had about a hundred or so members, many with young families, and Mom and Dad liked the counter-culture vibe of the non-denominational community right away.

Vine City wasn’t an average church with two services on a Sunday morning. Neither did most of its members like referring to their gatherings as church, opting for the less formal term “fellowship” to describe their Saturday night assemblies in the basketball gym of a local school. Church potlucks were called “Common Meals” and Sunday school was called “Children’s Ministry.” The people at Vine City thought of Jesus as a salt-of-the-earth dude who didn’t need His followers to dress up for Him. They encouraged a come-as-you-are environment and focused on Biblical scriptures emphasizing Jesus’ love for the downtrodden and outcast.

I liked the children’s ministry at Vine City. After worship in the gym auditorium ended, we kids filed downstairs to the school’s basement which had been refurbished as a recreation area. There we colored in Christian coloring books and made crafts out of glue sticks and glitter. We played games like Thumbs Up Seven Up and Duck Duck Goose, and sometimes we watched a Christian cartoon series called The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible. Snack time always promised Animal Crackers.

The activity I enjoyed most in children’s ministry was singing songs. “I’m in the Lord’s Army” was my favorite. The marching and saluting we got to do when it came on the tape player gave me thrills of excitement. 

One night, when I was about six, I learned what being in the Lord’s army meant. The deeper meaning behind the song’s words imprinted itself into my soul, setting the tone of my faith for years to come. It gave me my life’s purpose…

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If you haven’t yet read my book, which I’m thrilled to say is an Amazon best-seller, you can learn more about my story here. If you prefer the audiobook version, I narrate it myself and keep 100% of my royalties from Audible, so it’s the best way to support me. If you like audiobooks.

I’m Alice Greczyn, an author and speaker. This newsletter is free because I think helpful information should be free as much as possible. Please subscribe, and if you’d like to donate to my costs (news subscriptions, image licensing, audio recording, etc.), I’d surely appreciate it. Thank you.