daniel rivera. the irreverent.
Age: Fortyone Pronouns: he/him Face Claim: Diego Luna Occupation: Pastor
You were born in Richmond, Virginia, to loving parents, to three older sisters, to warmth under the Southern sun. The church down the road was as much your home as that old colonial with the oak in the backyard–Sunday services, Wednesday afternoon playgroup, preschool with the other children of the devout, you knew those holy halls even as a toddler just learning to crawl. It was not a quiet life, but it was a happy one, and your parents looked at you with pride and wonder at their luck and said, This is God’s will.
You were always ahead of your peers, in school and in faith. You skipped a grade–at the local Baptist school, where else?--and still so many of your classmates couldn’t keep up. That inquisitive mind bloomed young; you were always the child asking why, why, why? Until your elders had no more answers to give. When you were finally old enough to be baptized, you were first there, too, a tender twelve-year-old in a sea of teenagers. For, after all, the answer to your final why? was always, simply, because this is God’s will.
(And when Caroline, oh Caroline, your beloved eldest sister passed away from leukemia when you were only thirteen–well. You didn’t talk about it, none of you did, but you knew, somehow, this too is God’s will. It had to be.)
Seventeen years old, in your cap and gown, you had the world at your feet. With grades like yours, you could’ve done anything, gone anywhere, but there had never been a choice, not really. You enrolled in seminary school. You were the pride of the congregation, the one parents pointed to and said, be more like him. Oh, but you were humble, almost shy from the praise–yet you came back home to Richmond a newly minted pastor, and even you had to admit you were proud of yourself, just a little. After all, you had followed God’s will.
But, oh, a few years down the road, you were faced with the harsh reality of the church. The business, the politics, the narrow definitions of what the proper things to preach could include–it must be a Richmond problem, you told yourself; must be some seed of rot in your beloved city. So you went where you were called to next, found a new congregation in need in Charleston, in Nashville, in Houston, in Indianapolis. You loved each new city, you did, for you had always loved new people–but. But there was always rot just below the surface, and you could only ever escape it for a few years at a time before feeling trapped, trapped, trapped. So you left, and you left, and you left, and you followed God’s will.
Bone Gap, Indiana. You’d never heard of it, of course, merely let God guide your hand as you threw a dart at a map and looked until you found a church in need of a pastor. And this, oh, this–this is what you had always been after. A year passed, then another, and suddenly you’d been in the same place for ten years, and the trap had never sprung. Your congregation adored you, knew you, spoke to you everywhere you went, and you understood that though the path had been winding, the Lord had finally guided you home. You were there to stay, all according to God’s will.
But ten years is a long time to spend in a tiny little town, and your curious mind had always needed an outlet, had always needed more. Much as you may love your new and final home, there was little to say about the intellectual stimulation available in Bone Gap–oh, but there was, of course, a library, with a kind librarian always willing to find a copy of whatever their beloved pastor asked for. So you followed God’s guidance down intellectual rabbit holes, into the arcane and unknown. You were shocked your Lord had taken you down these roads, yet who were you to question what must clearly be His hand? And so you dug deeper and deeper, until you found new truths–or, you should say, very old truths–and you knew your Lord had been right. You truly were following God’s will.