Repost of Life Update for Carl Lindquist

A Life Update for Carl Lindquist

I lived all my pre-college life at 2538 Parker Ave., just outside Wesleyville, in a house that my dad and two grandfathers built in 1950. My parents were Lennart and Evelyn Lindquist. Dad worked most of his life at G.E., while my mother worked at the State Police barracks as a secretary. My older brother was Arne, and my younger brother was Paul. Arne went on to become a 'watch maker' and now owns a small jewelry store in Annville, Pennsylvania, east of Harrisburg. Paul has worked at the G.E. since 1973 and never left Erie. Because of that, he has largely looked after our parents in these later years. Dad died in 1998 and my mom passed away in January, 2009.

After high school, I decided to attend Thiel College in Greenville, PA., where I majored in Pre-Medicine and Religion (I know that probably sounds like a strange combination). During my first year, I didn't change much from the way I had acted and dressed in high school--pretty nerdy! But by the beginning of my sophomore year, the 60's zeitgeist overwhelmed me, and I totally changed my look. I grew my hair long, along with a thick red beard, got a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and started wearing 'hippie' clothes. I joined a rock band and really got into the spirit of those times. (Not surprisingly, my grades went to hell!) And fortunately, I didn't end up going to Vietnam. During the summers, I worked at Hamot Hospital in Erie as an orderly, which was very interesting work. I graduated in 1972, but two months before graduating, I met my wife-to-be, Mary Beth Grimm, who was a freshman. I had intended to go to Medical School but did not get accepted, so I returned to work at Hamot Hospital for the next 7 months.

Mary Beth and I were married the following April in her hometown of Hornell, New York. I moved back to Greenville so that Mary Beth could finish college, and for the next two years, I worked at the local hospital while she went to classes and finished her degree in music education. In January, 1975, we moved to her hometown in the southern tier of NY, where she had gotten a job teaching, while I figured out what I wanted to do. Medical School seemed out of reach at this point. I had joined Mary Beth's Methodist church very quickly upon moving back to Hornell. Her pastor had begun encouraging me to consider the ministry, and so, within six months, I was starting classes at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, where we lived for the next three years.

Moving to North Carolina was a new and wonderful experience. Southern culture was quite foreign to us, and Duke University was a tremendous place to live and study, then and now. We almost stayed south at that time after graduation, with an offer to be the Associate Pastor at the big Methodist Church in Durham, but then finally we decided to return north so as to be closer to our families. I took my first pastorate in Buffalo in 1978, at Christ UMC in Amherst. Two years later, our first child, Nathan, arrived just as we were moving to Syracuse for more graduate school. Another two years, at my next pastorate in Little Valley, New York, and our second child, Adam, arrived. It's amazing how kids change your life.

In 1986, our lives took a fateful turn. We moved back to North Carolina for good, where I've been serving churches ever since. In my politics, I had taken a turn right, again following the zeitgeist (this time conservative). I found myself interested in the interface between religion and politics, and I consequently got a position as the Executive Director of a small educational organization in Greensboro, NC, with the very pretentious name "Foundation for the Study of Religion and Economics." So we moved for three years to Greensboro, a beautiful city close to Erie in size in the Piedmont of North Carolina. When that job ended, I reentered the pastorate in North Carolina, and the Bishop moved us to Bethany UMC in Lexington, about forty miles on the way to Charlotte, where we lived for four years. During this time our daughter Sarahbeth was born. She was just what the doctor ordered!

In 1993, the Bishop moved us to a small North Carolina mountain town called Highlands. At first we thought we were moving to the middle of nowhere, but it turned out to be a wonderful place to live and raise our kids. The second highest incorporated town east of the Mississippi, at 4000+ feet, Highlands has almost a northern feel to it, with reasonably cool summers (for the south) and cold, snowy winters. It was a beautiful resort town where many folks from all over the south came to live in the summer, so we had an interesting congregation that actually swelled in the summer and shrank in the winter. We stayed there for 9 years before moving to First UMC in Morganton, NC. in 2002.

During this time, we began to do some overseas traveling, which has become my main hobby, you might say. We had already traveled to Israel/The Holy Land twice in the 90's. Around that same time, I went with a group from my church on a mission trip to Bolivia. In 2000, we spent two weeks doing a pulpit exchange in Aberdeen, Scotland, with several days in London. In 2002, Mary Beth and I took a sabbatical and traveled to England, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In 2004, I traveled to Italy with our Bishop, and in 2005, MB and I took a cruise that stopped in Greece and Turkey, plus I spent another three weeks that summer in Sweden, taking language classes and visiting with my Swedish cousins there. Finally, in 2007, we traveled to Italy and Switzerland to visit our daughter in Florence, where she was spending the semester.

In 2006, we were appointed to serve First UMC in Lexington, where we currently live. Our son Nathan works as a city planner in Colorado, Adam has been living in Wilmington, NC, where he is an aspiring musician, and Sarahbeth graduated last year from UNC-Chapel Hill and is now working on the Cal Cunningham Senatorial campaign. In June (2010), I will begin a year-long Sabbatical Leave from church and we'll be moving to a house we own in Greensboro. Looking forward to it.