We knew Eric without ever having met him. We spent countless hours in his company without even talking. We have the same hobby, yet we had never seen him. Perhaps that is why it seemed so strange when he came to pick us up in his red Ford Escort after finishing mid-term exams that Friday afternoon. Though we play the same online computer game, we do so in different time zones. But when we added a post to our website, asking if anybody would have the time and space to house us, he immediately stepped up and invited us to Athens, Georgia.

This is our story of Eric.


Live religion

Easter Sunday at Watkinsville First Baptist Church in Athens, Georgia. Two large TV screens hang suspended above stage, displaying a countdown to Jesus' take-off from the tomb. On the count of zero, an electrical guitar starts heating up the church. Hundreds of people rise from their seats, and rock to and fro in pure excitement. Then the band sets in, complete with drums, piano, and a sax. The two singers embark on a duet about the love of Jesus that lives on in all of us. Some sing along, others just clap the time or wave their hands above their heads. Clearly, this is not a one-way communication church.

As the applause dies down, Pastor Carlos Sibley steps forth and calls out: "He has risen!". A little girl answers his call in a tiny voice from somewhere in the back of the church. The crowd bursts out laughing. "That's right," the Pastor says, "all you gotta do is believe it!".

The next hour is one long homage to the reality and miracle of the life of Jesus. There is no sermonizing in the condescending sense of the word, no intricate theological debate or biblical exegesis, and certainly no bored looks or dropping heads among the churchgoers. The Pastor wears informal clothes, and throws casual comments about everything from Jesus and Elvis to hoops and green beans.

In between all the shared joy and gaiety, there are also moments of a more serious nature. A teenage girl with flowing blonde hair suddenly drops to her knees, and rests her forehead against the back of the seat in front of her. She spreads her fingers wide as if gently caressing the fabric of the covers. Under normal circumstances somebody would probably have cried out and dialed 9-1-1, but in here nobody really seems to take notice. The Baptist Church maintains that belief and practice are matters of personal choice, and today's service goes a long way to prove it. If not the living God, what we witnessed that Easter Sunday amounts to at least a living religion.


Just an ordinary guy

Reading the Bible, Elijah is a prophet who gets picked up by a chariot of fire in transit to heaven. Playing online computer games, Elijah is a well-liked fella known for his provess in recon ships. Going about his daily business, Elijah is just an ordinary guy in his early twenties studying Economics at the University of Georgia.

Elijah's real life name is Eric Schultz. He shares an apartment with a fellow student in the Lodge of Athens on the edge of town. Safely tucked away behind a gated entry area with video monitoring, and sporting several up-to-date recreational facilities, including a lagoon-like pool and a fully equipped workout center, the apartment complex seems ideal for housing students. The three-storeyed wooden buildings are placed in groups of two or three, forming open spaces with free air and soft grass between them. Clean and well-kept, the best case against the complex is that it is perhaps a little too idyllic.

Eric easily admits that it is not a very close-knit community. Though most of the residents are students like himself, he prefers to make his friends at college. His roommate is an old acquaintance, but he is rarely at home. In fact, we do not meet him all weekend. Eric, however, does not hold any reservations when it comes to surprise visitors, though he does seem a bit nervous when he picks us up in one of the campus parks. He sets us up on the two couches in the living room, and supplies us with an extra sleeping bag. When we ask him about his plans for the weekend, he tells us that he has not got any but us. Wherever we want to go, he will take us. Whatever we want to see, he will show us.

The TV in the living room is the biggest one any of us ever saw. We cannot even begin to count the inches across the screen, we simply just have to turn it on. An almost life-size image of a basketball player suspended in mid-air flashes across the screen. Eric's couch turns into a row of seats at the stadium, and when the player slam-dunks the ball into the net we are just about to rise and cheer with the crowd. We check ourselves as Eric tells us that the game is just the first of a series of play-off matches in a knock-out college tournament.

Back home where he grew up, Eric used to play soccer. But when he made the move to college, the scene for traditional American sports such as football, baseball, and basketball was simply too big to be ignored. If he had not taken it up, fitting in would have been a whole lot harder. It is not that everybody is a jock, sports are just such a huge part of American identity and culture. Even the girls we meet are way into it.


Worshiping at the Temple of Learning

The day after we arrive, Eric offers to show us around campus. We state it in so many words only - we are blown away. The buildings are beautiful, the gardens are well-kept, and the facilities are amazing.

We begin our tour at the north end of campus, and slowly works our way south on what turns out to be a four hour odyssey. There is little doubt that Eric takes great pride in his college, and it is probably not diminished by our several outbursts of "holy crap" along the way.

Depending on how you see it, campus either borders the southern part of downtown, or simply extends it. The two never really start or stop. They are just there, joined together by the constant traffic of the locals who mostly seem to be happy and carefree youngsters alive with the joy of freedom and learning. Eric tells us that apart from the University Athens is generally considered quite poor. Truth be told, we did not really see much of that side of town, though.

The several parks on campus are guarded by imposing classical buildings designed to follow the Greco-Roman dispositions of the founders of the University. The buildings are kept in line with the original style without getting bogged down in history. As such, our tour of campus becomes a walk through time. As it is Saturday obviously there are not many people around. There are pros and cons to this, but at least taking pictures is easier when there are not any pesky people around to ruin them.

We walk through the halls of the magnificent Student Learning Center with its marble floors and stairways, its countless study group offices, and its large rooms beset by hundreds of computers. Tied down to one of them we find a friend of Eric's called Megan. Her long, lean fingers typing away at a paper due Monday, we decide not to take up any more of her time, and head downstairs to the coffee shop instead. Jittery Joe's is the local Starbucks competition around Athens. We figure the name is somehow connected to the four shots espresso Crackaccino they serve. After all, it is a college town.

Next thing up is the enormous Sanford Stadium. The sheer size of the place hits us face-on like a brick. Seating some 92.000 spectators, it is more than double the size of the Danish national soccer stadium. Unfortunately, the football season does not start until fall, and even if we were to make it back here by then, Eric tells us that we probably would not be able to get any tickets. Even students are not guaranteed a ticket. They have to feel lucky and sign up for a lottery in the beginning of each semester if they want to get down to see some games in their four year study period.

As Europeans we marvel at the fact that spectator violence is never a part of the game. With tens of thousands of people tailgating at campus on game days - barbecuing and knocking back cold beer, that is - it almost seems inevitable that fights should break out. If something like this happened back in old Europe, people would probably start worrying what the hell was going on. Some kind of sectarian mass meeting perhaps? Anyway, even though the sun is shining bright from clear skies, we do not see anybody hanging out and drinking beer anywhere. Now, that is a cultural difference.

The last place Eric takes us to is the sports facilities building. It is by far the biggest building on campus, and even Eric admits that he feels somewhat awed every time he steps inside. It holds more squash courts than we care to count, a recreational gym that can be refitted into any imaginable sports arena, and a workout center with all the fitness machines you will ever need (and probably some you will never need, too, we are sure). To top it all off, they even built a freakin' running track up under the roof, so students can just climb the stairs and do a few indoor laps whenever they feel like it. Though tuition fees tend to be high, you sure get your dollar's worth in appliances.

We could go on and on rambling about the atmosphere and luxuries on campus, but we also have our story of Eric to tell. The story of a young man to whom the world is still open. A student of Economics, his life is still all potential and possibilities. He tells us that he will be a graduate in a year or so, but when we ask what about it, what it is that keeps his fire going, he merely shrugs.

"I'm not really sure," he says. Just like any other student in any other part of the world would, he suddenly becomes all quiet and contemplative. His gaze trails off into the distant skies, and for a while it is as if he is not really there. When he returns, he gives us the same nervous look he gave us when he picked us up the day before. Only, it is not really nervousness that we see in his eyes. It is more like a careful weighing of words, an attempt to be honest in the face of truth.

With all the certainties of religion, with all the educational privileges, with everything he has got going for himself, he just does not know. Not yet. He is like the rest of us, waiting for something to reveal itself to him, trying to get by without worrying too much. Nothing can take that away from you, least of all Eric. He will just have to bide his time, and let things take their turn. And with all the good friends and loving family that seem to support him, we feel confident that it will be a good one.


A gun and Bible past

Eric is a professed Baptist. It has not even occured to him to tell us that he is going to the Easter Sunday service, and when it does, we ask if we can go with him. We are in his car on our way to meet up with a couple of his friends at yet another Jittery Joe's, this time located in a huge outdoor shopping area on the outskirts of town.

Driving through Athens, we try to get him to talk some more about his religion. At first, he does not seem to have a whole lot to say about it. Apparently, he does not really consider it anything out of the ordinary. Only when we start telling him about the poor state of the Lutheran church back in Denmark, does he begin to open up some more. He cannot really place the difference between Baptist and other Protestant churces, but he says that going to church without being devoutly Christian is rather a common thing.

"Speaking for myself only," he says, "I'm probably more religious than most people my age." When questioned, he insists that he is by no means considered a radical, though he is not unfamiliar with other kids checking him off as being a bit on the weird side of things. Forgetting all about the polite distance we usually keep, we ask him how he feels about abortion and the whole pro-choice discussion. Again, he falls back into his contemplative mood, then says without wavering that as much as he dislikes the unnecessary termination of pregnancies, he would never condemn a woman to give birth to a child she did not want, nor a child to live a life in which it was not wanted. In other words, if we were looking for an extremist that mixed personal religion with state politics, we would have to look elsewhere.

The conversation soon settles on more easy and less controversial matters, but still it remains personal. Before we hit Jittery Joe's, Eric has given us a good run-down of his family history. Dad was in the army, meaning that they had to move around quite a lot. Starting out in Massachusetts, they continued on to Missouri, and then Weissenburg in Germany, before finally settling down in small-town Peachtree City in Georgia. His dad retired there as an lieutenant-colonel when he was somewhere in his forties.

Asking whether his dad took him to church a lot when he was a kid, we are surprised to hear that his dad is not really all that religious. The divine influence on Eric's life came from his mother. It was she who took him to Sunday services at the local Baptist church, and it was she who ingrained the Christian values on his mind and soul. What initially seemed to us a case of the usual gun and Bible scenario has turned out to be something quite the opposite. Contrary to popular belief, even in the US the warriors of Christ do not always go hand in hand with the warriors of the state.

When we arrive at Jittery Joe's we are met by three of Eric's close friends. They are all girls, and they are all religious - though the religion they share is not all the same. Robin is a Catholic, but since Baptists are open to multiple religious views it does not come across as a problem. The next day she even turns up for Easter Sunday service at Watkinsville First Baptist Church, all dressed up and ready to rock like the rest of her gang.


Easter Lunch

Our weekend with Eric comes full circle on Sunday afternoon after service. We are invited to a potluck Easter lunch with friends and family in a college flat that Eric describes as his second home. The flat is shared by four of his closest girl friends, all in their early twenties like himself. Kathleen, Megan, Angela, and Jenny have separate rooms and a common kitchen and living room. Furniture is sparse and functional as you would expect in a student flat. The only exception is a big glass cupboard with pink fluted cups and plates. In the corner by the balcony, an Easter tree reaches almost to the ceiling. One of the girls tell us that it replaced the Saint Patrick Day's tree which in turn replaced the Christmas tree. Traditions and celebrations sure do not go unnoticed around here.

Before we stuff our plates full of battered chicken, cheese baked pasta, creamed corn, and choice of salads, Angela gets to say grace. Words follow in quick succession from her mouth as if some divine spirit had entered into her. Either she has been through this a million times before, or she really knows how to let go, and just let the words flow from her lips. Both are probably true, and the effect is not any worse for it. For a moment everybody just stands there, trance-like, seemingly forgetting about the food, hoping for the sweet sound of prayer to go on forever. It stops as suddenly as it began. A quick "Amen!" and it is all over. The dazzling display of eloquence soon wears off, and we all pick up our forks and knives, and dig in.

Most of us settle down around a low table by the balcony door. Some are on couches, some are on chairs, and some are on the floor. Hurricane Kathleen, as we soon come to call her, sits at one end of the table, her many stories and easy laughter guiding us through the meal. Before the brownies hit the table, and all talk becomes muffled, we know all about her crush on the college football coach, her short-lived career in Civil War reenactment as a child, and her tendency to end up in somewhat awkward situations by mixing up dream and reality. Puns are intended, and no eyebrows lifted, as everybody comments on her stories, and joins in with a few of their own. Eric is at once the most relaxed and the most quiet. He just sits there, taking it all in, as if he could not be any place better on this particular Easter Sunday.

What strikes us most is how quickly we are accepted into their company. This is not just a gathering of friends. Kathleen's parents are there, and so is Robin's mom and siblings. Of course they are curious about our home country and our travels, but they go far beyond mere politeness. They fill us in on people and places we might want to visit, and Kathleen's dad Jim even reveals to us - in an almost perfected melody of southern twang - the secret location of Georgia's best assorted beer house. We will not repeat the name or place here, but if you are ever in Georgia, you might want to give us a call.

Come break-up time everybody is full, and ready to roll over. We shake hands, exchange website addresses and Facebook invitations, and make our way down to the car. Eric drops us off at a motel from where we will continue our travels by bus the next day. Before he gets back into his car, we give him a light hug. He seems a little surprised until we tell him that it is just something we like to do back home. A little sign of acknowledgement and affection. Nothing more weird to it than being a Baptist.

One last goodbye

Less than 24 hours after hugging Eric goodbye, we bump into him again. Having already reverted from Jittery Joe's to Starbucks, we sit freezing at one of their outdoor tables downtown, waiting for the sun to come warm our bones, and the Greyhound bus to roll up and take us yet another stop on our way.

Eric is out taking a stroll between classes. He wears a short-sleeved shirt, and carries a school bag. We ask if anything is new, but he just shrugs his shoulders as he usually does. "Nothing much," he says, "school is back on again." We wish him our best as he keeps on down the street. Just an ordinary American Baptist on his way to class.