In Memory of Mark Hill, the King of Weird
The end of the year is a great time for remembering things that have taken place in the last 12 months. Aside from getting a new job this year, one of the things that truly stood out to me was the loss of a good friend to a sudden and untimely passing.
I don’t remember when I met Mark Hill for the first time, but the first I knew of him was when my older brother would talk about his high school friend Mark, who invited him to lunch at a place in the cafeteria that he had dubbed “The Table of Weird”. It was a little club Mark had created for social misfits and nerds (back during a time in the mid-2000s when being a nerd or having a neurodiverse brain in grade school was still “uncool”) to eat lunch together and share ideas and stories and laughs.
“Weird” was Mark’s favorite adjective. Hardly anything truly offended him, but he didn’t appreciate being thought of as “normal”. He knew himself better than that (he had OCD and slight but high-functioning Asperger’s tendencies), and he had the self-confidence to embrace it—which is what drew all of his friends to him in the first place.
Mark would also host pizza parties at CiCi’s Pizza. He would bring “Apples to Apples,” and everyone would play the game and chat. I eventually got invited to these parties. By the time I got to high school, Mark was already in college. Yet there were still people at our high school whom Mark had befriended, and they still held a pseudo “Table of Weird” meeting at lunchtime without him.
Even after he graduated, Mark was still the de facto leader of the group. He was the founder and the primary organizer. He lived out what it means for a Christian to be hospitable, kind, and unoffendable, always patient, always willing to have a deep discussion on a topic. In fact, deep discussions on themes of the Bible were some of his favorites: he would often come to me with a “puzzle” for the day, a thought-provoking question that would make me think more deeply about what I believe.
I was disconnected from Mark for a long time while I was in college, but when I finished college in 2016, he helped me get a job at LifeWay Christian Store. This was when I really started to get to know him in earnest. I knew he was as quirky as he was intelligent, and yet he was also wholeheartedly kind and humble. He was an artist and a musician and a deep, often philosophical thinker who would quite often involve me and his other friends in mental puzzles, especially ones about faith, Scripture, and superheroes. He had a belly laugh that made everyone smile.
We worked together for three years. During that time, he experienced having to couch-surf for a few months while he searched for a new apartment. He also suffered from and was diagnosed with a rare sleep apnea disorder, the same disorder that ended up claiming his life.
After the store closed and I found another job, he looked for jobs for a while but had a hard time getting hired anywhere. But none of this ever seemed to phase him. He remained cheerful and faithful to the Lord in the midst of all of it. Somehow the troubles of the world seemed to glance off of him, especially since he tended to dissect things like that for all the philosophical and theological value they had.
Unfortunately, I lost most contact with him again after we both left our LifeWay jobs. I got a different job and moved on. One time he asked to sleep on my couch while he was in town for a job interview, and I happily said yes. Even when I didn’t see him, he would occasionally text me or Facebook message me deep, thought-provoking questions or theses on various aspects of faith and life. I didn’t always participate in them, but I appreciated that he included me in his musings.
So when I heard that he passed away at the beginning of September 2022, the same day that Queen Elizabeth died, I felt a meaningful part of myself die, a part that I hadn’t expected to lose and hadn’t realized I held so closely.
See, Mark was a friend to many people, but he especially got along with people like himself who didn’t always fit into the traditional molds of the world. I would consider myself fairly well-adjusted culturally and societally, but there has always been a part of me that identified with and understood the misfit feeling that he seemed to immediately see in me. He taught me that it was okay to be a misfit at a time when I was struggling with my identity as a person and as a child of God.
God put Mark Hill into my life to remind me of the joy of being a stranger in this world while also showing unconditional love and humility. And I’m so glad He did.
"They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world." John 17:16