“PK” may stand for “Promise Keepers” for some people, but for me, it meant “Preacher’s Kid,” since I was one and my wife and I have three.

The label of PK is usually either very good or very bad, with little in-between. Living a fish bowl existence, where the congregation watches your every move, can hardly have any other result.

I have a brother and a sister, but I was probably the worst one of the three. My Mom says that when I came home from kindergarten, I proclaimed that in my class I was “third to the worstest.” When Mom shared that analysis at a parent-teacher conference, my teacher said that I had it exactly right. In the second grade, my teacher couldn’t understand why my parents weren’t getting her notes, until it was discovered that I threw the teacher’s notes away on my way home. One day when I was in the third grade, I was in the front of a line of boys, when the teacher put her hand up to stop me and let the girls go first. She said, “Girls first.” I shouted, “Freaks first!” (That led to another parent-teacher conference.)

As a fifth grader, I got into trouble for putting graffiti on the school wall during summer break. I was foolishly writing my own name on the wall, when I felt the pinch of the principal’s fingers on the back of my neck. After another parent-teacher conference, Mom and I washed all the graffiti off the school walls. In the sixth grade, I took my “Hot Wheels” cars to church and sat on the back pew, so I could rev up a car and watch it race from one end of the wooden bench to the other.

It reminds me of what a visiting preacher said recently at our church. This preacher has two daughters, and he said, “I hope the first one turns out to be a lawyer, because the second one is going to need one.”

My point is that preacher’s kids are just kids who happen to be children of preachers. Most of them desperately want to be considered normal, and most of them turn out fine. Take me, for instance. Despite my misadventures, God got hold of my life one day and saved me from sin, and finally called me into the ministry. God has the last laugh; now I know what’s it’s like to have PK’s of my own.

So whether a kid is a PK or an RK (regular kid), don’t categorize him (or her). Instead, see children the way God says them — His creation, ready to be molded by a loving Christian adult who sees their potential.

Copyright 2007 by Bob Rogers. Read this column each Thursday for a mix of religion and humor. You can read more “Holy Humor” at www.fbcrincon.com.