Aibileen, Mae Mobley, and Me

Courtesy A. Hughes

Few works of fiction have affected me as deeply as did Kathryn Stockett's masterpiece, The Help. In fact, only 2 others have remained interwoven in the fiber of my being besides hers: Cold Sassy Tree (Olive Anne Burns – 1984) and Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver – 1998). In each case, I did not want the books to end.

Inwardly, I wanted to weep as I slowly turned the last pages. How I loathed the coming of the last one because I would leave my new, old friends behind. I wanted, maybe even needed, to take the characters with me into my future. Their stories had become interwoven with my life story. Such is the power of the written word.

I was barely a chapter into Stockett's book when the tears were slipping down my cheeks in a slow parade of wonder. My heart was beating fast enough that I might as well have been on a treadmill. All I could think was, “OH! When I grow up....these words are the kind I want to write!” I continued to marvel every time I turned a page. I marveled...and I quaked with fear. I'm well into my 5^th decade. Have I run out of time before I even let myself admit the truth?

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I once had an artist tell me that painting could be painful. As she explained, it is difficult to get colors mixed so that the artist can reproduce what she sees in her mind's eye. At the time, I had not admitted the truth to myself. It was easy to roll my inner set of eyeballs and think, “How insufferably dramatic can you be!”

By the time I cracked open the story of Aibileen's life, I had opened my own Pandora's box of creativity. I understood what the artist meant. Our canvases and mediums are different, but, oh, the agony of re-creating for the world what I see and hear with my heart.

Without practicing restraint, I could have doubled over from the intensity of emotions that welled up within me as the words drizzled off the page and into my soul. The feeling only intensified as Stockett's characters unfolded page by page. I want MY words to live up to that standard! My bones ache with the want of it. 

As I recently told a cousin, “I'm really good with beginnings...it is the middle and the end I struggle with!” Oh, to overcome the fraidy cat in me that says I will never pull myself together enough to flesh out the middle and find the end.

Courtesy B. Creasy

When Aibileen whispers words of hope, reassurance, and value into Mae Mobley's toddler ears, I leaned forward to hear for my own good. Aibileen is whispering the words she yearns to hear – and yearns to have her daughters hear. In that time and place, so much screamed to the contrary in her life.

In her singular grace, she plants them into Mae Mobley's heart when it would have been so easy to take out the unfairness of the world on her tiny charge. Mae Mobley heard the words. So does every lost fraidy cat who picks up the book or sees the movie.

“You is kind,” she say, “You is smart. You is important.” (p. 521 - The Help)

We rarely fork out the money for a movie...not even for Netflix. My husband wisely knew there was one movie we could not miss. The tears began within the 1^st 5 minutes and continued almost unabated until the last credit rolled. I ached for the Aibileens and Mae Mobleys of the world. I ached for the fraidy cats who have no Aibileen to remind them that they are of a value far more than rubies and gold.

Courtesy Christian Jones Hooker

I've been slower to write this last week or so. I'm scared to take time off. Altho' the clicks keep coming and it gives some of you time to catch up on posts you haven't read, the truth is, momentum slows a bit more for every day without a post. (You know how addicted I am to that counter! It's official, chocolate is now my #2 addiction.)

I needed time to rest. Time to walk through the fields of my mind with Aibileen and Mae Mobley. I savored and cherished the gifts they gave me. I fell asleep one difficult night repeating Aibileen's words to myself as I tossed and turned trying to make sense of my difficult life.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I realized that when I invite you in from the fraidy cat world and tell you that you've found a safe place to come home to, I have been trying to say what Aibileen said so simply. So many of us wait so long to have anyone tell us we are of value in this world and that our hopes and dreams are worth reaching for. 

Whether by accident or on purpose, we learn to be afraid of who and what we really want to be and do. We need a friend like Aibileen to remind us: we are kind, smart, and important. We need a friend who will challenge us to face our fraidy cat fears and become what our hearts long to be.

Tonight, I am thankful for so many of you who have come to read and reflect. I am thankful that many of you have been moved to share the news of the blog with a friend or friends. I am thankful for friends who always believed I was a writer at my core.I am thankful that my 3 fellas have caught a vision for the person I want to be. 

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I am thankful for a brother, who despite his recent layoff, has put his money where his belief in me is. Come Sunday, I'll be leaving on a jet plane to face 2 friady cats: fear of flying and fear that I'm not really a writer after all. As I reach for my dream, I hope you will be empowered to reach for yours.

Wanna know my dream? It's simple. After spending time with me, I hope you will leave feeling as if Aibileen just leaned over and whispered, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” Because...you are. See you later fraidy cat? I'll be here when you are! 

Phillipians 1:6 (Bible in Basic English)

Courtesy B. Creasy

For I am certain of this very thing, that he by whom the good work was started in you will make it complete till the day of Jesus Christ:

Psalm 138:8 (ESV)

The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.

From Ashes to Diamonds

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

The apple fell from the tree of life. The resultant tweets traveled the globe in mere seconds – thanks in no small part to the subject of the twittering. You had to be living in an bomb shelter not to have gotten the news by now. Steve Jobs, the king of Apple, is dead. You know me. I was thinking. Connecting dots so to speak as the media and internet exploded with the news.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

If he and Sir Richard Branson were not buddies, they were certainly contemporaries. Both were visionaries. Both wealthy beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Both men spoke publicly of their private wrestling matches. Maybe those wrestling matches are the great equalizer, the great common denominator of life? No matter how great your wealth or how devastating your poverty, the same questions stalk each of us: Where is God, and who am I in him?

Word is that while Sir Richard casts about for an answer to the 'God' question, Mr. Jobs had found his answer in Buddhism. I can't be sure what went on between Mr. Jobs and his Maker once he knew he was facing eternity head on. I'll leave that to him and the one who made him and won't spend a lot of time sermonizing or hypothesizing about the end result. I hope they sorted it out in a way that even now has Mr. Jobs rejoicing at the creativity of the architect of the universe.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Can you imagine what it must be like to be an earthly creative genius who is ushered into the presence of the creator of the universe? What would he ask when meeting the one in whose image he was made? Talk about a cosmic big bang! Wouldn't I love to be a fly on the wall if Mr. Jobs and the Creator God are talking about the intricacies of the design of the universe. Almost makes my brain explode to think of it!

I listened to video clips of Mr. Job's Stanford University commencement address last week and was mesmerized each time. The part that finally sent me scrambling for a transcript follows:  

 

“No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it...it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life....”

As I pondered the statements of the rich and powerful, I checked out a friend's blogpost of 9/30/2011(http://marciabgaddis.blogspot.com/). Her words mingled in my mind with those of Steve Jobs and Sir Richard. Marcia's hope in her creator is secure. Her book, When God Comes Near, details her journey of faith during her daughter's losing battle with Creutzfeldt-Jakob's Disease. Marcia's thoughts about the dark days of life when forward motion seems impossible include these:

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

“There are some days for all of us that are spent simply dying. We lose direction. We lose hope. We move through the day, respond to phone calls, think about what we should or could be doing and before we know it, we have managed to never find the productivity we longed for...Anne Lamott says ...'Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.' "

I've spent a lot of time dying in the last 3 years. Dreams, hopes, plans, and relationships of my youth are gone. I have been left to wonder: who am I really? Will I be a phoenix rising from the ashes? Will my ashes become a thing of beauty? Have I found or am I finding clarity in my season of loss and recovery?

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I have spent most of my adult years trying not to live someone else's life. Looking back, I'm not sure I've even come close because so much of being a wife and mother entails the needs of others. It has taken me over 5 decades to face myself and admit that what I really, really want to be when I grow up is a writer. Last week, I told my therapist on call that the scariest words I ever uttered were those.

What if I try and fail? Wouldn't it just have been easier to go on ignoring that secret voice within me than to admit the truth to myself and risk failure? I upped the ante by putting the words in writing for all the world to read which makes the fear all the more urgently tyrannizing! What was this fraidy cat thinking?

I am a fraidy cat. I am writing my way back to God in hopes that he will find me. I kept on reaching for him, even in the darkest dark, because I believe he sees me when I cannot see him. And, every time I sit at this keyboard, write another page or 2, and hit the 'publish' button, I drive back the darkness a little more. In the end, I hope that ashes will sparkle like diamonds in the sun.

Isaiah 43:19 (Bible in Basic English)

See, I am doing a new thing; now it is starting; will you not take note of it? I will even make a way in the waste land, and rivers in the dry country.

I QUIT! again......

Courtesy S. Squires

Did you know 95% of Pastors resign between Sunday night and Monday morning? I have this knowledge because my family includes a goodly number of men of the cloth. I grew up surrounded by preachers and missionaries. Most of them just do it in their heads until the day the thought becomes action. So, the general public really doesn't know that the 'weekly resignation' is an inside joke between preachers.

Writers are, I think, a lot like preachers. I'm pretty convinced most of us quit every time we send off a query, post a blog entry, or submit an article for publication. Maybe we grow out of that sense of panic after enough experience. Maybe the ones who were not born fraidy cats never feel the agony and ecstasy of that kind of terror.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I did it again last night. I re-read what I had posted. I immediately decided that this project was worse than that dream folks have where they find themselves in a public place without the benefit of clothes. So, I quit. Closed up my computer and swore not to pick it up again no matter how much cheap chocolate you offered me.

Thankfully (I think), I had a long overdue session with my counselor on retainer today. In a former career, she was an English teacher whose students won national awards. She was the one that set events in motion so that I ended up at the writer's conference this last May. Needless to say, she talked me down off the ledge I had perched on to commit literary suicide...for today. There's always tomorrow.

I told her that the last 24 hours have been like a 1-2 knockout punch. Every fraidy cat nerve I have has been on edge re Son #1's halfway 'round-the-world adventure. Things have gone exceedingly well till yesterday. In fact, I had actually settled down enough to begin enjoying the adventure. Ha! Just when you let your guard down, the fraidy cats launch a full tilt offensive attack! Between my anxiety about writing combined with my fears for him, I felt like Mohammed Ali had taken a go at me.

 Courtesy C. Hooker

The combined effects of communication logistics and a 2^nd round of delayed jet lag affecting Son #1's mood were enough to send me over the friady cat edge never to return. 

My counselor has done a good job the last few months. I am sure because I was able to talk myself down out of a full blown panic panic attack. But, it was a close call involving tears on my pillow and the loving prayers, coo's, and clucks of half a dozen mother hen-like friends of mine. What? You don't think I ride this roller coaster alone, do you? No sir. I drag friends along with me! Not to mention as many blog readers as I can entrap as well!

Courtesy J. Paine

Once I calmed down enough not to need smelling salts, the counselor and I talked a bit about the masks we wear. We hopped from there to fact that every human on the planet has some sense of being an outsider....even the ones who seem to have it all.

I got home and found a note from a friend who thanked me for addressing the sense of being an outsider who can never get in step with those around me. Apparently, if I am to believe the counselor and this friend, I'm not as weird as I think I am. Furthermore, taking the risk of emotional 'nekkid-ity', as my toddlers used to call nakedness, reaped a few benefits for others.

So, for one more night, I'm going to keep on keeping on...and hope you will see it as a victory on behalf of those trying to evict inner fraidy cats everywhere. I did not die of fear today. Between my fear of writing failure and my fears for Son #1's great intercontinental adventure, I felt I might need a defibrillator most of the day. But, I'm still here. Weak, exhausted, worn out, cellulite infused. But, I'm here.

Courtesy Gotcha, Queensland, AU

Guess what happened? At the cusp of where our yesterday met tomorrow, the phone rang. It was Son #1 calling from his today to tell us the world was looking up and to give us a bit of info about his own perplexities. In a few seconds, we all realized that a communication snafu had caused most of his frustrations. While we were on the phone, the snafu was identified, and his frustration and loneliness turned to lighthearted laughter.

It has been the day that seemed it would never end. Literally, just as it ended, fear turned to laughter and relief. Growing up on the inside is not for fraidy cats. But, in the end, it is a beautiful thing. 

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Isaiah 43:19 (Bible in Basic English)

See, I am doing a new thing; now it is starting; will you not take note of it? I will even make a way in the waste land, and rivers in the dry country.

On the Outside Looking In

Fraidy Cat in Training

Given my auspicious beginnings on that 'pennycostal' piano bench, It makes sense that I've spent a lot of my life feeling one beat out of step with the folks around me. If I didn't feel that way before my teens, I sure felt it by the time I had rubbed spiritual elbows with the Bible College student in the park. 

 

Wouldn't you know? I was just ahead of my time. During the 80's and 90's, Charismatics were the new, cool fad in a lot of places. By then, however, I had decided it was time for me to find some answers to life's questions on my own. I appreciated and respected my spiritual heritage. Still do. But, I needed some answers I hadn't found in my years of Pentecostal tutelage.

That journey wasn't any prettier or lest angst filled than the one I've walked since 1997. In some ways, I think that arduous, bone-crunching journey prepared me to endure the events of the last decade. At the time, I thought I found the answers I was looking for. Today, I'm sure I found a lot of them. I'm wondering about the others.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I'm still puzzled about how I've come to the place I find myself now. Why the wrestling? Why the looking for my good God and trying to find my place and roll in his plan? You'd think, at my age, I'd have it all worked out by now. I guess I'm a slow, hard-headed learner?

As I've worked my way through this 4.5 month long writing project, I've realized the recurring thread in my life really has been feeling 1 step out of sync with those around me. It was as if I never could quite catch up or fit in even tho' I had loads of friends and, by world-wide standards, a comfortable life.

All I wanted to do when I grew up was get married and live a 'little life'. I wanted a little family, house, and yard with emphasis on the word 'little'. By the time I got married, most of my friends were married and had as many as 3 kids. I never did catch up. I was simply too far out of sync.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

As a newly-wed, I had a wonderful 'church family' and was comfortable adjusting to newly-wedded bliss. Suddenly, Jeff decided it was time to look for a different church to call home. Looking back now, I know that his discontentment was one of the first signs of the monster in the shadows. At the time, I just felt confused and lonely. The stresses and strains the hidden monster put on us made me feel estranged – not just from him but from others around us. That sense endured until the monster was flushed out of hiding almost 2 decades later. I'm still in recovery. I guess you figured that out?

At the time I should have been enjoying baby showers with friends, I lost my community of friends and had to start all over. I'm not sure I ever got over that jolt at such a pivotal time in my life. I went on and kept functioning...that's what long distance runners do. But, I never again had a sense of belonging like I had in the church where we married. I always felt I was on the run....as if I couldn't trust my circumstances.

2011

Before Son #1 was 4-years-old, we were on the move. We'd move, and I'd adjust. Jeff would have his life cut out for him with the new job that occupied and preoccupied him. I'd be left adrift to find my way as best I could. In each place we moved, God did provide one pivotal friend that served to anchor me. Those friends remain as vital now as then. I really don't think I would have made it without them.

I guess I thought that having kids, when they did arrive, would serve as an additional anchor if not a pathway to other friendships. Never one to be able to march in formation, I found myself dealing with complicated kids with a complicated diagnosis. It was the kind of thing that added to my sense of separation and confusion.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

We couldn't go and do the things other 'normal' or neurologically typical families enjoyed. I once served as the director of a preschool and arranged a field trip to Sesame Street Live. I left the performance within the 1^st fifteen minutes because the sights and sounds were too overwhelming for my sensory-fragile child. That was my normal, and it was lonely.

Asperger's Syndrome was not a well known term when my boys were young. Most folks assumed Aspie kids struggled because they had at least one very neurotic parent – you guessed it: the mother. It never dawned on anyone to think the mother was a wee bit whacky because she was dealing with so many confusing issues behind the closed doors of her home and heart. I didn't know anyone who could understand or identify with what I was going through. Life got lonelier.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

So, no matter where I looked, I generally felt I didn't have a place to call home. It always seemed as if I was on the outside looking in wishing there was a place for me where everybody knew my name. The guy who wrote the Cheers theme song sure knew what he was writing about, didn't he? Thinking back through these things tonight, I'm even more amazed that when the time came to make some fraidy cat choices, I made the one I made...and stuck to it. Choosing to walk away would have been so much easier.

Oh my, these pages fill up quickly as the thoughts that are trapped in my head and heart come spilling out. I cannot tell you how humbled I am that you don't leave me alone out here in this invisible corner of cyber-space. Come back again? If you think you know someone who has always felt 1 beat out of step with the world, tell them you know a place they can call home. Ok? I'll be here tomorrow...waiting for you – and them. I promise.

Psalm 10:17 (New Living Translation)

LORD, you know the hopes of the helpless. Surely you will hear their cries and comfort them.

Birds of a Feather...Don't Always Flock Together

Courtesy T. McFerrin Greene

My poor Mamma. She and the earnest young Bible college student had a lot in common. She thought he was as lost and undone as he assessed our group of young people to be. One of the last things we joked about before they turned off the vent and let her drift away was how Heaven was going to be laid out. Funny how you can joke about things like that with someone on the verge of Heaven's gate when they are sure that is where they are headed.

Before Mamma Had Reason to Fear

She was faithful to ask any stranger, after making polite pleasantries, where they were headed for eternity and where they were spending their Sundays before they went there. Shoot! She called ME every Sunday till I was about 45 to ask ME where I had gone to services that day! She never got over my jumping ship to marry a Southern Baptist and morphing into a Reformed Presbyterian. She forgave me, but she never got over it. Funny how we hold those convictions so hard and fast isn't it?

Of course, I had spent plenty of time in my youth breaking her in so that my newly adopted denominational home wasn't a complete shock. Take for instance when I allowed that my best friend was an agnostic...Lord-EE! You can imagine that when my friend up and married an atheist, poor old mom nearly needed therapy. Of course, she didn't believe in that either, LOL! As if I weren't enough of a challenge, within the last year of her life, mom was HORRIFIED to learn that I had known some of my friends for nearly a decade and did NOT know where they attended church.

Daddy Preached on Their Wedding Day

I assured her that these friends were folks who had my back, prayed for me and with me, and demonstrated a devoted faith. In fact, I assured her, I was so convinced of their steadfast faith, I really didn't CARE where they went to church, how they dressed, what music they listened to, or movies/TV shows they watched. I didn't even care which version of the Bible they read: KJV, NKJV, NIV, NAS, etc. I'm not sure, but I think she looked up the word 'blasphemous' then to make sure I wasn't guilty.

I have to tell you tho', the nearer her eternity drew, the less she cared about the tag someone wore to identify themselves spiritually or what church he/she called home. One of our one-sided, post-ventilator conversations went like this: 
 

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

“You know...when you get to Heaven, it is NOT going to be divided up into sections so that the Pentecostals don't have to mix with the Baptists, and the Methodists don't have to mix with the Presbyterians.”  

At that point, she raised her shoulders and eyebrows and opened her mouth in a perfect 'O' to indicate her mock shock and surprise.

“In fact,” I'd go on, “I think God is gonna get a knee slapping chuckle when we all get there. I can just see him rolling out those denominational rule books and perusing them with all of us watching. He's gonna shake his head at some stuff, look up skeptically and say, 'You thought WHAT? How in the WORLD did you come up with THAT drivel?' Then, he'll look down in the next section, burst out laughing, and say, 'Ah...no...just no...when I wrote my Word down for you...I never meant THAT!' A little later on, he will smile pensively and say, 'Right there...yep...that was the ticket!' I imagine he is gonna nail us all and use our own sanctimony to do it. And then, tell us he loves us anyway because we loved his Son."

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

In earlier years, a conversation like that would have driven her right over the edge. But, with the veil of Heaven parting to let her slip to the other side, she seemed to get it. Either that, or she was just an old lady tolerating an uppity y'ung 'un knowing I'd get mine in the end! Nearest the end, she smiled and nodded indicating she was at peace sharing Heaven with the wonderful mix of folks God would welcome home for eternity.

When I was in my 20's and she nursed her horror at my cavorting with the unwashed heathen like my agnostic friend, she was always afraid. See.... I got that fraidy cat thing honest. She was afraid I'd veer away from the faith she held so dear. Wonder if she'd be relieved to know I haven't so much veered as I have engaged in a wrestling match of Old Testament proportions? 

Needless to say, she was ecstatic when she learned that both my agnostic friend and her atheist husband had found a faith of their own. Not only do they attend a church of their choice, when my old life imploded and most everyone abandoned us, that friend was there. Faithful, steady. She sent ME verses from the Bible meant to give me the courage to make it one more day. I cried in absolute amazed wonder every time. In the end, mamma rejoiced in the love my friend and I shared for over 3 decades. She's waiting for us now; I know she is.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

What if I had given in to my mother's fear? What if I had considered one of the dearest friends of my life an unwashed heathen too scary to embrace? At least that was one time I WASN'T a fraidy cat!
 

And that young fella in the park that day? I'm old enough to know now. Not only was he sincere, he was also a sincere fraidy cat. Just like my mom. They might not have ever flocked together, but they were birds of a feather. Each afraid that someone else's faith might be just misguided enough to utterly corrupt theirs. I'm glad my mom got over that. I sure hope he has by now. Heaven will be kinda lonely without him in my section. After all, I've been saving up a joke for him for about 23 yrs now!

Ok, fraidy cats, love you long and strong. You know me...I can't tell a straight story. I have to meander some. Thanks for coming along for the adventure. Don't you dare leave me alone out here in the dark of cyber-space. Come back again tomorrow. You might just be surprised where we are headed. I think I will be too! 

John 4:18 (Bible in Basic English)
There is no fear in love: true love has no room for fear, because where fear is, there is pain; and he who is not free from fear is not complete in love.

  For Elizabeth...because she never jumped ship......

The Lonely Runner

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I don't do it because I like it. I'm not even doing it because I'm getting a lot of satisfaction out of it. My clothes are not, after 3 months of this torture, falling off of me. I have to make myself do it. Once it's done, I feel the thrill of victory because I managed to force myself to do it one more time without spontaneously combusting. Yea, me.

I'm not an Iron Maiden fan, but I think at least one of them must have done some running too. Otherwise, I don't think they would have come up with a song like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I tried to listen to the song on You Tube to get in the mood to write this post. I made it till they started screeching. I like heavy metal about as much as I like running. Deepest apologies to Sons #1 and 2.

As I was running today, I was thinking a lot about life and how life is a lot like running. There are days you run in perfect weather with the wind behind your back. You don't even break a sweat. Endorphins kick in, and you could run well enough and long enough to keep up with Forest Gump himself. And, you want to because you'd rather run than stop.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Then....there are days when you are running into a gale force headwind, uphill, barefoot, in the snow. If my mamma didn't raise you, you are probably cussing every single miserable step. 

If you had a choice, you'd swing off the road and into the nearest 5 star spa for a massage and champagne laced mud bath. You don't, so you keep running hoping you'll run out of the wind and snow and onto flat ground where someone is waiting to hand you running shoes and some high energy food. Maybe spaghetti with a chaser of chocolate.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I started out life as a long distance runner before I could walk or talk. It wasn't of my choosing. I was born into it. Somehow, it has been the kind of life that has left me feeling as if I was always running to catch up to something. I wasn't sure what it was most of the time, I only knew that I was trying to find a way to get in step with everyone else around me.

God always seemed determined to keep me on the outside looking in. Maybe we all feel that way. If you found your way here and kept coming back, I guess you must feel the same. Or have at some point in your life. Welcome home. Stay a while? Let's run together.

Courtesy Christina Hooker Jones

My first running-to-catch-up moment was probably in about 4^th grade. A fellow student walked up and said, “Ya'll worship the devil at your church, don't you?” So, I spent the next 30 minutes trying to convince him that “Holy Roller” did not equate with devil worship. You see, I was born into a Pentecostal family WAAAAAY before being called “Charismatic” or “Full Gospel” was cool. You would have been cooler if you had a 3^rd eyeball in the middle of your forehead.

These days, just about everyone, everywhere has been to a church where folks clap their hands or raise them to the Heavens in worship. If not, you've watch 'em on the TV and wished you were there – admit it! Back then...well...ah...NO! Being part of that lifestyle was about as accepted then as being a polygamist in the Warren Jeff's cult is today.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

For example, some kids from my church were in a city park once when we were approached by an earnest young man who attended a local independent, fundamental Baptist Bible college. Back in those days, they had to go around 'witnessing' to folks or preaching on street corners. It was sad, really sad to me to see how desperate they were to convince total strangers that they were hell-bound. 

Even before I was a tween-ager, I just knew you couldn't threaten and scare people out of Hell and into Heaven. So, I felt sorry for those fresh-faced young students who had to wade out into the world every week to try and do so. By the time I came face-to-face with their condescension, I was in my teens. I didn't feel so sorry and sad for them after we met in the park.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

We were minding our own business. Adult leaders were in charge. The young man approached us and struck up a friendly conversation designed to evaluate our fitness for the coming kingdom of Heaven. We assured him that we were all on the same bus and welcomed him into our group. We were naive and did not know that, where he came from, it wasn't enough just to believe in Jesus as the Son of God and Christ Child who lived and died on the cross. We needed to go to the 'right' church. His. Or one of the affiliates. We didn't. OOOPS!

When we told him where we did attend church, he visibly stepped back and began to tell us that we were NOT on HIS bus as he was not headed to hell in a hand-basket. Furthermore, we were just 'tongues on 2 legs' because the church doctrine allowed for the 'gift of speaking in tongues'. He might as well have shouted, “Unclean LEPER!!!!” such was his visible angst.

Courtesy Jessica Paine

I wonder about that poor fella today. IF he does make it out of here on the same bus that picks me up, I hope God will let me see his face when he hops on AFTER me. I sorta wanna enjoy the shock of it. (I do mean that in all Christian love, of course, bless my heart, Honey.) Also, I've been saving up a joke I wanna tell him: Whaddya get when you cross a Holly Rollin' Pentecostal with a Southern Baptist – a Reformed Presbyterian. I just crack myself up sometimes.

Now that being progressively Spiritual means a lot of folks go to churches where the music pounds as folks clap and/or raise their hands, he might have mellowed over the years. Maybe not. Looking back, it is no small wonder that his love of Jesus didn't drive me fast and furiously away from the Jesus he professed to serve. Instead it took me decades to reach a point that I was no longer God's head cheerleader.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Well, my time is up for today. I'm hoping you'll come back again soon and bring a friend. Last May, a couple writer friends told me my writing would never be 'as effective' as it could be till I 'settled this thing between [me] and God'. I think I'm on to something here. It has to do with running to catch up, how lonely it has been, and how it is part of that 'thing' between me and God. See ya tomorrow? 

John 4:14 (Bible in Basic English)

But whoever takes the water I give him will never be in need of drink again; for the water I give him will become in him a fountain of eternal life.

 

A Priceless Gift That Cost Nothing

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

She never knew my name. On the social bell curve of high school, I was one of the crowd buried in the middle. My friendships were warm. Some were enduring. Still the same, we traveled in different circles even tho' I could walk past her house in less than 7 minutes as I made my way to the local library.

It was, and is I suppose, the way of high schools everywhere. Kids understand and abide by the rules without a handbook to show them the way. Maybe it is in these hallways that we begin to wear the masks that hide who we really are?

She was the head cheerleader and, of course, dating the captain of the football team. Or, at least that's what my memory tells me he was. I had seen lots of cheerleaders going back to middle school, but only 1-2 others had that same special spark that set her eyes on fire.

She was a wonder to watch as she commandeered her squad. To a mere mortal like me, her life looked like a fairy tale come true. I can't say I ever wanted to BE her, but I think I would have enjoyed a taste of her world every now and then. When I tell you why I remember her, I think you will wish you had known her too.

Courtesy Christina Hooker Jones

It had been a particularly grueling day. Not sure why now because teen grueling pales by comparison to adult grueling. I felt as if I were floating lost and alone in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the hallways. I wanted to step away from the grind...to do and to be someone new. There was no escape, so I toiled on.

Classes were changing. I headed down the corridor and up the crowded stairs wishing I could shake off my invisibility. I felt like an ant in an ant farm. I fought the urge to look around in case some huge humanoid was peering in at me thru the windows that bordered the stairs. The traffic snarl began to move again spurring me from my momentary escape of window dreaming.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

I lifted my head to survey the crowd coming down the stairs as I went up. I was intent on not getting in anyone's way. My eyes met hers, and that radiant, sunshine-like gaze drizzled its way into my somber spirit. The star burst in her eyes spread to her smile which widened in welcome. “Hi! How are ya? Have a good day!”

Suddenly, the clouds parted. My spirits lifted along with my sagging shoulders. Once heavy steps instantly became lighter than air because someone bigger than me had acknowledged my presence. I was not invisible after all. Her genuine warmth was bigger than life. It had been big enough to engulf me and sweep away the dread and foreboding that had threatened to wash me away that day.

And so it was, for the rest of that semester and all the next year, our paths would cross. Before long, we had developed a ritual of greetings on the go as we hurried from class to class. Our smiles would widen, and the fleeting moment of greeting would pass all too quickly. Every day, she made my life bigger than it was. For those brief moments, I left my world of insignificance and became someone worth a smile and a word of encouragement. It cost her nothing and meant the world to me.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

The end of the 2^nd year came and with it all the rituals that signal life is moving on. Yearbooks were handed out and signed. I mingled with the others in the middle of the bell curve of high school life and wrote all the syrupy, flowery things that high school girls write. The crowd began to thin. I looked up, and there she was. Ready to graduate. Our days of hallway greetings would be no more.

Hesitantly, shyly, I held out my book. “Would you?” I asked.

Just as shyly, she extended hers as well, “Only if you will....”

I tried to tell her, in just a few short words, about the gift she had given me all those days as we traversed the stairwells and hallways of our lives. I'm not sure I did it justice. I am sure I cannot do so tonight.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

In not too many years later, she was gone. Anorexia had taken hold of her and weakened her until an infection carried her away. I never knew her. She never knew my name until I signed it in her yearbook. But, every time I smile at a stranger and every time I wish someone a good day, I remember her. I have never heard the theme song for the television show, "Cheers", that I don't think of her when they sing the phrase 'where everybody knows your name'.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

She gave me a gift that cost her nothing. It meant the world to me. I'd like to think she looks down on me now from Heaven. I'd like to think she smiles when someone who is lost and alone in the stairwell of life looks up and sees me coming. She smiles because she knows I remember the gift she gave and am still passing it on today - over 3 decades later.