Culture

To All Comfort Handlers
A few months after my father died, Aunt Jeanne Marie dropped me off at a Sunday school class at New York Avenue Presbyterian church in Washington DC.
As I sat down in the small room with lots of little girls in frilly dresses, I immediately knew I didn’t belong. My tomboy pixie was no match for their bouncy curls. I vividly remember the stares and whispers as quick glances shot across the room at me.
At that moment, I knew I wasn’t enough for these girls. I wasn’t sure what I needed to add, but I knew I was lacking. And that lacking made me uncomfortable.
It can consume us, this need to fit in. It can cause us to shun any who are different. To create little circles of friends with rules that are easy for us inside the lines to follow. Aren’t we really just more comfortable when things are the same?
It seems weekly, a firestorm erupts because a famous Christian speaker says something outside the circle of some group or another. DonaldMiller confessed he got nothing out of going to church. Andy Stanley, oh my, dared weigh in on bakers and photographers providing services for gay and lesbian weddings. Suddenly, their faith was put under a microscope. Bloggers and their commenters chimed in from all over the world.
Any more, I’m hesitant to state my point of view. Not because I’m afraid of rejection. I’m proud to say I’ve moved past that childhood incident.

The reason – I may disagree with say, Anne Lamott’s stance on abortion. She’s very pro, and I’m very anti. But I believe we both serve a God whose death on a cross provides the grace for us both to be wrong. And yet, abortion rates have steadily declined. And not because pro-lifers stood on street corners holding signs. But because advanced technology has proven Gods truth, that we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made.

It all swings around to our need to feel comfortable. But isn’t that just really putting our faith more in our rules and less in the God who saves us?
Ann Voskamp, in a blog post written from a trash heap in Guatemala,  summed it up best,
“We all like being comfort-handlers but let a comfortable life wrap itself around you and that’s what ends up being the snake that snaps it’s head and poisons your life with pointlessness.”
Jesus, when he walked this earth, made the religious leaders uncomfortable. And they were the only people he called out.
As a Christian, I want those around me to be stunned by the grace of my loving God. And I know that requires me to put myself inside circles of uncomfortableness. But I am confident that the God I serve is the only God who can set people free. And leading others to that freedom should always be worth being made uncomfortable.

Betty White
I seem to be one of the few women my age who’s not the least bit impressed with Betty White. Maybe I’m an old soul, but I like the idea of older women and men acting their age. Kind of the way my grandparents did.
In this picture my grandfather is in his sixties. Thirty years younger than Betty White and around the same age Mick Jagger is now.
About four years ago, I sat with a group of friends watching The Who perform their 60’s hit, Pinball Wizard, at the Super Bowel half time show. All I could think of was what if my grandfather was up on that stage prancing around.
Having been an eyewitness to the sixties, even as a kid, I wondered what the rock stars would do when they got old. I wondered if Paul McCartney would join an orchestra. Or Mick Jagger a choir.  I never imagined they’d still be up on a stage strutting their stuff.


But watching Betty White spew out a stream of sexual innuendo unsettles me. Watching her hang all over men a forth her age really gets on my last nerve. She’s over 90 years old. Is that all she has to offer?

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think a lot of young men and women today are longing for the baby boomers to grow up. I even hesitate to type those words. But I think it’s true.


In the past few months several young women have asked me to write this. They told me how they long for good role models. They want to pick our brains for advice on staying married, raising teenagers, and getting old.

But they also said, the baby boomers are still too busy. Still in pursuit of “me” time. That we’re still trying to rock and roll.

We can’t stop it. We’re getting old. But it doesn’t mean our lives diminish. God still has big things for us to do. But He did tell us to put away the childish things.

Now don’t get me wrong, I want to stay young at heart. I want to continue to do many of the things I’ve always done. But I also want to mature. I want to act and dress my age. Must our pursuit of eternal youth so obsesses us that we leave young women and men behind?
Maybe it is time for the baby boomers to get off the stage. Maybe it’s time for us to take our seat in the audience, and just enjoy the show.

The Ever Present Gossip Mill

They met on a blind date. It was a whirlwind romance. In ten years they had six kids, I was number four.

She had no idea he’d be so abusive.
In 1957 they moved into a little house in Arlington, Virginia. My father got through the days with at least one bottle of vodka. My mother did her best to get away from him. She called the police, we escaped to hotels, but she always went back. She said she felt safer knowing where he was.

 One April night when I was ten, he held her at gunpoint at the dining room table. She got away and locked herself in their bedroom. All night he tried to get in. By morning he was enraged. With a sledgehammer, he beat down the door. She closed her eyes and fired from the small pistol she had squirrelled away. My father stumbled into my brother’s bedroom, fell to the floor, and died.

Not long after the dust settled, Mother moved us ten miles south and a world away. For me, it was the start of a whole new life.

Unable to sell the old house, it sat vacant for months. People broke in and camped. They vandalized the walls and fixtures.

One Saturday morning, Mother dragged us back to clean. By early afternoon, I escaped to the front porch. A young boy I’d never met walked up. With his hands shoved deep in his pockets, he shuffled his feet, looked down at the sidewalk, and shot glares up at me. After a few minutes, in one run on sentence, he blurted out:
“A woman shot her husband in that house, then she buried him under the picnic table in the back yard, and he comes back and haunts the place.”

For the first time in my life, I got slammed with the pain of gossip. How, I wondered, could I ever explain the tragedy that happened behind these walls? How my father’s death broke the spirit of my mother. And damaged the souls of the siblings I loved.

To this day, I get squeamish when conversations turn to gossip. When I find myself adding my part, my stomach churns. I’ve never quite figured out how to back out without sounding self-righteous. More than once, I’ve been accused of being naïve for refusing to believe that so and so is sleeping with him or her.
There’s always more to every story. And always more people whose feelings can get hurt. This story is my reminder to keep things to myself. To honor other’s secrets. And to not add to the ever present gossip mill.