Free Cookies

I come for the cookies….

“Why,” I asked the woman seated next to me, both of us with arms outstretched being squeezed by thin rubber tourniquets, “would someone go to the trouble of  giving blood to that venerable institution called the Red Cross expecting that their blood would be rejected?” I kept my eyes trained on hers to avoid witnessing either needle being inserted, grateful for the distraction.

“To see if they’re still clean,” was the answer she gave that summer afternoon in the Red Cross’s makeshift donation center in our little town’s City Hall. From the looks of it, the BloodMobile staff had the travel and setup routine down and, on this particular afternoon, business was booming in that air-conditioned meeting room. Word was out and neighbors in the Highland Rim town of Portland, Tennessee, population just over 5,000, were lining up, enticed perhaps by some visiting and sharing of the cookies and orange juice handed out to donors, all playing out indoors where there was air that you could breathe in August. The tech loosened the rubber tourniquet around my arm and the young woman in the next chair leaned over and explained. “If you suspect you have AIDS, you can let the Red Cross diagnose you. They’ll only use your blood if it’s clean,” she said. “Lots cheaper than paying for a test. And no one asks you questions you don’t want to answer.” 

Plus, there are cookies.

People amaze me. I sat back as the blood flowed and reviewed how creative types could see what the rest of us cannot, who find ways to work around existing services to fit their needs, even if the services were not intended to diagnose, for example. These workarounds can be quite ingenious, but less about artistic visions and more often the child of necessity. Were folks adapting the services of the Red Cross the way others did those phone hotlines, I wondered? The ones where you could find someone to talk to you for free? Maybe not, I thought, more like 2-1-1. Used to be, if you wanted to talk to someone but you don’t want two police officers showing up at your door to do a “well check,” you could dial, or rather, punch in “2-1-1.” The idea washed over me that our culture used to, at least, have a number of systems, screenings and alert systems apparently in place. Some were designed to separate the lonely from the disturbed, some alerted us when we needed to see a doctor, still others, a process of interest to me at the time, offered to determine if you were among the “called” or simply delusional. As someone whose life path led me into ordained ministry by way of teaching, social work and writing, I was becoming familiar with this web of services. 

You’ve Got a Friend….

I was serving Neeley’s Bend UMC by this point and our proximity to Nashville meant we had access to a 211 directory. Our little town of Portland, nearer the Kentucky state line, where my son and I still lived as he finished out high school, did not have such service, a system where anyone could call and chat with another, live person for a bit at no cost and about pretty much anything. Designed to help steer local residents towards food pantries or accessible ride programs, the lines were answered by folks who became, at least for a while, the only friends some could claim. Turns out, lonely people were also creative and many of them figured out they could call every day. In fact, lonely callers so overwhelmed the 211 system that a few rules became necessary: callers were limited to one call a day per person for a limited duration. Rules ruin it for everyone, some lamented, but, then again, even if only for ten minutes a day, you still had a friend who’d listen to you, for “free.” No strings attached. The beauty for many was that there was no real effort on the caller’s part except to dial the phone; no quid pro quo was necessary and no relational reciprocation was required. Someone was always at your (beck and) call. At least once a day. Whether we were annoyed with the smell of our pet’s kitty litter or the price of avocados, we could talk to a person through 211 about anything for ten minutes and they’d listen. They could even tell you where to get free groceries and usually there’d be cookies. All for free. Not sure how many towns have those systems in place now, but they definitely serve a purpose.

Along the same vein, (pun intended), while I sat in that chair watching the bag fill with blood, I had learned that, if you believed God talked to you and you wanted to know if you were sane, there were workarounds; in particular, there were helpful gatekeepers. While some folks slide easily into ordained ministry, others of us step onto the path shakily, unsure for ourselves and aware that those around us will be more than a little skeptical. For me, the first step was admitting to my husband that I prayed. We had been married more than a decade when I sat on the edge of the bed we shared, clutching a lumpy pillow, cringing as I told him that swearing was not in fact the only time I used the word “God” (with a capital ‘G.”) This was the man who was outspoken about his belief that only mental weaklings believed in a deity of any kind. 

God talks to you?!?! Of all people…?

For years as a teen, long before I’d met my husband or considered turning to the church for a vocation, I had struggled with anxious thoughts, worries that felt like there was one of those old mimeograph machines in my head. Perhaps you are old enough to remember those: the kind with the drum that you cranked by hand while the paper revolved around and your words were printed on multiple pages, the precursor to a copy machine. For most of my life, I’d been trying to make decisions absent any sage advice from my parents who, when approached for advice, waved me and my siblings off, annoyed, as if to remind us they were overwhelmed enough already by our existence and life in general. My father once described to me his own anxieties by sharing that he had spent most of his adult life feeling like he was hanging dangerously onto a ledge and, above him, people were constantly stepping on his fingers to make him let go, give up, go away. He could offer no guidance or help to anyone else while he was just hanging on. 

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

On occasion, because of my own anxieties, on the mimeograph machine in my mind, it seemed like a couple of pieces of paper would come loose and flap wildly as the drum turned. My mind was that drum and my thoughts were that paper flapping uncontrollably.  I had tried a variety of ways to ease my anxieties: visualizing silly images like a cat with a stop sign attached to its tail or locking my worries in a dumpster, but nothing helped much until I found my way into an Al-Anon meeting one day. I was nineteen and dating David, a man who shared early on that he was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and, who, after having known my mother for a few weeks, thought he ought to tell me about Al-Anon. “I don’t know much about that group except they used the same 12 Steps we use in AA. Who knows? It might just be a lot of old women complaining about their drunk husbands, but it’s there and worth a try.” 

You could always try those meetings….

He shared this one morning over coffee; I’d sought him out, distraught after encountering my mother drunk that morning. His suggestion hit me at the right moment and I found a meeting that evening at the back of the small storefront where the AA meeting was held. I was too worn out with navigating the alcohol and moods to be nervous about walking into a room where I knew no one. What happened then was that I walked into a roomful of loving, wise, patient surrogate parents who shared with me the Twelve Steps. Members of Al-Anon are, like me, those who have lived with or currently in relationship with alcoholics. The first three steps to that philosophy are designed to help you recognize that your life is unmanageable; likely if you grew up in an alcoholic home, your life had always seemed pretty unmanageable. The Third Step talks about believing in and trusting that there was a God and that God could help. The idea of letting go of control of my life seemed dangerous but I kept going back and sharing how stressful and chaotic my family’s day to day life was.  My own life at that time was a mess as well: I couldn’t tell you what I believed or what I needed to do for my next job, let alone as a career. So, per their suggestion, I attended 90 meetings in 90 days, letting those people love on me and studying the Steps. In contrast to everything around me, the Twelve Steps were not chaotic, but rather offered a different way to make decisions and live life. Then, one afternoon, I was curled up on my bed, emotionally exhausted and lost. It seemed a voice in my head, a benevolent voice, said, “You just need to sit down and shut up.” Suddenly, it felt like I was not alone in making decisions. I took a breath and stopped asking myself or God or anyone who’d listen; I just sat quietly, suddenly reassured the answer would find me if I sat still and waited. A revelation. There would be more. Eventually. I stopped dating David, but I kept coming back to the meetings regularly for nearly two decades, wherever I lived, and I know that that program and those people saved my life and even helped me grow up, at least a bit. 

 A decade later, married and teaching with two small boys, I finally told my then husband that I prayed and, when he didn’t laugh at me, I admitted that God not only talked to me but that I believed I was meant to be involved full time in some ministry. You might think that everyone around you would celebrate if you announced your call to church ministry, and that’s true in some circles. I’d been attending a Methodist Church regularly with our sons, but most of our friends at that time were not attending any church; most were agnostic at best. Thus, I felt the need to be selective when telling anyone that I had regular conversations with God, even those that are only in my head. It didn’t help that God and I were negotiating what ministry for me might look like and I was still quite leery of admitting God wanted anything from me, of all people. If nothing else, at the time, I cussed like a sailor. I had to wonder how that would work! 

Moving forward into what would become an increasingly complicated path towards ordination, it was clear that I had to be subtle about my next steps, and at least appear sane and convincing enough to be taken seriously. The first step was to write a letter to the Methodist Superintendent of the district I lived in and declare my desire to “explore ministry.” Somewhere in there, it was necessary to admit publicly – to say out loud in front of others – that God spoke to me and told me that I was “called” to ministry. Another chance to cringe.

My First Church

The process of moving towards ordination (in the Methodist Church at least) had certainly been more involved than dialing 211, but it was not dissimilar. I’d written that letter and one of the first things the church did was assign me someone to be my mentor, someone who would listen to me and ask lots of questions. Kind of like a free friend, but with a purpose. From then on out, as I went through the process, there were plenty of folks who were ready and willing to swim in the deep end of thoughts and emotions with me, like those free friends, or better, like counselors I didn’t have to pay. The first thing they did, though, was send me to  a psychologist’s office because there was a test in my future. Not free, I remember thinking, but a whole lot less dramatic than calling the local hotline and telling them I talk to God, I guess. 

The psychological exam was just one of the many steps involved in becoming a Methodist minister, a process that is quite long and involved, and can become expensive for many. I had to laugh when I found out, though, that people also used this process, or at least the psychological testing, as a workaround for their own mental screening; it wasn’t free and was far more involved than a simple phone call. I had to wonder: Did they want to be stopped before they hurt someone? I remember sitting in a leather chair in a paneled office with a massive wooden desk between me and the psychologist. I will be forever grateful he started the conversation with, “First, your test reveals you are mentally strong and resilient. All good.”

Relieved, I sat back in the leather chair, and let out a laugh, then admitted, “I’ve got to ask about one of the questions in that test.”

“Sure,” he said.

“It was  something like, ‘Do you like to smell other people’s shoes? Do some people actually admit to enjoying aroma of another person’s shoes?’” 

“You’d be surprised,” the psychologist said.

“Why on earth would you do that?” 

“It’s a way to ask for help, ostensibly without actually asking. They want us to catch them before they do something dangerous,” he explained.

I sure understand that, I thought, making a mental note to be, as a minister, more focussed on the reasons behind those workarounds than the tricks themselves. The reasons were where ministry would happen, I realized. Sometimes people need someone to help them figure out if they are crazy because they talk to – and hear from – God. Just as often, though, folks need to be encouraged to share what they believe God is telling them. Walking people through that process for the United Methodist Church requires years of discernment, writing, interviews and 84 hours of seminary. In other churches, you simply walk up to the front of the sanctuary and declare that God talks to you, indeed, that God is calling you to ministry. I get why it’s so tough to get through the ordination process for the UMC, though, and, don’t get me wrong: I respect it. Even after all the schooling and the discerning and retreats and writing and interviews, after all that I learned about myself and about ministry, I still stood behind the pulpit of my first church and wondered if I was in the right place. I suspect though that God is more able to use us when we are not so sure of ourselves, when we remember we need God. And, my experience has been that, often, we learn we need God through recognizing we need one another, whether we find one another through a phone call, a church or a self-help meeting.  

 Sometimes, in perverse moments, though, I will admit, I’ve wondered if we don’t just need to suggest people start with dialing 211. It’s a whole lot faster and cheaper and they will even tell you where to get free cookies. 

D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Eighty Years Later

Because coming home is just the beginning….

In a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief about his past actions. For years, I didn’t have a clue what those might be.

I did not know what troubled James, only that he was miserable, but when the Lady Preacher came by, he focussed on how I wasn’t preaching or leading worship in a way that would help him feel like he’d “been to church.” Apparently, as I explained in that eariler post, he was convinced that IF that Lady Preacher could dish up some good old-fashioned confession, that would fix things for him, at least temporarily.

My job, as he saw it, was to offer him a chance to relieve his guilt (for at least a week) through confession and some time on that mourner’s bench. There was no mourner’s bench at Wartrace UMC by the time I was sent there as pastor, though, and, unfortunately for James, I was not on board with the kind of spiritual bloodletting he seemed to want.

Wartrace United Methodist Church circa 1850
where a split log bench wih no back was reportedly the “mourner’s bench.”

Sadly, though, James, perhaps more than anyone at Wartrace needed his Preacher to see how guilty he believed he was, to convict him and then to help him leave that guilt on there, even if he never actually graced the church with his presence. I tried a few times to reprise my sermon from my perch on a sticky metal kitchen chair on his back porch, but the sad truth was that even if James had been able to feel forgiven by God every week, even if he had felt Scriptural preaching wash over him every Sabbath morning, he was in grave danger of never being able to forgive himself.

For years, I was unaware this was what he felt he needed. I would visit him regularly but we were not speaking the same spiritual language for the longest time. Until I preached about D-Day.

Wartrace United Methodist Church,
Greenbrier, Tennessee
(Photo Property of Rev Jodi McCullah) 2023

I finally learned why James was continually unhappy with my preaching on a sticky Sunday afternoon in June when I was directed to lift some old blankets and newspapers and take a seat on a sagging recliner in the corner of the porch at James’ house, a corner too dark and hidden even to be seen before. James had decided I was to be trusted finally, not because I had finally made him feel like the worm he thought he was; rather, on that sweltering Sunday in June, his son had called right after worship let out to tell Daddy that the Preacher Lady had shared a D-Day story in her sermon.

D-Day Promises

I had told the story of Rev. Herman Yates, a retired pastor connected to the church; he and his wife had moved there a few months earlier. He had never preached at Wartrace, not even in revivals, and he and his wife were homebound, too, but Wartrace claimed him because he’d grown up in the area. He was on my list of shut-ins to visit, and he had given me permission to share his story on the first Sunday in June. Herman, a sergeant in the United States Army on D-Day sixty years before, had joined other NCO’s who strapped on flimsy orange and white vests with large crosses on them in order to lead their platoons’ landing crafts and soldiers onto the shore. Eyes and throat burning from the acrid smoke, trying to drown out the screams, they were halted time and time again by the force of nearby explosions. Herman and the other Sergeants moved methodically forward, though, careful to move slowly enough for their men to follow and, of course, he said, slowly enough to be a perfect target. When I met him, Herman was able to tell the story calmly after relating it hundreds of times from pulpits across the area. He told powerfully of how he had bargained with God that day that, should he survive, he would dedicate the rest of his life to preaching. God took him up on the deal.

For those unfamiliar with World War II, “The D-Day operation of June 6, 1944, brought together the land, air, and sea forces of the allied armies in what became known as the largest amphibious invasion in military history,” according to the Eisenhower Presidential Library. “The operation, given the codename OVERLORD, delivered five naval assault divisions to the beaches of Normandy, France. The beaches were given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD. The invasion force included 7,000 ships and landing craft manned by over 195,000 naval personnel from eight allied countries. Almost 133,000 troops from the United States, the British Commonwealth, and their allies, landed on D-Day. Casualties from these countries during the landing numbered 10,300.” Combat would continue for nearly another year in Europe. (eisenhowerlibrary.gov)

Knowing what little I do about the massive undertaking that was D-Day, I have long been amazed at the instructions Herman received that morning before the terrifying landing began. “If you make it to the beach,” Herman’s orders had been to “go to the ‘big’ tree, turn right and meet up a mile down.” Herman and at least a few of his platoon somehow safely made their way onto the beach, somehow found some trees still standing on that battlefield, and somehow chose the right big tree from among many. Herman always knew how all that happened and how he had survived the rest of the war. He went on to serve churches for some forty years.

James was proud, he said that Sunday, proud I’d shared Herman’s story. For the first time since I’d arrived at Wartrace, sitting in the old recliner, I did the math and realized James was shaking because he’d been there as well. Tragically, though, James’ story was neither heroic nor admirable.

“I sent them all out there,” he said with litte introduction, “out there to die.” He paused and looked at the flickering television screen, his only constant companion for years. “One by one,” he continued, “the boats went out. We heard and we knew. We were wishing them a safe journey. We knew though. We didn’t know how many, but we knew, we knew. We were safe, right where we were.” He wasn’t in danger but he was painfully certain that his actions were killing soldiers – his own soldiers – on that beachhead as brutally as any bullet or exploding shell. After he shared his story, his voice trailed off and he mumbled to himself for a bit before I made a pitiful attempt to be helpful.

An estimated 20 percent of all combatants historically suffer from the effects of “combat trauma.”

Soldier’s Heart

nostalgia

“to be broken”

shell shock

“The affliction (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) has had many names over the centuries, demonstrating that it is a condition accompanying not just modern wars but all wars. Its cluster of symptoms was first diagnosed as ‘nostalgia’ among Swiss soldiers in 1678. German doctors at that time called the condition Heimweh, and the French called it maladie du pays; both mean homesickness. The Spanish called it estar roto, ‘to be broken.’ Civil War Americans called it soldier’s heart, irritable heart, or nostalgia. In World War I, it was called shell shock; in World War II and Korea, combat fatigue. ‘Soldier’s heart’ indicates that the heart has been changed by war. ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ bespeak the soldier’s anguished longing to escape from the combat zone and return home. Estar roto describes the psyche’s condition after war—broken.”

(War and the Soul: Healing our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Edward Tick, Ph.D, p. 99)

I doubt James heard anything I said that afternoon. I’d like to believe I offered him some kind of relief from his guilt but I’m pretty sure my words were wasted. I couldn’t do what he wanted, couldn’t agree with him that he should feel guilty, couldn’t acknowledge that he was indeed as guilty of killing Allied soldiers as any German bullet, bomb or soldier. I toyed with the idea of offering him one of the confessions we regularly used from the hymnal on Communion Sunday, but not one word I could think of was gonna do.

In every house of worship in the nation, veterans of wars are in the pews. Many have spent decades grappling with grief from their wartime experiences. Few of them feel like their part was heroic or admirable. Maybe they “won,” but too often, they are leary of telling us how ugly the “winning” was.

Evidently, James had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, so maybe telling Herman’s D-Day story created a space for James, as if we gave him permission to risk sharing the shame he felt. Perhaps being able finally to tell his story out loud was the confession James craved. Like too many combat veterans, though, he needed not only to share but also to not be shunned.

Years later, I would sit in a veteran’s retreat and listen to veteran after veteran tell their combat stories, usually with trepidation. So many were like the Iraq war veteran who shared his story of killing “anything that moved” from the helicoptor he piloted. That veteran believed himself to be a “monster” and was certain he should no longer be allowed in our midst. Like this combat veteran and so many others, James needed to tell his story and not have anyone, as one veteran feared, “run screaming from the room.” He needed to know I didn’t see him as a monster and that I would still visit, still speak to him, still consider him part of the flock. He had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, and telling Herman’s D-Day story gave him permission, at least in his mind, to risk telling his story out loud. Maybe Herman knew what would happen when I shared his D-Day story. God certainly did.

Leave a comment

Facing the Big Dogs (Part 2 of 2)

To read part one of this two-part essay, see Speak Up, Young Lady. Be warned, parts of that essay may trigger victims.

Wise ones tell us that we often have to “learn” the same lesson over and over until we get it right. My hint: once you figure out whatever lesson it is you seem doomed to repeat in your life, get on that. Study it. Dissect it. Get it right so you can get it done…or, at least, get good at it.

For me, evidently, one lesson that I have felt doomed to repeat is “Speak up.” 

After being fired at age 17 from a fast food restaurant for daring to write a letter to corporate about requiring female workers to wear short skirts (this was in the late 70’s) I found work that fit my college schedule at the county juvenile detention facility. I was thrilled to get the job if only because I was considering a career in social work by that time. Never mind that there was little or no training for the position or that most of my co-workers and I were still teens ourselves; the county simply needed folks willing to work all hours, and willing to be locked into the facility with teens in trouble. College students fit that bill nicely. There were three shifts a day, each eight hours, round the clock, and we all pulled at least one midnight to eight a.m. shift a week. I’m grateful that the teens we supervised were “less criminal and more neglected” teens, picked up mostly for truancy or petty theft or vandalism, but mostly just guilty of being unsupervised. There were three pods of four teens each and our biggest struggle was keeping them from being bored and trying to ignore smartass remarks. I generally worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift on three of my four shifts, always sharing supervision and feeding and fielding complaints alongside another college student, always a guy since we were locked in every night with boys and girls. 

When the dog bites….

Only once did we realize how vulnerable we were, but some training we received came in really handy then and years later for me. During a self-defense training, we learned about getting out of holds and about using weak spots like the instep which is usually vulnerable when someone grabs you from behind. I would years later be grateful for another piece of that training: when we were taught how to react when someone bites you. An unarmed combatant might bite and, while the instinct is to pull away, the best move is to push into the open jaws. That movement will cause the assailant to open their jaw wider and allow you to then pull away. Years later, while out walking in my neighborhood, I would use that with a dog that jumped his fence and lunged for me. I am grateful I saw him coming, though, raised my arm (covered thankfully by a heavy jacket) and pushed back into his jaw as he lunged. He was unable to bite down. We repeated this two more times, him lunging and me pushing back while I yelled for help before another neighbor came out. I’d heard people say time seems to slow in life-threatening moments, and I remember calmly being focussed on my arm going into that dog’s jaw.

It was terrifying.

It was also empowering and would help me in so many ways.

I’d been given one way to stand my ground and I’d seen it work. This would not come in handy until years later, though. At that time, I am grateful to say we had little reason to be afraid of our detainees in the juvenile detention facility. 

Again with the troublemaking.

After working there for nearly a year, though, as the juvenile detention facility (which seemed like a lifetime for me at eighteen, by the way) a new worker was hired. Without warning, my schedule was cut in half. It took a week or so to figure out what was happening, but, evidently, the new worker was dating the boss. Remember, this was the seventies. No one even thought of filing complaints then, at least not in Springfield, Missouri. I was angry, but was told at our monthly staff meeting this arrangement would be temporary. By that time, I was living in a tiny apartment. The kitchen was so small I could not open the oven door more than three inches because the refrigerator stood in the way. The bathroom had a claw foot tub with a skylight overhead, though, and a balcony, and I was thrilled to have it, but I would not be able to pay my rent on half a paycheck. Already, I had learned the art of “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and relied as well on the four meals a week I shared with the detainees at work. This job had been my way out of working fast food; I knew I was far too clumsy to be a server at a restaurant. After nearly a month with my hours cut though, I found it difficult to be cordial when I went to pick up my diminished paycheck and encountered my replacement. I’d thus far received good evaluations, so I was frustrated about having to consider another job. That is perhaps why I figured I had little to lose when the next monthly staff meeting rolled around. After our boss offered updates and training information, he handed out new schedules for the month and, again, I was facing half of my regular paycheck. I raised my hand. My boss called on me. I was standing at the back of the room, aware that others were disgruntled at how things were working out but only two of us had lost significant portions of our paychecks. I simply asked, “What do I have to do to get my hours back?” 

My boss looked at me, frowned, and asked me what I meant. 

“You know what I mean.” I said, “What do I have to DO to get my hours back?” He definitely knew what I meant. He looked at his girlfriend who was seated next to him up front, then frowned at me. I guessed it was time to start searching for another job. I certainly had no intention of actually sleeping with the jerk. And, while a well-reasoned letter to my boss’s boss might have seemed more professional, as it happened, I got my hours back the next day. Troublemaker. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. Noted. 

Speaking up, asking people to do the right thing hasn’t always been as successful as I might wish, though. Over the years, the stakes became higher.  Sometimes, it did not make me friends with those in charge, and sometimes those in charge used their power in ways that cost me lost opportunities and/or lost income. The best news for me was that often there were others standing with me, and, on occasion, I have been pleasantly surprised by someone speaking up for me.  

Sometimes, feeling the need to speak up cost me more than a lost date. While in college, I was invited to apply for a scholarship through a local civic organization to study in France for a year because French was my minor. The opportunity to study abroad would no doubt have opened doors I could not imagine. I wrote my application essay and my resume in French and English, and, of course I listed Leadership opportunities, including some speaking engagements explaining the Equal Rights Amendment in town or on campus. I was told, though, that the scholarship was given to a young man. I would have received it had it not been for my work on women’s issues; evidently the group imagined me sailing across the sea to start riots, maybe even to burn my bra.

I had two ways to see that, I reasoned. I could stop speaking up and go along to get along, but I would have to agree to be like the people who had disappointed me which might lead to me being the reason someone else was disappointed. All these lessons in speaking up followed (or led?) me into teaching and ministry and, while it got some easier, I never really got used to people being angry when I speak up. Now, when I find out, though, that there’ll be consequences or someone is angry, I (eventually) shrug. There are people close to me who I am loathe to upset, but everyone else can just take a number. I might be surprised and disappointed but we’ve come too far now. People just expect it.

Who Knew? My Life Lessons Aren’t Just For Me.

Turns out, learning our life lessons isn’t just for us. What we learn can benefit others. In ministry, I have been called to speak up for my LGBTQ students, those behind bars, wounded soldiers. I was, honestly, as proud as I was distressed to be called “that woman” by some of the folks dealing with wounded warriors at Fort Campbell.

All of my lessons, it turned out, helped in these cases, as did the understanding that the folks who needed someone to stand with them or speak up for them were in far greater pain than any discomfort I felt at speaking up at this point in my life.

Personally, speaking up was easier, in fact, when I was no longer the only one affected. When I had children, I felt keenly the need to protect my boys or anyone else who was vulnerable. My first chance to act on that came when a neighborhood dog began getting out of his fenced-in yard.

Facing the Big Dogs

In this case, I thought the “Big Dog” in the small town where my husband and I had settled with our boys was the Collie living on the corner across the street from one of my son’s friends. He was so large he could put his front paws on the shoulders of an adult and look him in the eye. He started demonstrating this on folks in the neighborhood who were strolling around the small downtown area, knocking more than a few of them down. The owner, when informed, usually snarled and slammed the door.  When I heard the dog had knocked down the elderly piano teacher around the corner,  though, I resolved to call animal control. I discovered though there was only a part time animal control staff in our small town in spite of a growing number of dogs allowed to roam free. I decided to write a letter to the editor -again with the letters, right? – to encourage folks to speak up and perhaps convince our city government to make the animal control agent a full time position. The letter was also an “open letter” to my neighbors with dogs to encourage them to follow the leash law in town and inform them of what was then the local rule at least. According to that rule, a dog owner whose pet bit another person could be made to pay any doctor bills. A dog owner whose dog bit a second time could be sued and, after a third offense, an animal would be put down by the city. I encouraged dog owners to protect both their neighbors and their dogs. Once again, I believed I’d written a well-reasoned letter.

The Big Dogs Bark

The letter was published on a Wednesday. That evening, I received a phone call from the mayor. My anticipation of a good conversation was usurped almost immediately when our illustrious city leader, whom I had never met, began berating me angrily and basically telling me to mind my own business. The big dogs were barking.

I quickly gave up on an actual conversation when it became apparent this was not a dialog. I was honestly surprised that any adult would yell like that at any other adult who wasn’t in their family. He didn’t even know me. I was also confused about why he’d been so rude and aggressive and I began to worry about encountering him in public. I was still pretty unsure what to think about his behavior when, early the next morning, I answered my front door to find the animal control officer in uniform. 

Photo by Blue Bird on Pexels.com

You gotta be kidding, I thought.

She was smiling, though, and, after introducing herself, asked if by any chance I’d received a call the night before from the city mayor. Turns out, the mayor had made a habit of nightly drunken calls to people who ticked him off, and this officer often was dispatched by the local sheriff to apologize to the recipients of those calls. No wonder the city couldn’t afford a full time Animal Control officer.  We took notice that the understanding was they’d keep up this practice of apologizing for him until the next election. I began to worry about how angry our neighbor with the collie likely was, if he had read the paper.

The Bite

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

We got the chance to face him fairly quickly when, a week or two later, I was walking with my eight-year-old to his friend’s house and the collie on the corner lunged out from behind a bush and bit me on the hip before we even knew what was happening. He only lunged once, thank God, and, fortunately, we were just a few feet from the friend’s house. The boy’s mother and I quickly decided I needed to see a doctor. The bite had punctured the skin and drawn blood, but he had not clamped down or torn the flesh. I had not needed to put my juvenile court training into action, I thought, since he only lunged once. The importance of the lesson about standing your ground, though, contained a much wider meaning, I would find out.

The bleeding was minimal but the bruising had already begun and I’d need a tetanus shot. As soon as I finished at our local clinic that day, I walked over to the police department and swore out a warrant. I was driven by the terrifying thought that, had my son been walking on the other side of me that morning, the dog would likely have bitten his face or neck. The thought made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I knew this was a chance to begin the process to make our neighborhood safer. Though I feared we’d all still have to avoid that part of the neighborhood for a long while, we had put this bully and his dog on notice and try to find some official help.

Amusing detail: the officer who took my information was surprised to discover, through a congenial conversation, that I not only actually loved dogs, we had two big dogs; we just didn’t let them run free. She and her colleagues were under the impression I hated all dogs. She gave me a court date and I left, already afraid and realizing I’d need to warn my boys to watch out in case the neighbor decided to retaliate once he was served with the papers. We stayed close to home for the next few weeks.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

When the morning came to face the dog’s owner in court, I will admit I was nauseous and more than a bit afraid not only of facing him but also of how the case would be treated. For all I knew, this dog owner played pool with the local judge. When the judge called us both up to his bench, the neighbor immediately started complaining, “Judge,” he said, “this crazy woman–” but the judge cut him off and asked me for the evidence I had of the bite, which meant both men would be viewing pictures of my butt and hip showing the puncture marks and bruising. A stellar start.

I was beginning to regret the warrant when the judge laid the pictures down, turned to the dog owner and asked, “You drunk, Sir?” My neighbor’s blustery and belligerent response was the judge’s answer.

“You, Sir,” the judge continued, “may or may not be aware that this bite is your dog’s first offense, his first strike.” He held up his hand when my neighbor began to protest. 

“You will pay her for her medical bills before you leave. And because you disrespected this court by showing up drunk, your dog now has two strikes against him.” Once again, he held up his hand to stop any protests. “I understand you own some property outside of town; I’d suggest the dog move there. Today. Step back.”  

Going through all of that was exhausting and literally gut-wrenching, but I had reached a point where NOT doing anything would have felt far worse. 

I’d finally reached a point where NOT speaking up was more painful than swallowing what I needed to say. I did not want to end my life filled with regrets. I’ve hated learning to speak up but I hated not speaking up more.

…where I am today is light years better than where I began, represents so much distance from curling up in the backseat, sure no one would believe me if I spoke up.  

This has been my journey and, while speaking up can still be tiring, today I have allies, I have freedom to walk away and I have lots of practice. The need to speak up is mostly easier to face. 

This life lesson is no longer the big dog in my emotional neighborhood lunging at me until I fall down.

Maybe you never think twice about speaking up, but I know you have your own challenges, your own life lessons, and I hope you’re moving through them, growing, reaching, finding your freedom.  I hope as you reflect on where you’ve been, that you give yourself the benefit of the doubt and that you recognize you likely did the best you could, the best you knew to do, at the time. If nothing else, you survived and learned to do things differently the next time. 

My hope for you, then, is this:

May you figure out your life lessons swiftly and early in life.

May you accept help and welcome allies along the way.

May you not reach the end of your life wondering 

Where you’d be or 

What you’d be doing 

If you had stared down your hounds, 

If you had pushed back on the jaws that threatened you, 

If you had felt strong enough…finally…, become fed up enough, worn out enough to say what you needed to say when you needed to say it.

“Honestly, I wanna see you be brave….”

Sara Bareilles, “Brave,” 2013

Speak Up, Young Lady! Part 1 of 2

Warning: parts of this post may trigger victims.

Take care of yourself.

Wise ones tell us that we often have to “learn” the same lesson over and over until we get it right. My hint: once you figure out whatever lesson it is you seem doomed to repeat in your life, get on that. Study it. Dissect it. Get it right so you can get it done, or, at least, get good at it.

For me, evidently, one lesson that I have felt doomed to repeat is “Speak up.” 

In some ways, I credit/blame my ninth grade Speech and Drama teacher not only for teaching me debate techniques but also for getting me labeled a troublemaker. She asked me to argue in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment in the fall, which was still being considered by states for ratification. The main concept was consideration of equal pay. I honestly, as a pretty-self-absorbed teen, had not really considered any of the ideas that led us to the creation of that piece of legislation. I had never encountered the idea of women being treated as equally important and valuable or as the bearers of essential ideas and points of view that had been discounted and ignored for too long or as important and valuable as men. Like most of the women around me, I’d been raised to consider males the norm and females the “second run,” tolerated but not equal in much if anything. We were like fish swimming in the ocean of male dominance; until someone else from outside pointed out there were other ways to see the world, all I saw was the water in which I was swimming. For better or for worse, that assignment set my life on a course I could not fathom before.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t get there; the ERA was not passed by the necessary number of states.

Anyone remember the Equal Rights Amendment?

What I was reading to prepare for the debate was novel to me, but it made sense. I researched and prepared arguments in favor of this amendment as was the assignment, but on the day of the debate, I was embarrassed, disappointed, discouraged and hurt that the teacher allowed the opposing team to argue relying heavily on personal insults thrown mostly at me even though they learned the same rules we did about ad hominem arguments. Silly me. I had expected a fair and respectful discussion. I lost a couple of friends that day simply because I was trying to fulfill the assignment I was given, but even more disturbing to me was the aftermath of this debate: I was from then on labeled as a girl who hated boys, something that would crop up at the most unexpected times throughout high school.

Turned out whether or not I believed the arguments didn’t matter. What mattered was that I dared to consider them.

Suddenly, whether I wanted it or not, I was perceived as radical and even dangerous because of being willing to consider something as radical as equal pay for equal work. 

I became, unbeknownst to me at the time, the poster child in our high school for “women’s lib.”

After a while, I simply embraced it. I even decided with some other girls to try out to be managers for the boys wrestling team because the wrestling coach, our history teacher, could not find boys who wanted to do the job. We all three got “hired” and we did the jobs, even earning our wrestling letters for our work.

Unfortunately, consciously or not, the wrestler I started dating decided I needed to be put in my place after we’d been dating for a few months.

Painful Lessons

Warning: This may trigger victims.

David didn’t have to say anything much at all. What he taught me while he held me down on that floor in my family’s apartment and raped me was that there was always someone stronger out there and they could overpower you if they wanted. It’s a lesson that’ll stick with you, make no mistake.

Within the scope of that lesson, there were others, all seemingly responses to the ideas of women being as free to be themselves as the men. “Be more ‘girly.’” “Be quiet when the boys are talking.” “Be available when your boyfriend wants you and be willing to do what he wants when he wants.” The lesson was a powerful one for me and I was, I know now, in shock afterwards; I went through the motions at school and at home.

It didn’t long to realize that the accepted rules were not ones I could live by. Because they were familiar, though, it took a minute to get to the real lesson. I needed to learn to say what I needed, to say no when I meant no and to say it regardless of whether or not anyone else agreed and as much as possible, in a safe way. This has become my life lesson.

I was desperate after that to get him to leave me alone but I did not feel safe to share what had happened with my parents. I tried several times over the next few months to get him to leave me alone: I even cut my long hair and took to wearing cutoffs and sweatshirts, a move to seem even less feminine than I was; our mail carrier was convinced I was a boy. My attempts to “hide” did little good, though; he would wait until he knew I was home alone and then call and knock on the windows and doors and tell me through the door he knew where to find me when he wanted. I knew he was right. I had no one I believed would help, no one whom I believed would believe me.

He was a wrestler, of course, which meant keeping my coveted wrestling manager position meant seeing him often. After a while, he changed tactics: he apologized. Where before he’d been angry and threatening, he became sweet and caring. He took me to meet his family. His little sister liked me. My little sister wouldn’t speak to me. His mother encouraged me to grow my hair out again and cooked special meals for me. We all watched “Laugh-in” together.  I finally agreed to go with him to junior prom. We’d get to dance, something he knew I loved dearly. We’d get to go to after parties with others in our class; before he had never wanted to participate in group activities. On prom night, though, we danced one dance, took the prom picture, then left, I thought, to go to a friends’ party. Instead, he drove me to a cliff overlooking the Kansas City airport, nearly an hour’s drive from my home. He raped me again, then fell asleep. I crawled into the backseat and watched the occasional plane land until the sun came up and he took me home. When I walked into our apartment, my father was visibly disgusted, evidently certain I’d been a willing participant. I’ll never know if our speech teacher knew what that assignment on the ERA had set into motion. I’ve never told her what I learned about the cost of speaking up or how long it took me to learn to push back, stand up and speak out.

Dropping Out/Finding A Safe Place

At the end of that junior year in high school, my high school “career” ended. People are often surprised to find that a person who’s earned a master’s degree “dropped out” of high school. Actually, though, I didn’t quit high school as much as I gratefully moved on. My family moved from North Kansas City to Springfield, Missouri when I was headed to my senior year. The move was disappointing because I had been chosen for the yearbook team at my old school, but I was also grateful. And hopeful. My hope was to be away, finally, from him. Imagine my horror when he showed up one day in the beginning of that first summer after we moved, standing at my front door with one of the other wrestling managers; she had told him where to find me. I remember clenching my teeth for an entire afternoon while we “visited.” I had no intention of doing anything that might require me telling my parents what I did not want to tell anyone and he likely knew that. I was grateful when they simply left and I did not hear from him ever again. I didn’t need to. He would haunt my thoughts for years until I was able to get help and start evicting him from any thoughts, conscious or unconsciousness.  

The rest of that summer would involve figuring out how not to face a senior year at a new school when I knew no one and I was the youngest kid in class. (I would turn seventeen in my senior year because I’d gone to a church kindergarten where they didn’t mind if I wouldn’t turn five til the end of November; the only requirement had been that I could tie my own shoes.) In addition, the high school I was leaving had been non-traditional in that we attended classes on a college schedule and were free to come and go as if we were in college. I had no intention of going back to a traditional school schedule once I’d grown accustomed to keeping my own schedule.

Looking for a new start…asking for help.

By mid-June, I’d decided to check into GED classes. “Why not,” I figured. High school had not been particularly friendly. College held the promise of starting out simply as the skinny girl with freckles in search of open minds and greater variety of interests and personalities and experiences.  College was my chance to leave the provincial and limited nature of high school and be reminded that everyone in the world was not of one mind on much of anything. I looked forward to finding I wasn’t as alien or as weird as the next-door neighbors seemed to think. First step was being legally allowed to quit high school. At that point, I didn’t care one bit about being labeled a quitter.

I quickly found myself in a small classroom in that summer before what would have been my senior year, being tested to determine if I would be eligible to take the GED. Four of us were testing, including myself, a twenty-something guy in a leather jacket asking me if I wanted to see his switchblade and two folks who’d recently moved to the country. I was sixteen and wouldn’t even try to get my driver’s license for another year because I knew once I did, I’d become the chauffeur for my brother and sister. I rode a ten-speed bicycle everywhere then, easy enough in Springfield. In the GED class, we were given a paper test and told to bring our copy to the teacher’s desk when we completed it.  She would score our test, then divide by 4 to determine if we had scored at a 12th grade level. If we hadn’t, we’d be offered remedial work to help us make the grade. Being seated next to “switchblade guy” probably spurred me to complete my work quickly, and I took my test booklet to the teacher. 

“Wait here,” she said, so I stood next to her desk as she graded my work. “It won’t take long before we know if you need more studies.” I’d completed my junior year back in Kansas City on the honor roll and was hopeful until the teacher wrote my score on the top of the page.  “Grade 11 equivalence. Remedial work needed,” she wrote.

 As she reached into her desk drawer, ostensibly for some remedial resources, though, I peeked at her tabulations, took a breath and pointed to her numbers, whispering so the others wouldn’t hear. 

“Excuse me, but your long division is wrong: forty-eight divided by 4 is twelve, not 11.” I wondered if her job required a high school diploma.

She slammed the drawer closed, looked at her calculations, and told me to come back at 8 a.m. Saturday for the GED. I elected to leave before my classmates had time to comment. I am proud to say that my school work prepared me well because I passed the GED easily. 

The next step then was to convince the local college to admit a sixteen-year-old. Somehow, it did not occur to me that they’d hesitate. First, the admissions office informed me, I would need to take an ACT before enrolling. Since the next openings weren’t until October, I’d be lucky if I managed to start classes before January, and that was only if I tested well enough, I was told. I felt pretty discouraged, but by this time I could not imagine going back to high school. I don’t remember why, but I decided to write to the only educator I could think of who might help me. Dr. Kahler was the principal of the school I’d left in Kansas City and a long shot: while I had good grades and had scored well on the Pre-SAT, my only personal encounter with my high school principal had been when I was hitch-hiking to school one morning. Imagine my surprise when a car stopped and I opened the passenger door only to see Dr. K. He then gave me a ride to class and a lecture on the dangers of hitchhiking.  (This was in the 70’s. We hitchhiked in our bellbottoms. Strangers were, sadly, the least of our worries; we had to be more afraid of the men we knew.) 

I wrote to him, though I didn’t even know if he would remember me, and told him I was trying to enter college that semester rather than attend a high school where I knew no one for my senior year. I told him I’d passed my GED and what the school said about my needing to wait until the next year. I doubt it was an eloquent letter; I simply recounted my efforts to move ahead in school. I heard nothing for a month, then in early August, nervously opened a letter on the stationery of my former high school. Dr. Kahler wished me well and included a copy of a letter he’d sent to the college, evidently a few weeks prior. I got on my bike and was at the admissions office within the hour. Yes, they’d received the letter, I was told. From the exasperated tone, though, it seemed likely they were not going to go out of their way to mention that to me, but, since I was there, the admissions office reluctantly agreed I could enroll on probation pending the results of my ACT in October. I sent back a note thanking Dr. Kahler. I also sent him an update and thank you note at the end of my first semester after making the honor roll. 

This was one of the first times I can remember speaking up, asking, over and over, for what I felt like I needed. Small steps maybe but steps nevertheless. Speaking up was not a quality I’d learned at home, though, and I know enough now to say I was taught to be a good victim long before I met that wrestler.

Most of my life, I had been the child who figured out quickly how to avoid being punished, who hid quietly to the side to keep from incurring any wrath on difficult days, who toed the line closely, even when the line seemed to change at random moments. My brother and sister more often were in trouble; they seemed to operate on the theory that any attention is better than none while I made it my goal to stay in the shadows.

As I began to step out into the real world, though, my parents were appalled to find I did not in fact always comply quietly, did not keep my head down, and did not just acquiesce and move on when I disagreed, at least not in the workplace. The first time I remember speaking up as a quasi-adult, in fact, I got fired.  

After working in a fast food store at half of minimum wage, I doubled my paycheck by donning a sailor’s white middy with a red, white and blue sailor collar to serve fish and chips for a pirate-inspired franchise. In our blue skirts and knee socks and white sailor caps, we worked around fryers and hoisted benches up onto long wooden tables so we could mop underneath them. We reeked at the end of our work shifts of sour milk after tossing oversized trash bags leaking coleslaw dressing into the dumpsters. I was in my first semester of college and worked thirty-plus hours a week along with two other girls who attended a local Bible college. The job was ideal for them because we provided our own skirts and, with all the bending and lifting, longer skirts were helpful for modesty for me. For my two co-workers though, knee-length skirts were required by their school in order to be allowed to work there.

Nevertheless, it was the 70’s; while maxi skirts were popular for school or a Joan Baez concert, shorter was better for uniforms, it seemed. The “Fly Me” campaign was still fresh in our collective memories and plenty of folks thought any feminist protest over that kind of advertising was just, well, for troublemakers. After working there for several months then, we received notices that, beginning the next week, our skirts must be at least five inches above our knees and no more knee socks. Pantyhose only. No discussion. The two girls from the Bible College would have to quit. I naively thought we could reason with the Corporate offices. I wrote a letter. Polite. Reasonable. I explained how pantyhose were in fact dangerous around fryers, and short skirts made it difficult to bend and lift without flashing customers. I also suggested they would lose some honest, hardworking employees by making it impossible for thousands of students from Bible colleges to work at their stores. I mailed my letter on a Friday and worked all that weekend as usual. 

Monday morning rolled around, though, and guess who was not scheduled to work at all? No explanation. No notice. Might have been a 70’s version of ghosting.  I always wondered whether if that’d happened today, I might not have gotten some relief from being fired simply for writing a letter to corporate. Instead, my parents chastised me for being such a troublemaker and I went looking for another job after having been fired.

Speaking up in this case did not seem successful but it seemed right.

More importantly, for the first time, I could not stomach staying quiet, going along to get along, or looking the other way simply because that’s what someone else wanted me to do. This was new behavior, foreign to most of the people I knew and disturbing to my family for sure.

This life lesson continues to show up, often quite unexpectedly. While I am more adept at recognizing the need to speak up, it’s taken all of my life to get here and I still feel a deep discomfort saying no. I’ve learned, though, that learning to speak up has been as much for others in my life as it has been for me. I wish it were easier but I reason that, if it were easier, it would no longer be something to worry about. We’d all be able to speak up. We are clearly not there yet.

For more on this life lesson of learning to speak up, see the next installment: Facing the Big Dogs.

Of Puppets, Delicatessens and Learning Styles

How a delicatessen menu taught me how to understand how my son – and my church members – learn.

While I was writing this, I had several conversations, mostly with my oldest son, Arlo, a college instructor, about the third grade retention law in Tennessee and how students often do well in reading or math skills but not in testing even though it is through standardized testing that it is determined whether or not they will advance or be held back to repeat third grade. The teachers I know work so very hard to help each student and if we are going to have standardized learning (i.e., all students of an age studying the same thing at the same time) then we will have standardized testing is a necessary evil. Having taught the students who ended up in Study Skills classes in a community college because after high school they were still not ready for college-level work, though, I know that brilliant people may never learn to test well. Many among us will go through life believing they are not smart when in fact it is simply because they learn differently and do not have access to the learning environment that suits them. We certainly cannot expect our teachers to be able to teach to all learning styles, but all of us can learn from those around us how they – and we – learn better, i.e., we can figure this out together.

Always Learning

No one was more surprised than I was when my youngest son – the shy one, the one who barely spoke until he was three – agreed at around age nine to be the puppeteer for our children’s time in worship. Until that point, most of the church knew him only as the child peeking out from behind the pastor. Turns out, Spencer didn’t speak much until he was three for a couple of reasons: first, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise with three non-stop talkers also at the dinner table; and second, like his older brother, he was born when we lived in Japan where he heard less English than Japanese. We moved back to the states before he was one, so he was uprooted and plopped down in Tennessee just when he was learning to speak. Changing how his brain was wired likely took a minute. The first real words he uttered came as a full sentence, though, or actually, as a question from his favorite movie: “Who ya gonna call?” 

The many faces of Spencer (now a lawyer, married, expecting his own child.)

Once he started talking, we would find out what a quick and dry wit he had developed.  I had introduced a children’s time during worship early and I was reminded regularly I was not in control, often by my own children. The morning I told the children about Jonah being swallowed by a giant fish, then “thrown up” onto the beach, Spencer jumped in with his commentary. 

“Could have been worse,” he said. “Could have come out the other end.”

He was eight when we got to the first church I served, just old enough to go to see his friend Charlie one town over for an overnight stay. Evidently, however, he could not sleep, he confessed when I picked him up the next day. Charlie’s mother was as surprised and concerned as I was; what had he done all night while everyone else slept?

“Watched infomercials,” he said. 

I looked to Charlie’s mom who seemed worried I might be upset. “Well, you’ll get a nap in the car ride home,” I offered, shrugging. 

My son said thanks and goodbye, then stopped at the back door long enough to tell Charlie’s mom, “Oh, your George Foreman grill will be here in three weeks.” Then he walked out the door, leaving both adults bewildered. 

That dry sense of humor and sense of timing would serve him well as a puppeteer. I planned to use the Children’s Time to both entertain and teach. We had a large red dog puppet, whom we renamed Jeffrey and whom we decided would be allowed to ask questions no one else dared ask. In his debut, our puppet first told what would become my favorite joke.

“What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?” he asked. 

I shrugged and asked, “What?”

“Anyone can roast beef.”

It took a minute, but we both waited, expecting to hear the chuckles move across the room slowly; first, though, we heard the roar from the back pew. One of my church members, Ray, loved the joke apparently. A few months later, I would visit him in the hospital and laugh myself because nearly every person who helped me find him that day would ask, “You mean the guy with the pea soup joke?” A year later, he would succumb to the illness that had sent him to the hospital. Sitting in the visitation parlor of the funeral home, I would hear the joke enough to prompt me at the funeral service the next day to ask how many in that room knew the difference between roast beef and pea soup. Nearly everyone raised a hand.  

On that first Sunday of the puppet’s debut, once the ripples of laughter had died down, Jeffrey asked me, the pastor, what I was wearing under that robe? I had not worn a robe before that, but frankly hoped the robe would solve the ever-challenging task of what to wear when preaching. 

“Why, I’m glad you asked,” I said. Then, as I reached down to lift up the hem of my robe, I saw Jeffrey had covered his eyes and was exclaiming, “No, no, no…!” Jeffrey was a hit and became one of our most effective teaching tools.  Using a puppet was in part a response to all I had been learning about how to help my people learn something about themselves and their God. 

Lessons from the Deli

Opportunities to learn what worked for teaching and what didn’t flew at me from all directions at that church; the toughest part was catching all of them and seeing how they were related. A delicatessen menu, for example, taught me about my son, my sister, father and my church. I knew my son was smart; I just didn’t know why he was so often angry until we visited the new delicatessen in Gallatin. We met up with some friends for lunch and we were standing at the counter as a group, staring at the menu, which was written on the back wall of the restaurant behind the counter where the sandwiches, soups and salads were prepared. Usually, when we ate lunch at drive through restaurants, menus sported pictures and we all knew what they were called because we could all sing the jingles we heard during commercial breaks while we watched our favorite television shows. At the new deli, even I felt the pressure to peruse the menu quickly, so I turned to my youngest son and asked if he saw anything he might want for lunch. He looked at me, bewildered. It was a glorious moment of vulnerability; normally, he would have barked at me for singling him out for help. At that moment, though, I realized he did not see what I saw. I saw “Salads,” in larger, bold lettering, for example, then “Chicken,” “Tuna” and “Garden” salad categories in smaller lettering followed by even smaller paragraphs with descriptions for each salad. He saw lots and lots of jumbled letters. 

“Want a ham sandwich?” I offered, knowing what he liked, and told him he could have it on white, wheat or rye bread and he chose rye just to be adventurous. 

“Can I have mayonnaise on it?” he asked.

 “Absolutely,” I said, “and no tomatoes. Chips?” He agreed to chips and soda. 

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I made a note, though, to visit our local library and there I was grateful to find out about different learning styles and how those often mirror and/or drive the different ways we relate socially in the world. Some of us learn just fine the way most subjects are taught in school; others struggle. I personally learn by taking what is presented and being able to then restate it in my own words. In Chemistry in high school, for example, my teacher would walk me through the problem at hand and it always made sense to me in that moment. If I did not get a chance to retell within a short time the solution to the chemistry problem, though, it would be lost to me. I may have initially understood it but I would quickly lose grasp of the solution if I had not written it down and been able to explain it myself. Only if I wrote something down, then retold it in my own words, would I learn what had been presented. Fortunately, that was easy enough to do in most classes growing up. I personally kept great notes and studying for an exam was a matter of going over and over my notes until I could nearly recite them word for word and then recreate them for an exam. Just explain something to me orally, though, then exit and the understanding would leave the room with you. 

My son, I realized, learned by watching and repeating what he’d seen as well, but by doing, not writing and reading. When he was five, we watched him recreate a rocket tower with his plastic building toys while watching one of his favorite movies about the Apollo 13 moon mission. When the rocket took off during the movie, we realized that our son’s rocket tower fell away in stages in exactly the same way the real tower did, something none of the rest of us had even noticed. I do believe that he would have been likely labeled with some sort of “learning disorder” had we not homeschooled our sons. As it was, what I read suggested he simply needed some understanding of his learning style and what might be getting in the way of his learning. He needed me to recognize, for example, that he found distracting those modern textbooks with their colorful pages and art interspersed with words. Simply placing a piece of colored plastic across a textbook page, though, rendered the colors and art less distracting. Turns out, he was among many who struggled because we as a culture had decided it was somehow helpful to readers to spice up the visuals in our textbooks and magazines.  Some of us enjoyed the art; some of us were too distracted to be able to read. Different styles.

Some of us will find a page like this helpful. Others might be distracted by the art. Page from “The Way Life Works,” by Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson, Times Books, 1995.

Spencer also needed information: when you read a textbook, a menu or a newspaper, you start with the largest letters. Might seem intuitive, but not everyone approaches the world in an intuitive manner and our world is richer precisely because we are not all the same. To read a newspaper, you look first at the headlines; on a menu, you choose categories like soup or sandwiches. Once you decide whether or not you want a sandwich or sports, you look to the next largest groups of letters and decide if you want a tuna sandwich or if you want to read the previous days’ scores. Smaller letters give you details about the avocado sandwich you chose, or where the baseball scores can be found. Even smaller lettering leads you to what else you could have on the sandwich or which team won the game or match. 

Learning styles also affect our approach to the world and our relationships. Often, my son simply needed information to help him navigate.

Turns out, when it came to relationships, the same was true. Often, he simply needed information to help him navigate. He asked once what to do when someone was crying. Before, his tactic was to walk away and get someone to help. He wasn’t uncaring. Far from it. He was worried he’d hurt someone more by saying or doing the wrong thing when they were already vulnerable. I suggested a plan: stay close by, and, if you know them well enough, put a hand on their shoulder or arm and ask if there is anything you can do to help. He said thanks and that was that; I thought he’d forgotten about it really until a couple of years later when said he had tried that with a friend and had been relieved to find it had really worked. 

What I had learned was that my son needs information while others learn visually or by hearing. Tragically, seldom do pastors learn how the people around them learn. My son taught me why so many of my family members and congregants might be frustrated. Suddenly, for example, my understanding of one member bragging that he’d finished college “without ever cracking a textbook,” changed. He’d turned that into a plus when it had actually been a hint to his learning style, one not often supported in schools then. Quickly, I understood why our children’s time was often the only part of the worship service people remembered in the beginning. The story or our puppet wasn’t teaching theology; it was just funny, but funny can be theological if you’ve let your guard down expecting a funny joke. 

On one of the first Sundays using Children’s Time, I talked in the sermon about “schadenfreude,” the idea that we take some joy in others getting their due or at least not getting more than us. For the children’s time, I had brought wrapped pieces of hard candy and shared it with the children, but I only had three pieces, so the last child in line got none. When he protested, I explained, “I ran out but at least three of the children get some so we can be happy for them, right?” 

“That’s not fair,” he wailed.

“Well, then, perhaps no one should have candy,” I suggested, snatching back the candies from the other children before they knew what was happening. They were, of course, bewildered by quickly changing fortunes. “Is that better?” I asked. 

He grinned. “Yes!” 

Of course, everyone laughed (but I immediately  regretted the lesson we were all learning at his expense.) In that moment, the pastor learned to think through the children’s messages more carefully. The child felt better but the others were sad and bewildered until I said,  “Wait. Look! There’s another piece of candy here after all.” All the children eagerly accepted their candy and went back to sit with their families. before their fortunes changed again.

Likely none of the children heard the sermon that day but the adults were primed to hear my sharing about my own schadenfreude. 

Ironically, I admitted, I had seen this in myself that morning driving to church. I was sideswiped and nearly run off the road by a speeder. My reaction to that bit of driving aggression had been far from pastoral. To make matters worse, when I passed the same guy a little later getting a ticket just a few miles down the road, I gloated loudly! My schadenfreude, or joy, was that he was “getting his due.” The adults in the room understood the idea better and had it reinforced because of Children’s Time. They understood better then the prophet Jonah who was not happy to discover that God wanted to forgive all the sinners in Nineveh; Jonah wanted to see them “get their due.” We usually want others to get justice while we ourselves get mercy and forgiveness. That’ll preach, as they say.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com

Over the years, then, using all I learned, I not only used the Children’s Time and our snarky puppet, but also worked to craft sermons heavy with stories and illustrations because so many of us only remember the stories we hear or the “word pictures” we encounter. “Show. Don’t tell,” works. Maybe too well. After a couple of years of working to find and add stories to the sermons in hopes people would take something away from worship, I got one of what would feel like daily lessons in humility. At an Administrative Council meeting, a member offered the devotion before the meeting proper using a story I’d told three weeks earlier in my sermon.  “Ah,” I thought, sitting back and smiling, “they DO listen.” But no. Once she’d finished her devotion, she handed me her notes. 

“Feel free,” she said, “to use that in a sermon. It’s a great story.” Sigh.

Bonus free joke from the adult Spencer: 

What is the difference between a tuna, a piano and a glue stick?

I don’t know. What is the difference between a tuna, a piano and a glue stick?

You can tuna piano but you can’t piano a tuna.

 Okay.

But what about the glue stick? 

That’s what everybody gets stuck on.

What’s ‘Just enough’ Christmas?

Christmas swings like a pendulum do….

My paternal grandmother, Arbaleta (Grandma Leta), and maternal grandmother, Marie (Grandma Ree), could not have been more different creatures, and this was never more obvious than at Christmas. At first glance, it seemed to me that they were polar opposites when it came to wintry holidays especially; in retrospect, it is evident they were each on opposite points of the pendulum that has come to symbolize Christmas for me. Generation after generation on both sides of my family seemed to be unconsciously caught up by the wild swings of this holiday pendulum, a reactionary arc between a resounding “Yes!” to Christmas and its counterpart, an adamant “Hell, no!” 

My Granddaughter’s depiction of our favorite activity: swinging. She is so wise….

Finding Healing Around Christmas

Maybe your family needs some healing around holidays as well. Sure, it seems strange to talk about Christmas amidst all the paper and ribbon and cookies and tinsel, but it is, in fact, the best time to step back, recognize struggles and disappointment and start our families on paths to peace with Christmas; maybe along the way we could even figure out what’s “enough” for joy. I offer this reflection then to all our families because we cannot find healing if we do not know our family’s wounds. Here’s hope for discussions about upcoming celebrations: may they be intentional, loving and truly joyful for all.

Marie as a young woman.
Marie, George, & their three daughters, 1940’s
Arbaleta and husband, Freeman (Mac)

For me, it seems the best place to start is with the grandmothers. Both of my grandmothers were born around WWI; each married during the Great Depression. Neither had, as they say, “a pot to piss in,” not while they were growing up and not while they were young mothers. Both worked hard to support their families outside the home as well as in. Dad’s mom, Arbaleta, had two children, a boy and a girl, nine years apart. Mom’s mother, Marie, had three daughters all close in age. 

Arbaleta’s husband, my Grandpa Mac, fell from an electric pole when he was young and wasn’t supposed to ever walk again, but did, in great part because Arbaleta would not let him not walk. She reportedly insisted he move his legs and even moved them for him for months as physical therapy until he could walk and work again. While I was never close to Grandma Leta, I have always admired the steely determination that these actions showed.

Marie had a husband who was always on the road as a truck driver, mostly because the bus or truck driver jobs close to town weren’t well-paying. He died of a massive heart attack at age 50; she lived another 30-plus years and married her high school sweetheart, then outlived him and married another kind man when she was eighty. At that wedding, the minister declared what we all knew, “Marie is a hopeful woman!” Grandma Ree, as we called her, was the quintessential kindergarten teacher when teachers still had time for nature walks, ironing leaves between sheets of waxed paper, and silly songs. Thus, she was the kind of grandmother I aspired to be: she played games with us, prayed for us, encouraged us and defended us when necessary.  For most of her life, she modeled a love of learning: she earned a master’s degree, helped “plant” two churches, became an accomplished painter and was memorizing her favorite Bible verses in her seventies because she was losing her eyesight.    

Marie as a teen.
A painting by Marie for an art class while working on her Master’s. A local Spanish-American War vet sat for the class.

While I know little of Arbaleta’s childhood except poverty and hardship, I know Marie helped her mother run a boarding house after her chiropractor father divorced her mother, something which mortified both women.

That I’m aware of, Arbaleta seldom left her home after we were born. At least we never saw her leave her home, though, as far as we knew, she was perfectly capable. Our collective memory of her is of her seated on the sofa in her silk pajamas. Every time we visited her, we would wave to her from a few feet away as she perched on the sectional sofa in the corner, surrounded by shelves of various sizes and shapes of cacti. In one hand she held a lit cigarette, ashes threatening to crumble onto the silk, and the other hand held the ever-present bean bag ashtray (you know, the kind that has the bean bag on the bottom and the colorful aluminum tin bowl on the top.) That I can remember, she never once kissed, hugged or touched us in any way, shape or form. And, though she was pleasant, there were no memorable conversations, just the cloud of cigarette smoke that circled above her. 

As for Christmas, well, I can’t remember there being much of it in their home at the edge of a Kansas golf course where she and Grandpa had retired. Ironically, I’m not aware Grandpa played golf, though my Dad did well into his eighties. As far as Christmas goes, Arbaleta represented the point in the arc where celebration was merely tolerated. Every few years, our parents would tote our gifts to their house to open on that rare occasion we woke up there on a Christmas morning, but the mood in the house was that Christmas decoration was, well, perfunctory. There was a tree and maybe a wreath, but evidently, for Grandpa and Arbaleta, a tree and some lights outside were “just enough,” though I suspect they were only put up to satisfy us. If overcoming poverty was Arbaleta’s life goal, she met it, thus the home on the golf course as well as the purchase of a new Lincoln every year. Secular or religious, it didn’t matter; Christmas was a formality, expected, tolerated for the children. Christmas dinner involved polished silver and store bought sweets, if any. “Please wait until you have permission to touch.”

Arbaleta died when I was seven and, suddenly, the focus of Christmas on my father’s side of the family shuddered and swung hard to the opposite extreme. Her daughter brought in Christmas every year from then on with a vengeance, lovingly, but with an overwhelming force. Every year, my aunt seemed to be competing for best Christmas ever, ostensibly in response to her own mother’s lackadaisical attempts.

While certain treasured and expensive statuary graced my aunt’s mantle for Christmas, for example, every year, the Christmas tree itself, usually the biggest tree I’d ever seen, sported a different theme with new, all handmade ornaments. I often asked when she started making them, sure she must have begun the previous New Year’s Day. She also made most of our gifts; they were always of Pinterest quality and I treasured several sweaters she knitted for me, for example. 

As if it were necessary, she also became an amazing cook and thus, Christmas visits always involved impressing us with recipes for new dishes. Ironically, my mother didn’t want the recipes and my mother’s mother, Marie, didn’t need them; my mother was too busy leaning into that dysfunctional pendulum that was swinging back to the starker side, likely in reaction to her mother’s seasonal excess. 

Marie, my mother’s mother, was on that same swing of the pendulum as my aunt, though I believe Grandma Ree went all out for her Christmas celebration for different reasons. Her husband, Grandpa George, also died when I was seven, but that did not slow Marie down in life or around the holidays. From the moment you opened the door into her home at Christmas, the scent of pine and wild berry candles carried you through room after room of greenery, holly, bells, poinsettias and new figurines or miniatures each year. Also new each year were the sweetbreads and cookies and homemade candies, all awaiting our discovery after hugs and kisses were exchanged and the coats and mittens and caps were piled onto a bed in the back of the house. 

Grandma Ree with her brother, Mother and Sister, c. 1960’s.

A Family Nightmare

While Marie’s response seemed to me to somewhat resemble that of Arbaleta’s daughter, the driving force behind Marie’s likely unconscious Christmas reverie gone amuck was a well-kept secret, a family nightmare. On two separate Christmas Eves, during her childhood and youth, Grandma Ree had lost family members to suicide. I was, of course, an adult before I was made aware of that history or the details: one drank poisoned alcohol and one shot himself, both on separate Christmas Eves. Of course, the grief and shock of their actions was complicated by their (conscious or unconscious) efforts to ruin Christmas forever for some of their family.

How painful were their memories of the holidays?

Before we assume that Marie’s attempts to reclaim Christmas was the reason for the pendulum’s extreme movements, though, we need to recognize that some calamity in earlier generations drove those men to choose Christmas Eve to end their lives; we have to ask how painful were their memories of the holidays that drove them to risk also ruining the holiday for their spouses and children? How far back did the pain begin and what don’t we know about that? 

In other words, it’s not likely either man, both of whom must have been suffering and feeling hopeless, started the family on that path.

The result, though, seems to have been an unconscious struggle to compensate. Those grand swings between holiday excess and hopelessness left subsequent generations still unconsciously at a loss to figure out what’s enough celebration. Further, while we can understand what might have spurred Marie’s need to excel at Christmas, I’ll likely never know what caused Arbaleta’s lack of enthusiasm for the holidays, and so I’m left simply to marvel at the overwhelming force of her daughter’s frenzied Christmas efforts. Sadly, or thankfully, no one now has picked up that mantle and the extended family is so fractured as to make these discussions nearly impossible.

I offer these reflections then to my nuclear family as the beginning of some discussions around conscious choices rather than wild reactions.

How does a family figure out what’s enough Christmas when the family’s history is, well, fractured? My own efforts were often emotionally unsatisfying; not only were my mother’s Christmas efforts headed for the stark extreme in reaction to her mother’s and her sister-in-law’s excesses, but they were complicated by my general lack of interest in cooking or baking except when absolutely necessary. 

It was my ex-husband who started me thinking about some of our responses to holidays years ago: he protested the idea of Valentines’ Day for example, saying we could and should give one another cards or flowers or candy at anytime of the year and not just one day chosen by candy and card companies and florists. Yes, we can, I agreed wholeheartedly. But do we? Of course not, I pointed out. To his credit, he came by his dislike and struggle with holidays honestly and thus brought his own reactions to our holiday table: his birthday is the day after Christmas, and he was one of six children. His Christmas gift always came with a declaration that, “Oh-that’s your birthday gift too.”

Over the years, I certainly have struggled with holidays, whether it’s decorating or preparing a feast or just planning. Don’t get me started on birthdays for children; too many of those ended in my tears from exhaustion and a sense of failure. Did I tell you about all the “Pinterest Fails?”

All these things and more (all these things and more) that’s what Christmas means to me, my love….)

Stevie Wonder

Plenty of us struggle with the holidays, though, whether because of grieving a loss or knowing you’re the only one who can’t afford the gift exchange. I’ve tried over the years to make our gifts for Christmas but again, I know too many of my family members and friends were less than thrilled with the results. Mea culpa. We tried spreading the Christmas holiday over several days to lessen the wild two-minute frenzy of Christmas morning. We tried taking Christmas to the mountains; we tried staying home. We wondered what would happen if our family just gave up one Christmas and had lots of little ones? Could that not translate into lots of chances to do or give or be kind to one another? So many of our attempts at intentional Christmases revolved around not expecting one or two people to create a magical holiday that only left them in tears and exhausted.

We’ve finally begun to incorporate some activities intentionally. Instead of china and crystal, we copied someone else’s snowman place settings, something the granddaughter and I could share. Last year, we started some silly story telling. This year, we introduced Karaoke and I am trying to reclaim the joy of baking by helping my granddaughter learn; watching her “knead” the goop she bought at the store made me think. Lo and behold, she discovered the joy of yeast and how it rises and how the baker must punch down the dough, then knead it. Her eyes grew wide after she made a fist and punched away. “That is soooo satisfying,” she said. A keeper. 

In case you’re wondering, religion did not seem to figure at all in the wild reactions to the holiday through the years for my extended family. While Arbaleta was, as far as I know, agnostic, and Marie was a strong Christian, neither of them addressed or seemed to include the religious holiday in their efforts to reclaim or dismiss Christmas. For our family, that’s a different pendulum altogether. I personally love a good candlelight Christmas eve service singing and the idea that God came to be with us as an infant. Nevertheless, culturally we continue to struggle with all that Christmas celebrations have become for generations and we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.

For our family, the faith and religious rituals are different pendulum altogether. I will never know why my Grandma Ree did not incorporate more of her personal faith into the celebration. Personal experience suggests she was treading lightly with agnostic family members and, as is true for many families, also celebrated on different days with different parts of the family, balancing church events with home. Nevertheless, culturally, we continue to struggle with all that our secular celebrations of Christmas have become for generations, often leaving us to begin another year frustrated, sad, discouraged. That is where we can start, but we must look collectively at this because we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.

The best time, I believe, to reflect on how we celebrate Christmas is when we are all together…and we’ll before Christmas comes around-unexamined-again.

For my family, I continue to try to reframe Christmas in light of the history I bring to the holiday. I guess I hope through reflections and questions to step completely back from that wild, reactionary swinging between excessive celebration to indifference and even disdain. 

I think one key is that we focus on the children, but with respect for their needs and not our own needs to give them the best holiday ever! 

They get tired; we pay attention. They want to dress up; they don’t want to dress up. Quiet time, dancing in the kitchen time, gifts that involve us engaging with them. I’m not saying we’re the best with children ever or that ours are happier than any other. What I am saying is that like in so much of life, the children around me ground me. What they need is so often what I need. Let’s sing Jingle Bells, yes, at a gathering, but we mustn’t forget the bells themselves and our need to jingle them to make the song come to life.

A little percussion goes a long way and when we sing “Jingle Bells” there need to be jingling bells….A five-year-old taught me that.

Music must also be a source of holiday joy for many families. I’m jealous of those who manage a musical gathering but hopeful that might be in our future as well. Certainly with percussion everyone can participate! The idea of introducing music brings us back, though, both to the need for sensory awareness and to the idea of joy and reverie throughout the year. In order for there to be music next year, we need to practice throughout the year – often and, by practicing, remember the things that do bring us joy without wearing us out. I write this and share it now, after the holiday blitz, planning to share it with my family, to start the conversation we can have in anticipation of next year. I am curious to hear from them, and find out if they are aware of, or experiencing their own pendulum of Christmases, maybe even unknowingly riding that pendulum right now. I’m hopeful that with some lowered expectations of ourselves and a little yeast, we just might be able to rescue the holidays from the extremes of that dysfunctional pendulum my family rode for far too long AND decide for ourselves what is “enough Christmas.”

 

Leave a comment

Check, Please!

Adventures in

Dating After 50

Ask anyone who’s played the “dating game” as an older adult and they will likely be able to offer up some horror stories, especially if they ventured into the world of dating sites (and later dating apps on phones.) Even if they succeeded in finding that special someone, and plenty of folks do, the journey can at times more closely approximate a game of MarioCart than a stroll down EHarmony Lane; the rules change quickly, toads abound and princes and princesses can be tough to locate and even tougher to engage.  

As I approached my fifties, after twenty-one years of marriage, I found myself clumsily navigating the dating world. I hated being alone, but I would end up single for far too many years before I found a man in Tennessee who would even consider a relationship with a liberal, divorced, (female) Methodist minister.

Lonely People (by America)

“This is for all the lonely people, Thinking that life has passed them by, Don’t give up until you drink from the silver cup And ride that highway in the sky.”

For readers living in more socially open-minded areas of the country, the divorced aspect was actually the least of the problem. I had stayed in Tennessee for one reason: our divorce decree would not permit me to move and take my young sons with me. Evidently, though, my being liberal in Tennessee was way more repugnant to many men I met, and, too often, I felt like a little blue raft adrift on a sea of red. I tried making sure that “liberal” was prominent on my profile’s description in hopes that those with more conservative leanings would just move on; sadly, being up front about social issues also attracted plenty of ugly comments. 

In contrast, being a minister was, apparently, just plain confusing for potential dates. “Are you allowed to date?” “Are you allowed to kiss?” Female clergy quite often seemed as foreign as Cyborgs. I understand that. When I started looking into preaching nearly three decades ago, I was asked if I could see myself preaching and leading worship and I had to confess I’d never seen a woman do either. I was not alone in my lack of experience at the time with clergywomen and so I could understand why single men quite often were at a loss as to what a relationship with a woman in ministry might look like. Still, there’s lack of education, and there’s rude. I was stunned when a guy who was working on my campus ministry building leaned over one day and said, “I guess you don’t want people to see you out on a date, so why don’t you just meet me at the hotel down the way? And, do you have a dress because I bet you’d look good in a dress.” Gee, how can a girl resist?

I held onto hope through several abysmal dates arranged on dating sites on the internet; this was before you simply looked at a face on your phone and swiped left or right. If I met someone on EHarmony.com, we talked for a week or two before they got my full name or even my phone number. I even joked that I didn’t date anyone I couldn’t Google. If a guy didn’t have a positive history, we would not meet up.

One hopes we all learn as we get older, but, if you have never experienced online dating or dating apps, you might be surprised by the shenanigans, even on sites catering to the “silver” set, guys who are old enough to know better. Surely, I thought, they’d be more mature than the younger guys who were often simply looking for a one-night stand or someone to talk dirty to them for a while. Now I wish I had a dollar for every time an older “gentleman” made sure before we even ordered our meals that I knew he’d taken his little blue pill. Can you say, “Check, please?”

Once I arranged to meet a potential dating partner at a local restaurant, but didn’t see him in the restaurant even though there were only two other patrons and one was a woman. Turns out, his picture online was from more than a decade earlier, so, once I walked over to the booth and determined he was indeed the man I’d spoken to on the dating site, I had to wonder why he had sent his father to meet me. Foolishly constrained by politeness, I ordered and drank down a soda, then asked the waiter for my check and told the old man sitting across from me, “I’ll call you.” I lied. 

Another guy complained about middle-aged women “letting themselves go” and gaining weight. “I hate it when they sit at a table and their breasts rest on the table,” he said. Yes, I would agree in hindsight that such a ridiculous comment ought to have been enough to prevent further conversation, but I was still hopeful that one comment didn’t sum up his entire attitude towards women. When I saw him walk into the restaurant, I didn’t recognize him, though, because, it turns out, he had gained more than forty pounds since the picture he had posted of himself! Okay, I thought, he’s embarrassed about his weight. When, though, halfway through the meal he gave me directions to his apartment in case I had trouble following him home, I excused myself to use the restroom. Nowhere had we discussed going anywhere together after the meal, let alone his place. I found the waiter, paid for my own dinner at the hostess station and left alone. 

 One guy openly lied about smoking – I said no smokers on my page – because, he said, he was looking for a girlfriend to help him quit. Another guy, who agreed to meet even after discussing the fact that I was a minister, informed me before we had even gotten our menus that whatever relationship we developed would not end in marriage. “Just to be clear,” he said, then he asked what I’d like to drink. No check necessary. One guy commented on my profile page that he didn’t date women with short hair. I responded that we at least had one thing in common! Yet another was charming throughout our phone conversations but then, during our first dinner, when I commented that his family sounded lovely, he calmly informed me that he was looking for a mistress and would not ever be introducing me to any of his family. I just left him with the check. 

Photos I used on my dating profile in the dark ages….

I did go on some dates that were not arranged through sites. I’d started taking social dancing classes and met a few nice men but no one I wanted to go out with until one New Year’s Eve. A charming man I met while dancing that evening, who was funny and who was respectful of my vocation, danced well and we ended up dancing nearly every dance together.  At the end of the evening, we were sitting around a large table with of my friends, enjoying a champagne toast to the new year when he invited me to visit his “compound” in rural South Carolina. Seemed innocuous enough until he began to press me for specifics. How soon could I make the trip? I wouldn’t need a car, he said. He’d drive me there and then I could have my choice of any of three refurbished RV’s (if I wanted privacy once we arrived.) When he lifted his glass in a toast to the fact that my impending visit to his compound would be a “forever thing” now that we’d found one another, he was sent back to South Carolina alone. 

I honestly wondered for the longest time if it were going to be possible to find anyone even to date, let alone to hope for a mutually supportive and loving relationship. I did meet some nice guys but both of us being liberal or even both of us being Christian wasn’t enough to build a relationship. As a pastor, I couldn’t date congregation members because of ethical concerns. The few colleagues I knew who weren’t married were often looking for a more conservative and/or less outspoken wife. It really seemed hopeless for so long. 

Mirror, mirror, on the wall….

What was most depressing was realizing there were often obvious reasons why some folks weren’t married any more; too often, a failed attempt at a connection caused me to look at my own foibles and failures and, more than a few times, caused me to wonder if I was just meant to be alone. 

Then I met the man we will just call Walt. No, not his name. He was also a minister. We met for the first time when my campus ministry team visited his church. A week later, he brought his youth group to an event we held for prospective students. He was the life of the party and danced several times. We shared dating horror stories. Then he asked about spending more time together and I began to hope my solitary days were coming to an end. I was happy to find such an out-going, gregarious non-conformist; he even spent evenings, he told me, on his porch surrounded by the hummingbirds who had become his friends.  

We arranged for a first real date, which started with a brief meeting of his mother and young granddaughters. They were delightful and it was a positive sign, I thought, and so I didn’t blink when he said he wanted to share a little bit at dinner before we officially began dating. I agreed. We were both old enough to have some baggage and we needed to begin any relationship with our bags open for inspection. 

Dinner began quietly. He did not drink any more, he shared. I was a longtime member of Al-Anon and we understood one another on that topic. I told him about my divorce and he shared about his; we both lamented the struggles of sharing children with exes, especially when the rift was still painful.  

“One thing it’s tough for me to share, though,” he said after we ordered. He took a breath and said simply,  “You need to know: the probation will be over soon.” 

Probation? 

By “soon,” he meant, “there are only eight months left on a twelve-month sentence.” 

“It’s okay, though,” he said, reaching across the table and putting his hand on mine, seemingly to reassure me all would be well. “The drugs were not mine; they belonged to the prostitute.”

I remember staring, confused, at his hand patting mine. Knowing that the drugs weren’t his made it better? 

“No one here will ever know,” he explained. “It’s in another county.”

I pulled my hand back, still silent.

“You should probably say something here,” he said. I had just been staring at him, trying to process this information. “You know,” he said, “you can’t tell anyone about this. What people tell clergy, you know.” 

I remember I laughed just a bit at that. He was wrong about so much at that moment. No such privilege existed, though he clearly hoped I believed it did. Most baffling was that he seemed convinced I’d be fine with the idea of him soliciting a prostitute so long as she had been the one who brought the drugs to the party. 

Not only were we not on the same page at that moment, we weren’t even in the same book. In fact, I was only clear about one thing at that moment. I raised my hand, caught the eye of the waiter nearby, and said, as calmly as I could manage, “Check, please.” 

Pickleball? Really?

I will tell you that, after many years alone, I did enter into a caring relationship with a man whom I met playing pickleball, of all things. Who knew pickleball would replace EHarmony, Match.com or the vegetable aisle in Whole Foods as the place to meet eligible singles? By the time my husband and I met, though, I’d pretty much given up looking. That was wise, though, because, honestly, when I review my dating experience before that, well, I think you’d agree, if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry. Check, please.

The First Time I Ran Away

Always a Fashionista…gotta love the boots.

When I was five, I ran away from home. Of course I didn’t get far. My world then revolved around a quarter-acre yard in Springfield, Missouri, on a corner lot, two blocks from my elementary school. We lived a short drive away from where I was attending kindergarten at our First Baptist Church and near enough to some train tracks that I knew it was bedtime by the train whistle every night. The little three-bedroom, one bath brick house on Marlin Street had a fenced-in backyard, a sand box, a metal clothesline and a weeping willow tree, all seemingly perfect for three children under six. Its feathery leaves hung to the ground, draping around the trunk with just enough room under the canopy for a five- year-old to hide and imagine different worlds than were to be found inside the little house on Marlin. 

For the longest time, I couldn’t tell you why I ran away on that particular day. I often wondered if it hadn’t been that I didn’t want to go back to kindergarten. I went on the afternoon shift, so we basically had an hour or two of ABC’s, singing, and a snack in the gymnasium of First Baptist Church before we took a nap. I already could read and write some when I got to kindergarten, so there was no struggle for me there. 

There had been a memorable first day spent on the vinyl chair in our kitchen trying to learn to tie my shoes. “Little boys and girls who can’t tie their own shoes are not big enough to go to kindergarten,” I’d been told again and again.  “They’ll send you right home.” I had spent the morning of my first day of kindergarten tying and untying my red plaid tennis shoes, both my mother and me praying I’d avoid the shame of the teacher calling my mother to bring her little “baby” home. We needn’t have worried. Not once did I ever have to tie my shoes while at school. 

Perhaps, on that morning, I simply didn’t want another perm.

My mother struggled daily with my full head of “straight as a pencil” “dirty-brown” hair because it was constantly tangled. Every day, we’d have the same conversation about brushing the underside of my hair, that thick mat next to my neck, and every day I would stare at her as if I were hearing the laments and reprisals for the first time. My hair may have been the bane of her existence but her brushing my hair is the only physical connection with her I remember. Her brushing it angrily. Her trimming errant bangs until the top of my head was nearly visible. Her trying to make it curl. Her finally chopping the hair off rudely, at a strange angle because she was done with it, as fed up as I was with trying to tame that mane. 

Mom had been introduced that summer to the “home permanent.” I’d never been to a salon even to have my hair cut. Mom cut our hair herself with her sewing scissors, black handled shears that were never sharpened or oiled, as far as I could tell, so they’d pull when she hacked away at the thick bunch she’d grab in her left hand and chop with her right hand. I remember staring into the bathroom mirror blankly. I hadn’t cared that she cut it because of how horrid it looked, I realize now. I cared because she said, as she was sweeping up the hair from the floor, “Now you can just brush it yourself.” She would no longer brush it for me. I think I would even in that moment have agreed to another permanent like the one that had failed so miserably and sent her to her sewing basket for the shears.

I can still smell a home perm a mile away….

The day before, the permanent had required a couple of hours of me seated on that sticky vinyl chair in our kitchen while she rolled strand after strand in metal-curlers, the kind with bristles meant to grab and hold the hair long enough for the chemicals to alter the makeup of your hair and teach it to curl like those golden locks on Shirley Temple  If the rolling of the curlers wasn’t bad enough, the chemicals made my nose burn and my eyes water and the bristles on the curlers pricked my scalp. Then, once the solution had been applied and wiped off my neck and back, I was told to take my daily nap. Whether we slept or not, we “napped” every day so Mom could have time to herself, a practice I appreciated when I had children. Only on this day, because of the perm, I was relegated to a rug on the floor by the washer in our laundry room. I could have no pillow for my head because we didn’t want to ruin a pillow. Were we worried about ruining my head? Also, no pillow meant any attempts to rest my head caused dozens of tiny needles to prick my scalp, but sitting up and trying to read sent rivulets of stinky solution dripping down my neck and back. I would not rest well that afternoon. 

Sadly, the perm did not “take.” My hair rebelled. My mother was furious, disgusted, as she yanked curler after curler off only to watch the long brown strands defiantly continue to hang as straight as pencils. She was crying. I was crying. She’d been trying to prepare me to participate in a Girls’ Auxiliary ceremony at our church where her teenage cousin would be “crowned ” a princess. The Girls’ Auxiliary was the church’s alternative to the Girl Scouts, designed to encourage girls to learn Scripture, study the lives of missionaries and participate in ministries like collecting monies for children India and China. To the program’s credit, many of us certainly were inspired by godly women like Lottie Moon. My cousin had completed the requirements for attaining the “Princess” rank and there was to be a ceremony at church. I was tasked with carrying a paper gold crown on a pillow to be placed on her head. Mom wanted me to represent the family well, to look pretty and be a shining example of the next generation of princesses. 

But my shock of brown hair refused to do its part. And mom was fed up. She’d gotten the shears out just as her aunt called and offered to come over and help. Her aunt had three daughters, all teens, and somehow managed to fashion a dainty pony tail for the ceremony. 

The next day, however, the shears returned and that was all she wrote. My hair would not cover my neck again that year or the next. Not until I learned to brush it myself. I could not for my part, see the point. I didn’t care about my hair being pretty, which may seem ironic, since I was teased incessantly by my father. He was annoyed that I was so attached to my white straw hat, white gloves and white wicker purse, all gifts from grandparents the year before for Easter. He thought I wanted to be “a little lady” because I carried my purse with the gloves inside it and donned my little white straw hat with a yellow ribbon nearly every day for most of that year. I didn’t participate in outdoor activities anymore with my brother or sister that year. I preferred instead to go outside in my hat and carry my purse to sit under my tree and pretend I was somewhere else. It would be years later when I’d realize why I wanted to be anywhere else.

Of course, picture day came soon after the cut.

At the time, I just remember being grateful I could pull that straw hat over my crooked bangs. That afternoon then, while mom was sweeping my hair off of the bathroom floor, and I was supposed to be on my bed for naptime, I pulled the hat down over my ears, shoved my gloves into the purse and snuck out the screen door from the laundry room, careful not to let it creak or slam shut. 

I had left a note on my bed that I expected her to find, a note that simply said, “I am running away. Jodi.” Then I went outside and sat under my tree, my back against the trunk, legs stretched out towards the backside of the house, the branches drooping and fingering the ground as the breeze tried to cool the afternoon. Then I waited. I waited for her to find my note and come running frantically out of the laundry room into the carport, searching. I waited for her to scoop me up and hug me and exclaim how relieved she was that I was safe. I waited for her to carry me inside proclaiming she would never let me go, maybe even to bake cookies for me. Just for me. 

I waited, and, then, worried she wouldn’t be able to see me under the tree whose branches drooped to the ground, I moved to the sandbox. And waited some more. When the heat got to me, I moved to the back door that led to the laundry room and perched on the steps, clutching my purse, waiting to be found. I’ll never know how long I waited, but eventually I got tired and gave up. Then, slowly so as to not make the screen door squeak, I peered into the laundry room at the ugly rug that still stank of permanent solution. I crept past the opening to the kitchen and found no one, so I crept to the bedroom I shared at the time with my sister. She was asleep on her bed. My brother was asleep across the hall in his bedroom. Even my mother lay sleeping on her bed; drugged by the heat and disappointed by the day.

I guess I was sure Mom must have seen the note and ignored it, so, ever the quick thinker, I crossed my name off and penciled in my sister’s name on it instead, then fell asleep. It would be years before I’d wonder why I hadn’t just crumpled the note up, why it hadn’t dawned on me that my little sister couldn’t read or write at the time. As it turned out, the note was still on my bed when I awoke from the nap, so I folded it up and tucked in into my white wicker purse where I carried it for the rest of the summer. 

“Good? Bad? Who Knows?

There’s an often told Chinese story, “Good or Bad, Who Knows?” about a farmer, his son and his horses. The farmer used an old horse to help plough his fields, but one day, the horse escaped and galloped off. When the farmer’s neighbors offered their sympathies to the farmer over the bad news, he simply replied, “Good? or Bad? Who Knows?”

As it happens, a week later, the old horse returned and brought with it a herd of horses! This time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on this good fortune. Once again, though, he replied, “Good? or Bad? Who knows?”

As it happens, a few days later, when the farmer’s son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off the horse’s back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this was very bad luck. The farmer’s reaction again was, “Good? or Bad? Who knows?”

Some weeks later, then, when the army marched into the village requiring every able-bodied youth they found to enlist, they found the farmer’s son with this broken leg and he was not drafted.

“Good? or Bad? Who Knows?”

Banner Week? Week From Hell? Who Knows?

It was a banner week. Or the week from hell. Depending on when you asked me. Start seminary. Check. Get divorced. Check. Buy a house solo. Check. In one week. Ugh. Scheduling all three in one week had not been my choice: the seminary starting date was set, but the other two were simply the luck of the draw. I agreed because I wanted to be done with those moments where legal experts, signatures and explanations of terms and fees were laden with shame. Time to move forward.

Thus, on a Monday morning in 2003, I began what would be a four-year run at Vanderbilt Divinity School, one of many steps to ordination in the United Methodist Church. I had already been serving as the pastor at a small United Methodist Church. For seven years, I’d been what the UMC calls a Local Pastor, meaning I was the only pastor for that congregation and licensed (given authority) to preach, teach, marry, bury and serve communion for that congregation. During that time, I attended classes offered by the church but all the while I was waiting until my sons got a bit older before entering seminary and moving closer to ordination. I served at Wartrace United Methodist Church in Greenbrier, Tennessee, while living in Portland. Portland, Tennessee, lies about 30 miles from the church to the west and nearly 45 miles north of Nashville where the school is located. For those four years, the daily trek between the three locations would be my own little Bermuda Triangle, and I would clock 40,000 miles each year, though God knows I hated driving.

Images from Wartrace UMC, my first appointment.

God also knew that, when I was called into ministry, one of my biggest concerns was that I swore “like a sailor.” How’s this gonna work I wondered? God held my tongue, though, and miraculously, only one time did an obscenity escape my mouth while I was in front of anyone in more than a decade. (I’m gonna blame campus ministry and later working with combat veterans for my language eventually going south again.) 

Back to that week. I started seminary and the daily drive back and forth forth and through the back roads. I also would close on a house on Wednesday of that week, my first solo home purchase. Though my husband and I had bought two houses together, I still found the process baffling on my own. With the help of a patient agent, I got there though and much to the relief of my youngest son, we were staying in our little town which meant he could finish high school with friends.  More importantly, at least to him, we weren’t going to live in a trailer, apparently a fate worse than any other his teen brain could conjure.

I closed on this house alone on Wednesday after classes because the day before, somewhere in the midst of visits to shut-ins or the hospital and more orientation for my new Vanderbilt classes, I went to court to finalize my divorce. The court appearance was still required then and ours was early in the morning on that Tuesday. I drove down the ridge and sat in the courtroom as the judge appeared and called couple after couple to stand before him to ask if either had any other concerns or if they could agree to the final settlement.

Couple after couple said yes. Some answered quietly and sadly. One or two barked their answers as they stared at their soon-to-be exes. We were last except “we” weren’t there. The judge moved the process along fairly quickly so it was only 9: 15 or 9:20 when our names were called, but my soon-to-be ex was nowhere to be found. I went before the judge, wondered a minute or two whether or not I could change the agreement since my husband wasn’t there yet, then answered. “Yes, I am in agreement to the terms we negotiated with the help of a mediator.” 

And then I was divorced. Something I’d never believed I would be. My parents were not happy together, but they stayed married. His parents struggled too but they also were still married. I had never imagined myself divorced. Of course, I never imagined in my forties I’d be preaching or attending seminary and studying theology and Bible and the elements of worship or prison ministry, either, but there I was in classes 9 a.m. every day of the week suddenly. Even nine years earlier, it had not yet entered my mind that I’d be standing in a pulpit trying to help a congregation feel closer to God OR divorced OR buying a home as a single mom. I answered yes, the gavel hit the wooden block on the judge’s bench, and we were done.  

Wartrace United Methodist Church was approaching 150 years old when I went there in 1996 and the photo at the left is in front of the original building, taken around the turn of the last century.

I next saw my now ex-husband again as I walked out of the courthouse around 9:30. He was just then walking in a bit late even though he lived in the same town as the county courthouse. I had driven some thirty minutes down the ridge to get there.

“Are you here alone?” The judge had asked me before declaring us divorced. 

“Yes, sir.”I had said, “It’s appropriate,” I explained, “It didn’t feel like he showed up for the marriage so I guess there’s no reason to expect him to show up for the divorce.”

The judge frowned, but declared I was no longer married to the man I’d expected to live with forever. I used to tell friends I imagined fondly the two of us walking hand in hand when we were elderly. Perhaps he’d wear a beret; I’d once seen an elderly couple walking together and the man wore a beret. They seemed to walk as if that was simply the most natural thing in the world. The two. Together. 

We’d walked through life together but, ironically, we had never actually taken many walks together until our twentieth year of marriage when we were in counseling and needed to talk out so much.  The only reliable privacy we had was to go for walks in the neighborhood so we could talk, or argue, without our sons needing to hear it all. I lost about twenty pounds that last year from stress and walking. I’d love to say I never found it again but that’s a different post.  

I stopped briefly on the steps leading into the courthouse as my now “ex” husband entered, looking at me quizzically. 

“It’s done,” I said, and he frowned. 

“Do you want some coffee?” he asked. 

My turn to frown. “Pass, “I said. “Heading to class.” 

“How’s that going?” he asked, He’d finished his own doctorate while we were married and was none too happy to be paying me alimony while I got my Masters of Divinity, but he also liked academia and worked in it, so he was happy to chat about that if I wanted. I didn’t. 

Me wilting. John Wesley Bobblehead, as always, expectant. Sensible boots and backpacks would become my uniform.

My day would be filled, thankfully, with the business of becoming a Vanderbilt student, and the myriad tasks that entailed would keep my mind occupied that day, I hoped. As soon as I got in the car, though, I wondered if I’d missed a chance. I should have planned to meet up with a friend and get drunk or find a rebound relationship or get a tattoo, I thought. Was I missing out on the chance to be self-destructive and not be judged? Damn.  

I drove silently to the campus for more paperwork. Classes began on Wednesday and honestly, at the time, it felt like they would be a welcome relief. Before that, there were school loan papers to sign, books to buy, an ID to be photographed for; time to don my student pastor identity. Orientation day at Vanderbilt Divinity School was, of course, as was the entire week, played out in the muggy heat of August in Tennessee. Sadly, that all required I move about the campus in the heat dressed as a professional without looking wilted. Complicating the day for me was the layout of the campus with the walks between buildings. Those walks meandered through the beautiful campus, but not in any grid-like pattern. While pastoral on cooler days, the campus on that steamy day seemed to confound me every time I had to leave the Divinity School quad to visit another building. The paths between buildings curved and intersected and wound around various statues and even the stone crypt of Bishop William McKendree, who, I would learn, was the first Methodist Bishop born in the USA and credited with establishing Methodism on what was the western frontier in the early nineteenth century. McKendree UM churches dot the countryside in Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. He died near Nashville while visiting family and in 1876, his remains were interred in the grounds of Vanderbilt University, along with those of other Methodist bishops, in part because the school originally was created to help educate Methodist ministers.   

View of the gravestone of Bishops McKendee, Soule and McTyeire, and Amelia McTyeire, Chancellor Garland, and Dean Thomas O. Summers in 1925. Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives photo archives PA.CAF.GRAV.002 (https://www.vanderbilt.edu/trees/mctyeires-grave/)

Pastoral, bucolic, flowering garden beds sat next to benches that encouraged rest and beautiful old stone buildings invited meditation, but those paths seemed designed to confuse me even though I had grown up reading maps. My father, who helped survey the paths for hundreds of miles of Missouri state highways, taught us how to read maps early, and every year at Christmas, he presented us each with the state highway version of “bling,” a new, revised state map. I was always particularly gifted at directions and maps; I corrected pathways to destinations regularly. It was a gift that I could tell you how to get “there.” Not that day, though and not in that place. The Vanderbilt campus walkways, I soon discovered, curved and meandered enough that, on at least three trips on that sweaty afternoon, I wound up at the wrong building in spite of the decorative campus maps posted prominently. I guess the designers felt students needed to be lost more often. At one point, after finding my campus mailbox, I followed a group who all said they were looking to get campus ID’s next. One by one we got pictures taken and laminated. Mine was a witness to my defeated state on that afternoon. Perspiration matted my hair and my cheeks were red from the heat. The bad news was no one would recognize me in that picture. Perhaps that’d be good news one day. My query about retaking the photo on another day was met with a glare. The clerk was spending her afternoon in the air conditioning, I thought. What’s her issue?

I moved along, aware a library card still needed to be acquired and a locker in the Divinity School building as well. If I could find the library, the Divinity School would be close, I reasoned, but the heat was getting to me. At one point, I stopped into the food court to find some lunch but found the choices bewildering and the process moved more quickly than I was prepared to navigate. Students who’d only recently attended undergraduate classes jostled me and moved around me and the hot food worker glared until I took my tray and moved to the salad bar. A few minutes later, I stabbed at my salad and wiped the sweat off my forehead trying to unstick my bangs. As I dabbed at my sweaty forehead with a napkin, another worker, a woman, stopped at my table and put her hand down and said, “You look like you need to put your head on the shelf now, dear.” 

“I’m sorry?”

“Put your head on a shelf. Take a break? Stop thinking for the day, you know.” 

I frowned.

“Rest your mind, sweetie,” she said and she moved on. Words of wisdom from a stranger, but I didn’t have time to rest yet; that’d come years later. 

On my way back to the library, my phone pinged to tell me I was late for an orientation I’d completely forgotten about, and I stopped and looked around me, lost again. I felt old. I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to keep up. How would I manage classes and single parenting and being the pastor and preaching and visiting and paying for all those books and driving? It was too much. What was I thinking? The next day I’d be signing papers to buy a house on a part-time salary and school loans. The students around me were twenty and thirty years younger and most were accustomed to the changes on college campuses that threw me, like salad bars in the cafeteria and computer charging stations everywhere. Those students didn’t seem lost.

I sat down on a bench, defeated. I would have just quit right then and there, if I could have found the damn Divinity School building.  Obscenity doesn’t count if no one hears you, right? I would be walking into the orientation with the other 60-plus students who would be in my cohort for three to four years. Only I’d be late, sweaty, disheveled and feeling defeated. I sat on a stone bench and looked at the backpack I had been steadily filling with more and more, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to make the locker work in order to leave some of the many required books in there. Tears filled my eyes as I began to pray.

“I can’t do this, Lord. It’s too hard. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was foolish to even consider I could manage. I still had a house to close on and God knows that process never made sense to me. How am I gonna manage that AND Divinity school? I can’t even find the damn school.” I was trying not to just start sobbing.

I took a breath and looked up at the elderly and majestic magnolia tree shading me, one that had been planted with a couple of hundred other southern magnolias in 1895 by Bishop McTyeire, one of the bishops buried near the Divinity School. I squinted to look through the dark leaves at the sun shimmering and the cross…. Wait. What?

There was a cross on top of that building. 

Suddenly, I was laughing as I cried. Of course, there was a cross on the top of the Divinity School Building! My guess is that everyone else knew that, except those of us sitting in our self-pity piles. Geez. Yeah, I’ll cop to a tendency to self-pity, fueled by a glass half full mentality. Sometimes I’ve wondered how I ever got anything done, but, then again, I’ve always been teachable. I wasn’t alone like I felt I was either, but there’s seldom been room for or recognition of any company in my self-pity dinghy.

In that moment, sitting on that concrete bench, though, laughing at the shiny cross against the blue sky, I kicked myself. Had I taken a moment to look up and to seek God in the midst of my exhausting week, I would’ve seen it. Like on the steeple of a Christian church in most places, shiny and bright, that cross topped the Divinity School building, there to guide us all day back home, like the North Star. I would have seen it if I had just looked up, if I had started my days with an awareness of God’s presence.

The rest of the week would be mostly a blur, but by time I stepped back into the pulpit that next Sunday, I would have “celebrated” or “survived” three momentous life changes in the course of one week. I was living in a new home, divorced, and a seminary student, but I was still standing, gratefully. I shared with my congregation about looking up and seeing the cross and realizing it had been there all along waiting for me to notice. I also shared the image of putting my head on a shelf. Both would carry me through the next four years of school as well as the decades I’d spend in ministry, reminders of who brought me to that moment and who would guide me through all the struggles, if I would pay attention.

Of Hiking, Floods and Fragmented Memories

In the previous Post called The Boulder Fields of our Lives, about hiking Longs Peak and working at the YMCA of the Rockies, I ended by explaining that our summer work (and “Hikemaster” Course) were cut short not long after we scaled the 14,000+ foot Longs Peak because of a natural disaster in the canyon below us. A few days after the climb, a year’s worth of rain fell in 70 minutes and the Big Thompson River below our camp washed out nearly everything and everyone in its way.

“On July 31, 1976, the skies opened up over the Big Thompson Canyon, setting off the deadliest natural disaster in Colorado history that claimed 144 lives and caused $35 million of damages.” (https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2016/07/29/big-thompson-flood-killed-scores/87524858/)

Fragmented Memories

For decades now, because my memories of being just above the “500-Year Flood” are so fragmented, I have not told the story of being there, which is unusual for me. Most days, I am known to bore anyone close enough to listen with a story or two; I usually can’t help myself. The stories I have not told then generally are ones I cannot remember OR ones I do not want to remember. Only after writing about climbing Longs Peak, as I looked at the photo of me and my climbing companion, did it occur to me that the story of that summer was not complete without talking about the flood.

“The chaos along an otherwise trickling Big Thompson River killed 144 people, five of whom were never found, and carved out a chapter in the history books as Colorado’s deadliest natural disaster.”

https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2016/07/29/big-thompson-flood-killed-scores/87524858/

Both the hike and the flood were, for lack of a better word, watershed moments for me, but the lessons have been realized slowly and in fragments. To better remember those days, I looked at a couple of television news reports of the flood, but they were recorded decades after the flood. Strangely, the lack of technology at the time affected both the before and the after, the event and the memories. The only phones in 1976 were landlines and, so, warnings came only through emergency personnel going door-to-door; at least one first responder died trying to warn others that night. Only a few black and white photos are available as well, making attempts at remembering as cumbersome as the warning system had been. Nevertheless, I have felt driven to try to piece together a coherent memory of those days and, as I researched and read and poured over old photos online, I read the words of one Colorado disaster preparedness official. She said,”We learn the most from chaotic events.” As I have tried to remember and reflect, I think that she was right; we do learn much from chaos, but we have to work to find those lessons.

First, setting the stage for our story….

After my freshman year in college, I went to the mountains near Estes Park to work for what I thought would be a summer of fun. Once there, I was surprised to find a sense of peace that I had not expected. I was, for the first time, hopeful that I might actually be able to find a peaceful and stable home once I could support myself. I surprised myself, in fact, by making some plans to continue working at the camp in the fall.

Though I kept journals off and on, little remains of what might have been written that summer. I do remember that, on the back of placemats, during lulls in our work, I sometimes wrote letters or journal entries; most of them are lost, but the only one I have found from before the flood surprised me. I wrote:

  • Tuesday, July 20, 1976

    “Storm clouds have mingled with the mountain peaks since sunrise; we here in the valley are enclosed, shut away from the crowds that would disturb us….peace of mind must certainly follow. Here, in my room, I am lulled into a tranquil mood by the clouds every day. Even when my work day is long and busy and even frustrating,” I wrote, “…the calm is inescapable.”

Calm was something I could not claim before that trip and safety was not a place I remembered.

At that point, the clouds covering the tops of the mountain peaks around us (The highest peak in our area was Longs Peak at more than 14,000 feet in elevation.) were benevolent. I wrote: “These clouds draw your thoughts. Constantly changing, first ringing, then entrapping the peaks, they are playing quietly and are a source of constant amusement.”

I worked days in the bakery and often used the back of placemat/maps for journal entries and letters.

Those “playful clouds” would soon turn deadly, though. During our Hikemaster classes that summer, we learned to appreciate the danger of the storm clouds that often came up quickly in the mountains. On July 20, though, I was simply calmed by their presence and movement. I needed that calm desperately; the family life I would return to was chaotic, unpredictable, traumatic. The rules changed daily and nothing that occurred in my home could surprise me anymore. The overwhelming feeling that I had carried with me when I tried to escape to the mountains from a tumultuous family life was fear. Fear and anxiety wore me out and, I know now, the trauma, fear and stress are why so many of my memories are fragmented at best.

And now, a word about trauma….

Trauma is destructive. Like the different kinds of skin cancer, trauma can create a wound that burrows deep or spreads outside of you, like when you fear for your loved ones in such a depth as to make others question you, call you hysterical even. And yet, because you have experienced trauma, you know. Accidents DO happen. People, even people you trust, DO harm one another. Your parents did not protect you. No one saved you. Nothing, not even seeing another day, was guaranteed. All the worst, all you feared, was indeed possible, did happen. And no amount of reassurance from others can repair that trust completely; we can learn to manage the fear but we never know when some sound or smell or person or newscast will bring it all rushing back.

Like a broken mirror, trauma shatters both our sense of self and our memories. Too many of my memories lie in shards on the floor and picking through them, trying to piece them together, trying to make sense, to have some timelines or events make sense is most likely why I write.

Even the effort to capture the memory of that time is fragmented: all that remains are three pages written by that seventeen-year-old me as I tried to capture what I saw and a couple of newspaper pieces I wrote after I got a job working at the local paper and my editors learned I’d been in the “500-year Flood of ’76.”

The morning of July 20, 1976, though, I was feeling calmer than I ever had, safer, more at peace and, to my surprise, I was enjoying even the colder weather on the mountains. I have long been known to dislike the cold intensely, so as I read the words I wrote, I am struck by what I believed I had found there: a home and place where I was being trained to pay attention to my surroundings, to know my own capabilities, and how to prepare for and help others in disasters. Wanting to help others is one response to trauma. I know I was hopeful that I might at the very least return the next summer to be Hikemaster and even one day make my home near the clouds.

I wasn’t able to stay, though, and thus much of what I remember, even as I try to piece it together, still seems fragmented and lost to me. Like most of my co-workers, I went home soon after the flood, and immersed myself in college classes. I never saw any of my coworkers again and I never spoke to any of them afterwards either; those relationships simply ending undoubtedly contributed to a sense of loss.

Now, as I try to access any memories of that time, I am left with the handful of days afterwards, days when all of us above the canyon were trying to figure our what was happening below us. Even though we were aware, we did not want to talk about how we ourselves inexplicably had escaped being swept up.

That first day, though, we didn’t know what was going on below us in the canyon.

Like the many campers along the river, we were enjoying the scenery. The Big Thompson River was one of the jewels of the area, a mighty source of income because of all the tourists it drew. Most of the year, “…the water runs only a few feet deep and fifteen to twenty feet wide…happily rushes over rocks and gurgles through pools as it descends 8,000 feet from the high range to the south Platte on the prairie. The water is clear, numbing cold, and playfully sparked by the sun.” (Big Thompson: Profile of a Natural Disaster by David McComb, Pruitt Publishing Company, 1980.)

  • Saturday, July 31, 1976

    Today is unusually rainy.

    Normally, storms approached Estes Park and the YMCA camp from the south; thunderstorms, while normal, are of short duration, with clouds often enveloping peaks by 10 a.m., which was why hikers needed to climb summits of the various peaks in the range in time to skedaddle back down below the treeline or risk becoming a lightning rod.  Our Hikemaster course is teaching us a great deal about safety and we are training to lead hikes, which would mean teaching tourists about safety as well. Too often, though, tourists in the park dismiss any safety preparations or climbing instructions with disastrous consequences. The tourists we met traveling up to the summit the day we climbed Longs Peak weren’t interested in safety tips.  As we were headed down to the timber line, we passed, for example, a woman in a summer dress, wearing tennis shoes and carrying a purse on her arm as if she were headed to a party. They would be fine, they told us, and they waved us on. They had evidently never seen a person who’d been struck by lightning. Unprepared hikers found their way to our camp often enough though and several of our coworkers are among those trained to rescue hikers.

We did not know at that time that many of our Hikemaster instructors would be called upon to help flood victims the next day.

The storm was approaching from the East, though, we noticed, and it just seemed to camp above us, a thunderhead with no high westerly winds to move it. Reports were that during that Saturday evening, twelve inches of rain fell, about the normal annual rainfall amount for the area. Estes Park and the YMCA are above Lake Estes on the Big Thompson River, but, just below us, the unrelenting water from several tributaries gathered debris and swept down the canyons, both restricted by and guided by steep walls. By the time the waters reached the North Fork and the Big Thompson, there was already enough force to destroy bridges. All along the canyon, this storm surge ripped up everything in its way, including homes and campsites, swept up by a water level estimated at nearly twenty feet above the normal. Reports I read later told of at least one emergency worker dying in his attempts to go door-to-door to warn people.

We Learn from Chaos….

One of the innovations that came out of the Big Thompson flood was a national warning system for floods and other national disasters. That, with the advent of cell phones has greatly reduced the number of deaths in floods.

  • Sunday, August 1, 1976

    The camp is secluded from the world as usual, except for the hymns and local newscasts being broadcast on the radio in the bakery. Rain falls steadily still and a heavy fog had settled on Big Thompson Canyon. Four of us went by van higher up into the mountains to a lodge to feed some visitors. While the lodge was only thirty feet higher than the camp, it was eerily sitting just above the clouds and driving on those narrow roads on the sides of those mountains felt even more dangerous than normal.

    Sitting in the lodge’s kitchen after breakfast, we listened to the radio to learn when we could expect some sunshine. Mountain thunderstorms seldom lasted even more than an hour or two, so this second day of fog and rain was disconcerting. The announcer became somber, reading a report that surprised us: “The Big Thompson River had overflowed its banks in the narrow canyon leading to the valley and four persons were reported dead.” We became quiet, not having known that the storm was dangerous. The cook was worried about his family, knowing they lived near the flooded area. The storm, we heard, was stationary, and we could look forward to more rain.


    A lightning flash warned us we needed to take the van back down the mountain before trying to drive became even more treacherous AND before the van started attracting electricity. We warned the visitors in the lodge not to drive anywhere or even to go outdoors because they’d be lightning rods.

    Throughout the morning, as we worked back at the bakery and kitchen, we listened to any news reports coming over the radio. We worked silently through the day as the reports began to seem unreal; the number of dead grew to more than sixty before evening. We began to slowly comprehend the devastation that was apparently just below us. No one wanted to ask if it were just dumb luck that we were above the deadly flood and others were below it. The folks in charge were not sharing much information; maybe they didn’t want us to panic. No one really was surprised to learn that our phone lines were down. That was not terribly unusual, but the announcement added to the somber mood and hushed tones all day. The frequent updates on the radio and our director forbidding us to leave the YMCA property kept us all close to the kitchen even long after our own shifts had ended. Only the maintenance crew left to take the trash but the normal 30-minute round trip took hours and they returned with widely varying reports of the flooding just 1500 feet below us. If any of my coworkers or those in charge were afraid, I did not see it.

Monday, August 2, 1976

  • Monday, August 2, 1976

    This morning, the fog is even lower than before, which meant rescue helicopters were grounded. Several refugees have been brought into the camp in the night. So forlorn, they are wet and cold and dirty. They wait for some coffee and a blanket; dirty pillowcases in the hands hold the few belongings they were able to salvage. They are lucky, though; hundreds more are still stranded. Many more are missing and most are expected to be dead. Still there are no phone lines available and a trip to Denver, normally a couple of hours, would take six or seven and that was only if you had a four-wheel drive vehicle. Technical climbing skills are needed now for rescuers because roads are washed out in the canyon and the only way out is up over the cliffs.

  • Tuesday, August 3, 1976

    For three days, we have heard little about what was happening below us, except by the radio. I suspect now they were trying to prevent any kind of panic; we also did not know what the rest of the world thought about our fates, either. We were surprised to find for example, that our parents had heard mostly dire reports about Estes Park and the YMCA camp above it being unreachable and even obliterated. Some men we didn’t know came to get us today and told us we were going to be calling our parents via ham radios set up. The instructions to “tell your parents you’re still alive” stopped me for a moment. I had not known nor had I had a moment to worry what they might be thinking at home.

The overriding feeling it seems was somber but also a bit bizarre. For one example, our local radio station published a newsletter/bulletin we could see every morning, and next to the names of the dead each day were that day’s baseball scores.

Rumors

Rumors abounded. One account said all manner of snakes, also apparently trying. to escape the waters, were chasing survivors up the sides of the Big Thompson River canyon.

There was one report of a baby, who became known as Baby Moses, stranded on a rock in the rushing water.

One newspaper wrote: “After it opened, the refugee center at Loveland High School became a source of personal details as survivors, some with nothing more than the clothes they had worn into the canyon, told how an evening of cards with friends was interrupted by rushing water and a mad dash to scale slippery rocks. Throughout the first days rumors were abundant. There was one report of a baby, who became known as Baby Moses, stranded on a rock in the rushing water. One national publication called to verify that the baby had been rescued by a woman who lassoed it while riding a white horse. But no one could substantiate any of it, and The Coloradoan reported it as an example of the rumors.” (Big Thompson: Profile of a Natural Disaster by David McComb, Pruitt Publishing Company, 1980.)

“We learn the most from chaotic events.”

Disaster Preparedness Official in Colorado

I Learn from Chaos

For the longest time, I realize now, I felt profoundly disillusioned after that flood; the safe home I thought I had found, in fact, was as treacherous as any place could be.  I was not able to stay and create a home there that I was seeking because of the flood and damage. It took me years to acknowledge that and even longer to name the terror. I could not risk feeling that terror then; none of us could afford to name the terror that was just below us. 

I certainly had seen the power and wisdom of what we had been taught while learning to hike safely on those granite peaks. I cannot necessarily agree that we “learn from chaos,” but I can admit that I learned from how others around me operated in the chaos. 

Over the years since I left the camp, I know that I consciously incorporated lots of those lessons into my life. When you hike, take only pictures and leave only footsteps. When you journey, make sure someone knows where you’re going and when you should be back. When it’s cold outside, layering is the key to staying warm. If you’d asked me before what that summer taught me, I would have acknowledged all of that readily. I also spent a lot of time the next few years in jeans, hiking boots and denim shirts. I even decorated any space I inhabited with topographical maps. I started jogging in order to build up my endurance. I even tried caving because I was not near any mountains.

Mostly, trying to remember any part of that time has shown me that I had learned and incorporated lessons from the flood into my daily life much more extensively than I realized. Being just above the flood and watching how others navigated that danger, in fact, would inform and guide me for decades, if only because so much of what we’d learned in our classes had been especially effective in the midst of that chaos and tragedy.

There is wisdom and, often, survival, in choosing to be careful, and to work together. We learned to look before you step over a log or rock, make sure you pack what you need but only what you need, and, naturally, respect the power of nature and especially of water. In life lessons, those translate to being intentional, learning when enough stuff is enough and admitting to ourselves that we are not the most powerful force out there.

When my parents showed up a few days later to take me back to Missouri, they said I was different. The summer had been grueling in a number of ways, but I had learned so much that would inform every step I took from then on, would help me create the safety I craved whatever path I chose. I don’t doubt that the summer has helped me feel brave enough to continue to travel and explore new places, albeit with safety ever in mind.

Until now, I hadn’t talked or thought much about that time. I chalked it up to being forced by circumstances to abandon the path I had begun to enjoy so much. I felt for the longest time that I’d had an adventurous summer but it was over and so the memory and the possibilities were simply filed away like a summer fling; they were simply not relevant going forward. What I didn’t recognize was that I was on another trek, one that would last my lifetime and what I learned during that summer was helping me all along to find my way, help me create the safety I craved. I say “create” rather than find because all that I learned that summer helped me slowly realize that the safety I sought I had learned to carry with me. “Safety” would be wherever I found myself when I paused long enough to look up from the path.

I will continue to unpack the backpack, to try to remember the story of those days and others still dark. I can recognize one truth, though, folded neatly like a bandana in my jeans pocket: chaos and danger will be all around no matter where I travel or where I land, no matter where I make my home. Because of that training, though, I have tools, guiding principles and more confidence to continue exploring whatever path has been before me.