The Gospel in Nail Polish

"Tell your wife," the anonymous comment read, "to dress appropriately for church.  No more pants and spaghetti straps."

I held the blue paper in my hand, and turned it over a few times.  It was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen, at that moment.  It was a pastoral review form.  And this member wanted to talk about my clothes.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to throw it away, or wear it as a badge of honor.

Yes, I knew people noticed me.  And I knew I was in the traditional East.  I had heard, on a Sabbath afternoon, perfectly serious people talk about the color of the elder's socks (visible as he sat on the platform) as if this was legitimately their business.  But I had also expected I had earned some slack, since they had known me more than three years, and I had been struggling to pull together a maternity, and then nursing-friendly wardrobe I could afford.

I know people notice me. I am married to the pastor, and everyone knows who I am. So I have tried to be a good example, including my appearance, since that is all some people know about me.  But being a good example means something in particular to me.

I have noticed, in my 18 years of being the pastor's wife, that notes like this have always been anonymous.  I have never met the clothing police face to face.*  In fact, if it weren't for the anonymous notes, I couldn't tell you that the critics even existed in my churches.**  I have to conclude that either there are very few of them, or they aren't passionate enough about their opinions to get serious.  So I don't feel obliged to please them.

Moreover, Jim has a theory about growing healthy churches, which he calls "Don't cater to the kooks."  I just expand it to include the critics.  What he means, of course, is that you have to feed the culture you want to grow in a church. You don't make healthy churches by jumping through hoops for unhealthy people.  Instead, you encourage and support healthy people.

So I take care with my example.  I take care to consider who my example is supporting.

One morning I came to this same church in my winter wool skirt (long) and high-heeled tall boots.  One of the younger women came to me, excited about them.  "Now we can all wear those boots," she said.  And she told the story of another young woman who had worn some, and been told she looked like a harlot.  Of course, now that the pastor's wife wore them, they were okay.

The conversation opened up a whole new way of thinking for me.  If I have to be an example, let me be an example of what I really believe.  When spring came, I went out and bought nail polish in rainbow colors for my toes.

I look in the mirror with new eyes on Sabbath mornings.  I don't dress to offend the critics, but I don't dress to please them, either. I have never been hurt by the church fashion police, but I know that others have been berated, excluded, or kept from volunteering because someone disapproved of what they wore.  So I ask myself, "Can my example be used against someone else?  Could someone point to me to defend a theology I don't believe?"***

Life is not about the clothes you wear.  And if that's true about the need to look fashionable, it's also true about the need to look conservative.  Appearance does matter.  But it matters only as a means to something more important, like hinting at the relevance and vibrance of our faith.  Or communicating that I am an approachable person.

So what's my bottom line on this one?  Get dressed.  Be sure to wear clothes.  And try to suit them to the occasion, and the function.  Then put your mind on other things--things that truly matter.

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.  John 13:35

*Well, once, but it was a visitor, and someone with so little social sense that I can't really take it seriously. 

**Okay, there is also the "reporting for someone else" tactic.  You know--where someone tells you, "I thought you should know that some people have been saying . . . "  This usually means "I said to my friends, and they all nodded, so they must agree." On really serious issues it comes out as "There are a lot of people who think . . ." but it translates to the same thing.

***I remember one morning when I realized I was wearing a denim skirt and sensible shoes.  Plus, my hair was in a bun at the nape of my neck.  I changed to pants right away.

Giants in Prayer Meeting

I don't love prayer meetings.  I know somewhere out there are red book quotes to say I am essentially a bad person because of it,* but it's still the truth.

I think the problem (aside from having young children) must be that I don't speak the language of prayer meeting.  There is a certain spiritual language that happens, less at church, but still in prayer meeting.  That's because prayer meeting is still the intellectual property of another generation, the group who wield the quotes with innocent happiness, expecting that hearing them will make me happier still. The language is a highly spiritualized mixture of metaphors about sheep, and light, and the world as a term for evil.

The format, as I've experienced it, is usually this:  after a bit of chatting, someone stands by a chalkboard, or gets out a piece of paper, and starts a list.  The members start naming local illnesses and foreign tragedies, church institutions and world events that need prayer. Then one, or several, or all will pray.  Because the list is usually long, it's often referred to as a unit.  The rest of the prayer is filled in with flowery language--again, mostly metaphors. And since I don't relate to the expressions, I find myself fighting distraction.

But there was one exception.  One prayer meeting that moved me down to the soles of my feet.

It was our first prayer meeting in Warren, Pennsylvania.  Jim and I were fresh out of undergrad, two religion degrees, lots of ideas, dropped into the middle of a very rural, very traditional, and above all, very large district.**  We started with business meetings at each of the churches, talking about what they wanted for the future.  Warren wanted to start prayer meeting again.  As soon as the idea was mentioned, a warbly-voiced member chimed in with "Wednesday night at 7pm."  And so it was planned.

And so we showed up, on Wednesday night at 7pm.  I wasn't enthusiastic about the meeting.  There were so many more important things to do with our time, and the church's limited energy.*** But we started the meeting, and the saints shuffled in.  And after the usual litany of unremarkable requests (I didn't know the people well, so the ailments of absent members didn't mean anything to me yet), we all drifted to our knees the best we could, and settled in to listen to each other pray.

I had a prayer forming in my head.  I would be expected to say something, after all, and I wanted to be sincere and concise both.  At the same time, I was getting cramped from staying in one position so long.  I tried, very carefully, to shift my weight and move my legs.

And then he started praying.  He was old, and sick, and a stiff wind might have blown him away.  His voice was slow and unsteady as his gait, and I knew I was going to have to fidget some more before we got through this prayer.  And it was as bad as I expected, dry prayer cliches I'd heard every week in church, about sickness and backsliding, missionaries and colporters. The phrases were as dry as the sawdust on the floor of the tent-meeting images they evoked.

Then he came to the youth.  I hadn't seen any youth yet--I didn't know who he was talking about, or if the prayer was for all youth, everywhere. But when he came to the youth, his voice broke.  I heard a sob, and a sniffle.  He went on, fighting to keep his emotion-laden voice audible. Their world was so different, he said, their troubles and pressures so foreign to him.  He asked God for strength, to help them face it all.

The emotion reached me where the phrasing couldn't. The broken phrases weren't far from cliches themselves, but I could almost drown in the conviction of his sincerity.  He meant it.  The tired out church-language sounded false to me, because it wasn't my language, but he meant every word.  The weight of conviction pinned me to my place like a wooden stake.

With my eyes tight shut I could see an image of him reaching up to God.  I couldn't see his weakness, in the darkness behind my eyes.  Instead, I was overwhelmed by the vision of God reaching down to him.

I felt like a worm.  This man was contacting the holy God.  Who was I to judge him for his age or his ineloquence?  My professional education dropped in value in my eyes.  We had come to his town to share the love of God, and there was no better qualifier for the job than knowing God himself.  The world felt different when I opened my eyes again.

I still do not love prayer meeting.  But I understand a little better the value of the people who do.  People who don't speak my language, but still talk to God.  They often seem weak--old, or sickly--but I'm learning not to judge too quickly.  Hidden in their ranks are some of the strongest saints I will meet.  So I try to listen to what they mean, and not be troubled by the cliches.  And if one of them offers to pray for me, I never turn them down.

*At least, the way the words are quoted, it sounds as if the speaker means that.

**There were six churches, and about enough members to make one small church of the type I was used to. I liked to say we had one church named Distant (for the town) and five others that ought to be--there was a lot of driving in that district.  But all of that is another story, for another day.

***Here I must point out, in deference to my Warren friends, that turned out to be a vibrant church, and more resourceful than they appeared.

Adventist Ghost Story

No, not a real ghost.  I don't believe in those.  Elder X was definitely gone before we ever got in the car that night. Yet his passing plunged us into one of the strangest, spookiest nights of my life.  I was going to save this story for Halloween, in fact, but I'm going to excuse my impatience and say that summer campfire-story season is good enough. Besides, I'd rather tell it on a bright sunny day.

It was a cloudy day in February, but strangely warm.  The layer of snow had melted away under a heavy wind. The long-dead autumn leaves got tossed around the road like scurrying brown spiders.  But it was Friday night, and I was finally, happily, in my pajamas and robe and ready to make a puzzle (yes, this was pre-children).  No good ever comes from having to change back out of one's pajamas in the night, I would like to say.

We got a phone call just about bedtime.  Elder X had died that afternoon.  We expected it--he had even said a few days before that he hoped it happened soon.  But it was a grim thing to change back into presentable clothes, which I did while Jim was still on the phone, and steel my heart to go visit the dead man's house.

It was good and dark by the time we set out. The warmth was gone, but the spectral wind was constant, blowing the crumpled leaves into our headlight beams, looking all the more like frightened, fleeing animals.  We had printed directions to the house--cell phones wouldn't have worked out in that wilderness, even if we'd had them.  I clenched the armrest, and for a few miles we were fine.

But this was the wilds of rural Pennsylvania.  The road you were looking for might, in fact, have a name, but that didn't mean the locals felt like sharing the information.  We pulled out the state atlas (we weren't fools enough to be out without one), but in the dark, long driveways and paved nothings look a lot like roads.  We were close, but it was impossible to know just where we were.

The first spooky place we hit was the school. We reached it at the point where the wrong road turned into a dead end.  It was brick and iron, and stately.  And crumbling--oil and industry were ghosts now in the region, and the population had receded like a river flood, leaving broken things in its wake. A tangle of chain-link fencing stood upright only at the remaining posts.  On that night, in that wind, it was ready to be the set of a horror movie, and even I--mostly ignorant of the genre--could have written the first half of the plot.

The next place we found was the cemetery--the very place Elder X said he wanted to be buried. The road hugged it around the corner at the top of a hill, all overgrown and interrupted with ancient trees.  We had no intention of stopping for directions here, but someone had stopped, apparently.  We slowed to look at the car, parked on the grass, spun back to face oncoming traffic.  The driver's door was open, bouncing slightly in the gusts, the dome light on, the vehicle empty. To this day I have no explanation.

Another turn, and we found an actual house.  The front door was open, inexplicably on a February night.  I climbed the brick steps to a narrow porch and rang the doorbell.  And waited.

Kreee. The sound was right beside me--I caught my breath and turned to look.  At a weather-vane--a black rooster, turning gracefully in the energetic wind.

Why is there a weather-vane on the ground? 

I was chilled, and spooked, and no one was coming to the door.  I wanted to give up, but there were no other houses with lights on, and if I didn't stay, we'd have to wander some more, and find who knew what else.  I rang the bell again.  And finally someone came to the door.  He was elderly, wearing only his underwear and a paunch, and he stared at me through the screen as if he couldn't see me.  I swallowed, and asked my question anyway.  And after two or three tries, he understood enough to tell me where the road was.

And all of this, of course, before we reached the dead man's house. But the dead man's house was the scariest place of all. Everything else was just odd sights on a windy night. But at the house, we met Elder X's family, his widow, and adult children.  Elder X had been failing, and in pain for a long time.  His family was as relieved as they were grieved, not surprisingly.  What was surprising was the almost predatory way they reacted to us.  

I had never met any of them in church.  The Elder had been too ill for many years, and none of the others came without him. But his years of service to that congregation, by tale, had been as stormy as that night.  His contribution had been a decades-long power struggle to control the church. The congregation, by the time we arrived, boasted no more than a dozen people on a Sabbath morning. And the family was just as ravaged by the culture of controversy.

I remember distinctly the way the elder son scooted his chair closer to mine, his wiry white beard twitching, to say, in a voice of scandal, "Did you know they changed the hymnal?"  I remember the widow's almost gleeful condescension when she saw Jim had set his Bible on the floor under his chair.  I stared at the orange shag carpet and felt the weight of pessimism in the house.  And I wondered, What would it feel like to live here?

Elder X's family had the comfort, that night, of the hope of a resurrection.  But they didn't have the comfort of a God of grace, because it hadn't been in his legacy to them.

I remember also the text Jim read that night, Revelation 14:13--Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on." "Yes," says the Spirit, "they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.

It was a promise.  But as I remember that night, it feels like a warning, too. Elder X was at rest, but the fruit of his particular faith lived on.  It will follow him, in the hearts of his family.  What he lived, they will carry.

I want to pass that warning on to my church today, a church so twisted up in controversy that the issues are hardly the issue any more.  This same demanding attitude, this same lock-step legalism is being entertained in our organization. These works, too, will follow us as a church. 

What will our legacy be?  We may have the comfort of being right, but we need a God of grace more. We need to ask ourselves, not only "Am I right?" but "What does it feel like to live in this church?" Because if we do not live the love of God, the price will fall on those whom we leave, quite literally, in our wake.

This is my Adventist ghost story.  Because dead faith leaves a specter far more substantial than any silly fear of the departed. This is my camp-fire terror story.  I hope it scares you, too.