************************************************
"Don't!" His mouth formed the word. But I was on a roll now. We'd see who would make who do what. I stiffened my thumb into a hard stub with its sharp nail a blade. I held this weapon steady with my other hand. Then I gritted my teeth, and punched God's eye out.
************************************************
I poke my finger into my eye, and God winced. This made me smile. I wasn't pleased with Him being God. I disagreed with what He allowed to occur, what He said was so, and who He, unbearably, was. Now I'd inadvertently stumbled onto a way to strike back at high heaven. I poked my finger into my eye a second time, just to check. Sure enough, it worked. God winced again, shifted on His throne and regarded me with alarm.
Now it hurt badly to poke my own eye. But the heady rush of being able to make the Almighty suffer, to have Him in my control, to torture and make Him writhe like a worm on a hook felt even better. It was worth it. By now the pain in my self-injured eye was excruciating. Tears ran down my cheek, and the other eye began watering in sympathy. I wiped them both enough to get another quick peek at God. He had His hand over His own eye. He was rocking forward and backward. Streams of brine ran down His great cheek.
I laughed. Now I was god to God. This was a brave new world of untold possibilities. I could control Him like a puppet. With Him out of the way, I could do, think, and be whatever I wished. God looked at me and shook His great white mane.
"Don't!" His mouth formed the word. But I was on a roll now. We'd see who would make who do what. I stiffened my thumb into a hard stub with its sharp nail a blade. I held this weapon steady with my other hand. Then I gritted my teeth, and punched God's eye out. The pain tore through my head as my injured eye exploded in its socket, beyond recovery or repair. I clutched my face, and cursed the God who allowed such pain--which He might have prevented. How could He be so sadistic? He was supposed to be kind. He was supposed to be powerful. Why didn't He do His job and stop such senseless tragedy?
It was a long time before the tears in my remaining eye slowed enough so I could see God again. He was sobbing, the tears streaming from both His eyes. Then I raged at Him, sitting there weeping--His two uninjured eyes like spring-fed pools. If I could have reached Him, I would have torn Him from His throne and cast Him to the ground, and with my two strong thumbs blinded Him forever. But He was out of my reach. So I did the only thing I could. I clutched my wrist and stabbed with my thumb again, deep into my remaining eye--and screamed.
There was a brief electric flash like a jolting bolt of lightning. Then all was darkness. The fluid from within ran down my cheeks--thicker than tears or blood. Now I would live by feeling alone, not by unwelcome sight. God couldn't see me. He'd be hurting too much. He'd be blinded by tears. He'd be in agony, writhing on His haughty, humbled, almighty, powerless throne. I'd found the way to beat Him, to shut Him out forever. A curtain of darkness had fallen, and I was free at last.
For a long time there was only darkness and agony. I held my ruined face in my hands, and rocked in the blackness to reassure my body it still existed. For hours, days, years I stumbled anf fumbled in this new world of my own creation. I listened. I smelled. I groped. It was an empty relief not to have to deal with God anymore. Regrets were useless. There was certainly no turning back. During that time I bumped into things and injured myself often. I fell into nothingness when it opened unexpectedly before me, and struck the unmerciful bottom when it lashed up to catch me.
There were things in this darkness--things stronger than I--that stank loathsomely, and hissed and wretched horribly. Sometimes they caught me and tore at me. I couldn't protect myself from them. I was their plaything and slave until they lost interest and abandoned me.
But mostly, I was alone. Very much alone.
Centuries passed, or seconds. I crawled yards, or miles, or in circles only a few feet in diameter for all I knew. I slept and woke and dreamed and wandered in utter blackness. Sometimes I still cursed God. But now it was mechanically and without passion--more for the comfort of the sound of my own voice. After all, I had disposed of Him. He was gone. I had a part in His world once, but He had no part in mine. Did He still exist somewhere? If He did, could He see me?
Finally, I lifted my head.
It was then I felt Fingers touch my face. I'd been alone so long that I didn't draw away. They gently soothed my rough sheek, and tenderly traced the hollows that still oozed and ached endlessly. Then the Fingers drew away. I lifted my face after them. "Don't go," I whispered to the night.
In a few moments, the Fingers returned. I felt their strength and purpose, yet they were trembling as they touched me. They found my cheeks, fumbling with my face, and finally located my empty sockets. Suddenly there was firm pressure in the center of both eye sockets. Lighting flashed again. The Fingers drew away, and I could see.
I looked up into the face of God. But He couldn't see me. He had no eyes. He had given them to me.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Little Cherry Pies (Why I Married My Wife)
***
I was drowning. Judi was air. Only, I wasn't supposed to breathe.
***
I wasn't such a great fiancée. In fact, I think I was about the worst fiancée ever. This was due, strangely enough, to the fact I really, really, REALLY liked Judi.
My attraction to her womanly charms was so bewilderingly overpowering that it ran head on into a major life commitment I'd made before meeting her again seven years after I'd first asked her out at Auburn Adventist Academy in Washington State. Back then, we were still in the kitten and puppy stage of the courtship game. It took me three days to work up my courage to ask Judi to our high school Freshman Class Party. I couldn't think of anything to say all evening, and feared a repeat performance. I went back to the dorm that night, wrote her a song, and hid it in a box in my closet.
Now, however, we were all grown up. The game turned deadly earnest.
The major life commitment to which I refer was my conviction, based on my reading of the Bible, that I should wait until I was properly married before God, family and friends before sleeping with the woman who would be my wife. Now it seemed irresistible force (my attraction to Judi's comely self) had come up against immovable object (my Bible-based moral convictions about not sleeping with anyone I was not married to). That was the ingredients for a collision of train wreck proportions. I feared I would bed the beauty before we reached the altar. In her heart and mind, Judi had already committed herself to me. I feared she would take me into her bed with "I do's" still only promised, if I only asked. That meant I had to protect her from me.
So, to protect Judi's good reputation, my own troubled conscience, and the honor of our families and friends--as well as do what was right in the eyes of God--I did what any dolt of a male might have done under similar circumstances. I broke up with Judi because I liked her too much. I know this doesn't make any sense. If I'd read Paul's writings in the Bible a little more carefully, I'd have come up with a more sensible and theologically correct solution. "It is better to marry than to burn with sexual desire..." Paul wrote. Why that most useful bit of Biblical teaching escaped my notice, I do not know. It caused major upheavals in our courtship, however.
Not only did I break up with Judi once, just before Test Week (the time traditionally reserved for students to drop out of Adventist colleges because of the sudden realization that Christ is coming far too soon for them to finish their education), but I did it a second time, a few months later. Both times it was for precisely the same reason: I was drowning. Judi was air. Only, I wasn't supposed to breathe.
Just why the male of the species will turn and run from the very thing he wants and needs most is a wonderment both to womankind and to God Himself, I'll wager. But that's what I did. Judi hinted that eloping was a good option. Her parents had done that after her German Grandpa had sternly forbidden his eldest to marry the girl of his choice on pain of being cut off from all future financial support. They went ahead and got married anyway. In Judi's family, elopement cut the sort of knots that were tying me up, and settled things with the naysayers and non-supporters. In fact, Judi's Dad had told her he would pay her a thousand dollars cash if she suddenly showed up married.
But I would have none of it. I was determined that I--a soon-to-be preacher of the holy Gospel--was not going off to some sinful city of cardsharps and stage show strutters, like Las Vegas, for a cheap quickie of an "I do" by a guy in an Elvis suit with a three-dollar mail order marrying license. We were going to be married in a church before God and man, by a proper clergy--like my Grandpa Gepford--as befitted a future man of the cloth. Somebody should have taken me out, hung me up on a clothes line, picked up a stout stick, and knocked the holy starch out of my over-stiff, stubborn soul. The unyeilding Swedish blood of my ancestors had congealed somewhere between my ears. I was in way over my heart and head, but I wouldn't budge.
Now I know better. If you love the girl, Elvis is good enough.
Judi and I already decided on everything except the name of our firstborn by this time. We would have two children, healthy or sick, boys or girls--and no more. I'd already visited her parents' home shortly after I broke their little girl's heart, blasting it to bits by bowing out of her life briefly just before test week, thus destroying her concentration on the studies her parents were paying good money to have her attend to.
Judi's Father seemed a formidable Kodiak bear in his cave to one callow youth come seeking his firstborn daughter's hand in marriage. I drove to her parents' place that first home leave from college in my old heap of a car, with the vinyl top torn off in chunks and the door wired shut where a close-passing truck had nearly ripped it from its hinges. Judi's Dad's and brother's cars were pricey, and spotlessly maintained. It shows how much I attend to automotive matters to say I can neither recall the make of my own car back then, nor any of theirs. In fact, I have to go look up the make and year of the car I've been driving for the past two years when I take it in for an oil change. As for Judi's car, it was a sporty little beauty like herself--though I don't recall its particular make either. Just driving in at the Ammon residence, I was already out of my league. But I didn't have enough sense to perceive that fact. Ignorance can sometimes pass for courage.
When I met Judi's father, he was so polite ice sickles froze on the dripping eaves. I'd just broke his little girl's heart a week ago, and now I was showing up at her door? The man who potentially would be my future father-in-law took one look at me and my junker of a car, and decided he needed to do something to secure his daughter's safety. She'd be riding around with me in that thing. Earlier, back at college, we got called out of a Saturday night movie by the campus police. They'd spotted my car, and thought someone had broken into it. I assured them that was how it always looked, and they needn't worry. They went off in the dark with their flashlight, shaking their heads in amazement.
So Judi's father and brothers began plotting to fix my car's door, while I took the family's Crown Jewel Cutie down to see a cave carved into a bank of nearby White River. The sandstone cave complex was located beneath the roots of a great old maple tree, down a half-mile long steep slope just across the highway from Auburn Adventist Academy, not far from her parents' home. I wanted to show Judi that cave and do a bit of boasting about how I'd scared the campus bully and his gang years before, back around the time we’d first met.
That bragging rights trip to the cave with the Big Bear's daughter didn't work out so well.
I'd been raised running the steep canyon sides off the end of my Grandpa's farm up on Ham Hill, in Centralia from practically the time I could walk. We slid down hills this steep in Grandma's laundry basket for fun when I was three or four years old. Judi's father, on the other hand, had never let his little girl step off the sidewalk. Our differing life experiences soon manifested themselves. Judi's feet went out from under her, and she headed downslope for White River hundreds of feet below on the seat of her jeans.
I was astonished someone would actually do something like that on a mere trail--rather than hanging from the side of a cliff, or sliding down the outer branches of a fir tree forty feet in the air. I stood and stared after my rapidly descending True Love. She tobogganed, sans tobaggon, down the admittedly steepish slope. I recovered enough to race down the hill after her by the time she stuck out her hand, caught a small passing tree, and swung around to slam into the trunk of the larger one beside it. If Judi hadn't taken the precaution of rescuing herself, she would have ended up several hundred feet further down the slope in the White River itself. When I came to where she was clinging to the tree, I held her close as hard as I could and said, "I thought I had lost you!" Scared me half to death. Her, too. She might have died, or been injured badly.
I brought Judi home again, smeared with mud, and limping. Her Momma took her into the bedroom, shut the door, and got a look at the great purple bruise on her daughter's shapely rear end. Now I had had an affinity for that particular rear end from the first time I followed it down the hall as a Freshman in high school. But a bruise the side of a dinner plate was no way to decorate it. Between my crippled junker in the drive among the gleaming power rides, and nearly losing the Joy of the House in the local river, I was on pretty much every Ammon's bovine excrement list there for a while. Judi didn't do hillsides. I didn't do sidewalks. Was this really going to work out?
Fortunately, my future father-in-law developed a remarkable deal of personal discipline working his way from mail room flunkie to one of the top executive positions in the huge Boeing airplane and space craft company. You don't have hundreds of highly skilled people working under you in multiple locations, access to top secret "Black Box" projects for the US military complex, and the ear of Congress when you testify in government hearings without having learned a thing or two about dealing with how you feel in any particular situation--and doing the right thing anyway. Even if that situation involves your little girl and a frizzy-headed college kid who plainly isn't up to the task of taking care of her properly. My father-in-law's life work helped bring down the Evil Empire during the Cold War. Security and safety for one of the world’s contending superpowers was his passion. And I couldn't take his little girl on a walk without nearly killing her.
As for my family, my Dad gave Judi the thumbs up the first time he met her--and he was ever a man of keen discernment when it came to judging character. My Mom had inadvertently seen a song I'd written for Judi the home leave before. She was greatly interested in meeting the girl that was making her son have those kinds of feelings. It was called "I'm Hugging My Pillow and Wishing That It Was You". (I found out later, a group called "The Ink Spots" had recorded another song by the same title back when my Mom was a girl.) The lyric expressed my ardent interest in the person of this new and unknown leading lady in my life. Mom met Judi through my eyes and feelings in the song I wrote before she met her in person. As my Mom is musically-inclined, that was probably the best thing that could have happened. As for my older brother, John, I saw myself grow a good two feet taller in his estimation the moment he learned I was actually dating Judi Ammon. My little sister, Ingrid, was the one who phoned me to let me know Judi was on campus just before we met. My people were in her corner.
We went back to college again. But all was not well, even yet. I broke up with Judi again a month or two later, for the same reasons as before. I wanted to bed her so badly that if I didn't exit her proximity promptly without looking back, it was simply going to happen right there on the floor with God and the angels looking. So I informed Judi I felt we needed to put some distance between us to consider our relationship. I drove my old beater over to the coast that Sunday, and sat on a big rock looking down at brown cows munching green grass. I wondered why God in His blue sky seemed about as pleased with me as Judi's Dad had been as I sat there pondering life and trying to pray. Finally, I drove back to campus. When I walked into my dorm room, the phone rang. It was Judi. "I've just had my fiancée break up with me," she told me, her voice trembling and tearful. "I'm all alone down here. I need a friend." I said, "I'll be right over." So ended engagement trail separation number two, less than twelve hours after it started.
A few more months passed. I'd already gotten advice from my Dad during the Christmas break about buying Judi an engagement watch--which in Adventist circles at the time, served in place of an engagement ring. I had the money set aside. But I still hadn't officially popped the question, and the frustration of wanting to sleep with Judi, but having my conscience forbid me, was heating up to fever pitch again. Finally one night, I called her on the phone. "I've got to talk to you about something important," I informed her grimly. I drove over to her upstairs loft that I'd filled with wild flowers and love notes one day not long before when she was away at work.
From the tone of my voice, Judi feared the worst. Was this the third and final time I was going to exit her life after giving every possible indication that I was extremely attracted to her? She had cause to be concerned. I truly did not know, walking up the wooden steps to her little loft, whether I was going to break up with her for good, or ask her to marry me. I hadn't a clue. My heart and my brain were on opposite continents somewhere. My feverish body was tossed on the stormy seas between. My future and hers was teetering in the balance, and the slightest breeze could tip me either direction.
When I came through the door, Judi took my arm and said, "Sit here on the sofa. I won't hear anything you have to say until I've made us something to eat." I don't recall what she fixed for me that night. I know it wasn't Little Cherry Pies, but it was something equivalent. After I'd eaten some lady-cooked comfort food, my mind was a good deal clearer. My heart and my head were finally coming into alignment, now that my hunger had been eased. How can you break up with a beauty after she's just fed you? I couldn't. Judi already had my heart. Now she had my stomach, too. My brain finally kicked in as it should have done months earlier. Sitting there on her sofa in that little upstairs loft with the restroom with no door, I asked her to marry me. Why she said "yes", I really don't know. I thank God for women who have the patience to lead their men gently in matters of the heart. If they didn't feed us those Little Cherry Pies, we guys would starve ourselves to death, drooling.
Here's the slightly transmorgified story of the night I asked Judi to marry me in the altered setting of an old time Pie Social picnic, where a man purchased the food a woman had prepared at a community auction for the purpose, and was permitted her company in the bargain. That's the sort of a thing that would have happened back around the time my Grandpa was courting my Grandma...
Little Cherry Pies
She fed me little cherry pies
On her picnic blanket--
With daisies smiling all around,
And the cool brook bubbling low.
She fed me little cherry pies,
Made with her slim fingers.
She stroked my head upon her lap,
Where the fragrant wild rose grows.
She fed me little cherry pies,
As I kissed her fingers--
And praised the pretty freckles
Sprinkled on her nose.
She fed me little cherry pies,
While bumble bees were fumbling
Sweet nectar from the clover,
And clouds came drifting slow.
There's no cherry half as sweet
As my Maggie's kisses.
Her tender skin is softer far
Than the petals of the rose.
A glory of bright butterflies
Came dancing through our meadow.
I sipped her huckleberry wine,
Where tiger lilies grow.
She fed me little cherry pies
From her picnic basket--
With daisies dancing all around,
And the cool brook laughing low.
There she promised she'd be mine--
Mine, and mine forever.
She fed me little cherry pies
Where the fragrant wild rose grows.
c2009 Skip Johnson
All rights reserved
I was drowning. Judi was air. Only, I wasn't supposed to breathe.
***
I wasn't such a great fiancée. In fact, I think I was about the worst fiancée ever. This was due, strangely enough, to the fact I really, really, REALLY liked Judi.
My attraction to her womanly charms was so bewilderingly overpowering that it ran head on into a major life commitment I'd made before meeting her again seven years after I'd first asked her out at Auburn Adventist Academy in Washington State. Back then, we were still in the kitten and puppy stage of the courtship game. It took me three days to work up my courage to ask Judi to our high school Freshman Class Party. I couldn't think of anything to say all evening, and feared a repeat performance. I went back to the dorm that night, wrote her a song, and hid it in a box in my closet.
Now, however, we were all grown up. The game turned deadly earnest.
The major life commitment to which I refer was my conviction, based on my reading of the Bible, that I should wait until I was properly married before God, family and friends before sleeping with the woman who would be my wife. Now it seemed irresistible force (my attraction to Judi's comely self) had come up against immovable object (my Bible-based moral convictions about not sleeping with anyone I was not married to). That was the ingredients for a collision of train wreck proportions. I feared I would bed the beauty before we reached the altar. In her heart and mind, Judi had already committed herself to me. I feared she would take me into her bed with "I do's" still only promised, if I only asked. That meant I had to protect her from me.
So, to protect Judi's good reputation, my own troubled conscience, and the honor of our families and friends--as well as do what was right in the eyes of God--I did what any dolt of a male might have done under similar circumstances. I broke up with Judi because I liked her too much. I know this doesn't make any sense. If I'd read Paul's writings in the Bible a little more carefully, I'd have come up with a more sensible and theologically correct solution. "It is better to marry than to burn with sexual desire..." Paul wrote. Why that most useful bit of Biblical teaching escaped my notice, I do not know. It caused major upheavals in our courtship, however.
Not only did I break up with Judi once, just before Test Week (the time traditionally reserved for students to drop out of Adventist colleges because of the sudden realization that Christ is coming far too soon for them to finish their education), but I did it a second time, a few months later. Both times it was for precisely the same reason: I was drowning. Judi was air. Only, I wasn't supposed to breathe.
Just why the male of the species will turn and run from the very thing he wants and needs most is a wonderment both to womankind and to God Himself, I'll wager. But that's what I did. Judi hinted that eloping was a good option. Her parents had done that after her German Grandpa had sternly forbidden his eldest to marry the girl of his choice on pain of being cut off from all future financial support. They went ahead and got married anyway. In Judi's family, elopement cut the sort of knots that were tying me up, and settled things with the naysayers and non-supporters. In fact, Judi's Dad had told her he would pay her a thousand dollars cash if she suddenly showed up married.
But I would have none of it. I was determined that I--a soon-to-be preacher of the holy Gospel--was not going off to some sinful city of cardsharps and stage show strutters, like Las Vegas, for a cheap quickie of an "I do" by a guy in an Elvis suit with a three-dollar mail order marrying license. We were going to be married in a church before God and man, by a proper clergy--like my Grandpa Gepford--as befitted a future man of the cloth. Somebody should have taken me out, hung me up on a clothes line, picked up a stout stick, and knocked the holy starch out of my over-stiff, stubborn soul. The unyeilding Swedish blood of my ancestors had congealed somewhere between my ears. I was in way over my heart and head, but I wouldn't budge.
Now I know better. If you love the girl, Elvis is good enough.
Judi and I already decided on everything except the name of our firstborn by this time. We would have two children, healthy or sick, boys or girls--and no more. I'd already visited her parents' home shortly after I broke their little girl's heart, blasting it to bits by bowing out of her life briefly just before test week, thus destroying her concentration on the studies her parents were paying good money to have her attend to.
Judi's Father seemed a formidable Kodiak bear in his cave to one callow youth come seeking his firstborn daughter's hand in marriage. I drove to her parents' place that first home leave from college in my old heap of a car, with the vinyl top torn off in chunks and the door wired shut where a close-passing truck had nearly ripped it from its hinges. Judi's Dad's and brother's cars were pricey, and spotlessly maintained. It shows how much I attend to automotive matters to say I can neither recall the make of my own car back then, nor any of theirs. In fact, I have to go look up the make and year of the car I've been driving for the past two years when I take it in for an oil change. As for Judi's car, it was a sporty little beauty like herself--though I don't recall its particular make either. Just driving in at the Ammon residence, I was already out of my league. But I didn't have enough sense to perceive that fact. Ignorance can sometimes pass for courage.
When I met Judi's father, he was so polite ice sickles froze on the dripping eaves. I'd just broke his little girl's heart a week ago, and now I was showing up at her door? The man who potentially would be my future father-in-law took one look at me and my junker of a car, and decided he needed to do something to secure his daughter's safety. She'd be riding around with me in that thing. Earlier, back at college, we got called out of a Saturday night movie by the campus police. They'd spotted my car, and thought someone had broken into it. I assured them that was how it always looked, and they needn't worry. They went off in the dark with their flashlight, shaking their heads in amazement.
So Judi's father and brothers began plotting to fix my car's door, while I took the family's Crown Jewel Cutie down to see a cave carved into a bank of nearby White River. The sandstone cave complex was located beneath the roots of a great old maple tree, down a half-mile long steep slope just across the highway from Auburn Adventist Academy, not far from her parents' home. I wanted to show Judi that cave and do a bit of boasting about how I'd scared the campus bully and his gang years before, back around the time we’d first met.
That bragging rights trip to the cave with the Big Bear's daughter didn't work out so well.
I'd been raised running the steep canyon sides off the end of my Grandpa's farm up on Ham Hill, in Centralia from practically the time I could walk. We slid down hills this steep in Grandma's laundry basket for fun when I was three or four years old. Judi's father, on the other hand, had never let his little girl step off the sidewalk. Our differing life experiences soon manifested themselves. Judi's feet went out from under her, and she headed downslope for White River hundreds of feet below on the seat of her jeans.
I was astonished someone would actually do something like that on a mere trail--rather than hanging from the side of a cliff, or sliding down the outer branches of a fir tree forty feet in the air. I stood and stared after my rapidly descending True Love. She tobogganed, sans tobaggon, down the admittedly steepish slope. I recovered enough to race down the hill after her by the time she stuck out her hand, caught a small passing tree, and swung around to slam into the trunk of the larger one beside it. If Judi hadn't taken the precaution of rescuing herself, she would have ended up several hundred feet further down the slope in the White River itself. When I came to where she was clinging to the tree, I held her close as hard as I could and said, "I thought I had lost you!" Scared me half to death. Her, too. She might have died, or been injured badly.
I brought Judi home again, smeared with mud, and limping. Her Momma took her into the bedroom, shut the door, and got a look at the great purple bruise on her daughter's shapely rear end. Now I had had an affinity for that particular rear end from the first time I followed it down the hall as a Freshman in high school. But a bruise the side of a dinner plate was no way to decorate it. Between my crippled junker in the drive among the gleaming power rides, and nearly losing the Joy of the House in the local river, I was on pretty much every Ammon's bovine excrement list there for a while. Judi didn't do hillsides. I didn't do sidewalks. Was this really going to work out?
Fortunately, my future father-in-law developed a remarkable deal of personal discipline working his way from mail room flunkie to one of the top executive positions in the huge Boeing airplane and space craft company. You don't have hundreds of highly skilled people working under you in multiple locations, access to top secret "Black Box" projects for the US military complex, and the ear of Congress when you testify in government hearings without having learned a thing or two about dealing with how you feel in any particular situation--and doing the right thing anyway. Even if that situation involves your little girl and a frizzy-headed college kid who plainly isn't up to the task of taking care of her properly. My father-in-law's life work helped bring down the Evil Empire during the Cold War. Security and safety for one of the world’s contending superpowers was his passion. And I couldn't take his little girl on a walk without nearly killing her.
As for my family, my Dad gave Judi the thumbs up the first time he met her--and he was ever a man of keen discernment when it came to judging character. My Mom had inadvertently seen a song I'd written for Judi the home leave before. She was greatly interested in meeting the girl that was making her son have those kinds of feelings. It was called "I'm Hugging My Pillow and Wishing That It Was You". (I found out later, a group called "The Ink Spots" had recorded another song by the same title back when my Mom was a girl.) The lyric expressed my ardent interest in the person of this new and unknown leading lady in my life. Mom met Judi through my eyes and feelings in the song I wrote before she met her in person. As my Mom is musically-inclined, that was probably the best thing that could have happened. As for my older brother, John, I saw myself grow a good two feet taller in his estimation the moment he learned I was actually dating Judi Ammon. My little sister, Ingrid, was the one who phoned me to let me know Judi was on campus just before we met. My people were in her corner.
We went back to college again. But all was not well, even yet. I broke up with Judi again a month or two later, for the same reasons as before. I wanted to bed her so badly that if I didn't exit her proximity promptly without looking back, it was simply going to happen right there on the floor with God and the angels looking. So I informed Judi I felt we needed to put some distance between us to consider our relationship. I drove my old beater over to the coast that Sunday, and sat on a big rock looking down at brown cows munching green grass. I wondered why God in His blue sky seemed about as pleased with me as Judi's Dad had been as I sat there pondering life and trying to pray. Finally, I drove back to campus. When I walked into my dorm room, the phone rang. It was Judi. "I've just had my fiancée break up with me," she told me, her voice trembling and tearful. "I'm all alone down here. I need a friend." I said, "I'll be right over." So ended engagement trail separation number two, less than twelve hours after it started.
A few more months passed. I'd already gotten advice from my Dad during the Christmas break about buying Judi an engagement watch--which in Adventist circles at the time, served in place of an engagement ring. I had the money set aside. But I still hadn't officially popped the question, and the frustration of wanting to sleep with Judi, but having my conscience forbid me, was heating up to fever pitch again. Finally one night, I called her on the phone. "I've got to talk to you about something important," I informed her grimly. I drove over to her upstairs loft that I'd filled with wild flowers and love notes one day not long before when she was away at work.
From the tone of my voice, Judi feared the worst. Was this the third and final time I was going to exit her life after giving every possible indication that I was extremely attracted to her? She had cause to be concerned. I truly did not know, walking up the wooden steps to her little loft, whether I was going to break up with her for good, or ask her to marry me. I hadn't a clue. My heart and my brain were on opposite continents somewhere. My feverish body was tossed on the stormy seas between. My future and hers was teetering in the balance, and the slightest breeze could tip me either direction.
When I came through the door, Judi took my arm and said, "Sit here on the sofa. I won't hear anything you have to say until I've made us something to eat." I don't recall what she fixed for me that night. I know it wasn't Little Cherry Pies, but it was something equivalent. After I'd eaten some lady-cooked comfort food, my mind was a good deal clearer. My heart and my head were finally coming into alignment, now that my hunger had been eased. How can you break up with a beauty after she's just fed you? I couldn't. Judi already had my heart. Now she had my stomach, too. My brain finally kicked in as it should have done months earlier. Sitting there on her sofa in that little upstairs loft with the restroom with no door, I asked her to marry me. Why she said "yes", I really don't know. I thank God for women who have the patience to lead their men gently in matters of the heart. If they didn't feed us those Little Cherry Pies, we guys would starve ourselves to death, drooling.
Here's the slightly transmorgified story of the night I asked Judi to marry me in the altered setting of an old time Pie Social picnic, where a man purchased the food a woman had prepared at a community auction for the purpose, and was permitted her company in the bargain. That's the sort of a thing that would have happened back around the time my Grandpa was courting my Grandma...
Little Cherry Pies
She fed me little cherry pies
On her picnic blanket--
With daisies smiling all around,
And the cool brook bubbling low.
She fed me little cherry pies,
Made with her slim fingers.
She stroked my head upon her lap,
Where the fragrant wild rose grows.
She fed me little cherry pies,
As I kissed her fingers--
And praised the pretty freckles
Sprinkled on her nose.
She fed me little cherry pies,
While bumble bees were fumbling
Sweet nectar from the clover,
And clouds came drifting slow.
There's no cherry half as sweet
As my Maggie's kisses.
Her tender skin is softer far
Than the petals of the rose.
A glory of bright butterflies
Came dancing through our meadow.
I sipped her huckleberry wine,
Where tiger lilies grow.
She fed me little cherry pies
From her picnic basket--
With daisies dancing all around,
And the cool brook laughing low.
There she promised she'd be mine--
Mine, and mine forever.
She fed me little cherry pies
Where the fragrant wild rose grows.
c2009 Skip Johnson
All rights reserved
Killing Kids for Jesus (Why I Use a Modern Language Version of the Bible)
***
"Wilt! Wilt! That man Jesus touched the poor guy. Look! His leg has wilted. He can't even walk. Ahh!"
***
The day I realized the King James Version would not be a fit for the ministry to which God had called me was the hot summer afternoon I assisted with a Vacation Bible School for the neighborhood children in Fresno, California in my first church assignment out of Bible college.
In our denomination, the Children's divisions for Bible instruction are carefully crafted. They often include multiple teaching props. One prop that is traditional for teaching the younger children--and is also often used by our missionaries in teaching simple truths to the illiterate in far away places in times gone by--was the Picture Roll. The Picture Roll is a 2 foot wide by 3 feet high roll, with a new picture on each page. It sits on a wooden stand, and the pictures can be show as needed by simply lifting those not in use over the top of the stand so the appropriate scene is revealed. Eager young minds could see the picture and learn the verse printed beneath it, while the teacher would tell the story from which the text and the picture were taken. It was simple, colorful, attractive teaching technology--a tool of the trade for child instructors. Pretty much anybody could use it.
Except me. I ran into a snag. With a room full of forty ghetto kids sitting around listening, I turned to the trusty Picture Roll's first scene with a feeling of conscious competence. I'd just completed four years of Bible school a matter of weeks before. Teaching these simple Bible stories to mere children should be a snap.
The picture showed Jesus bending over a lame man, his hand outstretched. The lame man was saying, "If Thou wilt, Thou canst heal me." I read the verse aloud, had the kids repeat it after me. Then, resorting to the Socratic method of instruction, I asked, "What does this mean?"
Immediately the children began chorusing, "Wilt! Wilt! That man Jesus touched the poor guy. Look! His leg has wilted. He can't even walk. Ahh!" I was so appalled at what they'd just taken from a straight forward reading of the King James, I said, "No! Oh, no! It doesn't mean 'wilt, wilt'. It means, "If you wish, you can heal me." The cheerful little chirpers with dirty faces and ragged clothes kept grinning and waiting to learn more. They liked stories about witches who live in gingerbread houses and catch kids and keep them in cages, and cook them. They liked stories about giants who shouted "Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman! I'll beat him, I'll eat him, I'll pound his bones to bread. Then I'll spread him on toast with jam and eat him for breakfast!" Or something similar.
The neighborhood kids who had come to Vacation Bible School liked my stories about Jesus, too. He could just touch people, and they would wilt. Only, I, as storyteller, they were certain, was keeping the secret for dramatic purposes. I said "wilt" meant something else. Of course, they all knew better. But they would play along until the story unfolded more fully.
Only, I knew how that story was going to unfold. I saw I was in deep water, and that maybe I didn't know how to swim as well as I'd thought. Exegeting tenses and participles in Biblical Greek and delving into eschatological distinctions concerning end time events hadn't prepared me for this. I abandoned that page of the Picture Roll as a lost cause, and moved on to something else—flipping to another page at random.
There was the same Jesus as in the first scene, only this time with children crowding around him on every side. He was laying his hands on their heads. Whew! We'd get this matter of Jesus being a hero instead of a villain cleared up quickly, before we sent these little munchkins on to cookies, punch and crafts with an entirely wrong impression.
I held forth boldly again. "Now kids, let's look at this story. Here is our memory text. Everybody say it after me, 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not.' They all chimed in, in the best tradition of an audience at a melodrama, repeating the text after me. Then I asked, “What does this verse mean?"
Immediately forty squirming hopscotch theologians began parsing and exegeting the text at hand, as instructed. "Suffer? Suffer? Oh, its Jesus again--that man who touches people and wilts their legs. Yes. He's touching the children so they will suffer! He is putting his hands on their heads. They're going to be wilting like dead daisies!" Suffer the little children. Plain as day. Right there in the King James Version Picture Roll text. If you read it for yourself, you know its true.
I was struck speechless, which for a preacher at any stage of his development, is a remarkable thing. I looked around at all those grinning faces beaming up at me with such good will, expecting me to tell them the truth about Jesus---and I saw they thought I was doing a marvelous job of it, so far.
Finally, I stuttered, "Suffer? Suffer? No, it doesn't mean Jesus touches them and they all suffer and wilt like the man with the lame leg. Suffer doesn't mean 'suffer'. It means 'let'. Jesus is saying, "LET the little children come unto me, don't keep them away." They all looked up at me, grinning. By now they were coming to realize I truly believed the lies I was telling them about words meaning different things than words actually meant. I could see in their eyes they knew I was a total idiot, but they liked me anyway. Because even if I didn't have a clue on God's green earth about the things I was saying, I at least had come and tell them whopping good stories. About Jesus wilting people's legs and making children suffer like dead daisies by simply patting them painfully on the head.
Any teacher who doesn't learn more from his students than they do from him, isn't fit to continue teaching. That week, I purchased a reliable modern translation of the Bible. I didn't want to keep on telling little ghetto kids--who hadn't grown up speaking 500 year old King James English as their second language—more lies about God. I've used a reliable modern language version in my preaching, teaching, and storytelling ever since. It is the only way I could keep looking God in the eye.
"Wilt! Wilt! That man Jesus touched the poor guy. Look! His leg has wilted. He can't even walk. Ahh!"
***
The day I realized the King James Version would not be a fit for the ministry to which God had called me was the hot summer afternoon I assisted with a Vacation Bible School for the neighborhood children in Fresno, California in my first church assignment out of Bible college.
In our denomination, the Children's divisions for Bible instruction are carefully crafted. They often include multiple teaching props. One prop that is traditional for teaching the younger children--and is also often used by our missionaries in teaching simple truths to the illiterate in far away places in times gone by--was the Picture Roll. The Picture Roll is a 2 foot wide by 3 feet high roll, with a new picture on each page. It sits on a wooden stand, and the pictures can be show as needed by simply lifting those not in use over the top of the stand so the appropriate scene is revealed. Eager young minds could see the picture and learn the verse printed beneath it, while the teacher would tell the story from which the text and the picture were taken. It was simple, colorful, attractive teaching technology--a tool of the trade for child instructors. Pretty much anybody could use it.
Except me. I ran into a snag. With a room full of forty ghetto kids sitting around listening, I turned to the trusty Picture Roll's first scene with a feeling of conscious competence. I'd just completed four years of Bible school a matter of weeks before. Teaching these simple Bible stories to mere children should be a snap.
The picture showed Jesus bending over a lame man, his hand outstretched. The lame man was saying, "If Thou wilt, Thou canst heal me." I read the verse aloud, had the kids repeat it after me. Then, resorting to the Socratic method of instruction, I asked, "What does this mean?"
Immediately the children began chorusing, "Wilt! Wilt! That man Jesus touched the poor guy. Look! His leg has wilted. He can't even walk. Ahh!" I was so appalled at what they'd just taken from a straight forward reading of the King James, I said, "No! Oh, no! It doesn't mean 'wilt, wilt'. It means, "If you wish, you can heal me." The cheerful little chirpers with dirty faces and ragged clothes kept grinning and waiting to learn more. They liked stories about witches who live in gingerbread houses and catch kids and keep them in cages, and cook them. They liked stories about giants who shouted "Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman! I'll beat him, I'll eat him, I'll pound his bones to bread. Then I'll spread him on toast with jam and eat him for breakfast!" Or something similar.
The neighborhood kids who had come to Vacation Bible School liked my stories about Jesus, too. He could just touch people, and they would wilt. Only, I, as storyteller, they were certain, was keeping the secret for dramatic purposes. I said "wilt" meant something else. Of course, they all knew better. But they would play along until the story unfolded more fully.
Only, I knew how that story was going to unfold. I saw I was in deep water, and that maybe I didn't know how to swim as well as I'd thought. Exegeting tenses and participles in Biblical Greek and delving into eschatological distinctions concerning end time events hadn't prepared me for this. I abandoned that page of the Picture Roll as a lost cause, and moved on to something else—flipping to another page at random.
There was the same Jesus as in the first scene, only this time with children crowding around him on every side. He was laying his hands on their heads. Whew! We'd get this matter of Jesus being a hero instead of a villain cleared up quickly, before we sent these little munchkins on to cookies, punch and crafts with an entirely wrong impression.
I held forth boldly again. "Now kids, let's look at this story. Here is our memory text. Everybody say it after me, 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not.' They all chimed in, in the best tradition of an audience at a melodrama, repeating the text after me. Then I asked, “What does this verse mean?"
Immediately forty squirming hopscotch theologians began parsing and exegeting the text at hand, as instructed. "Suffer? Suffer? Oh, its Jesus again--that man who touches people and wilts their legs. Yes. He's touching the children so they will suffer! He is putting his hands on their heads. They're going to be wilting like dead daisies!" Suffer the little children. Plain as day. Right there in the King James Version Picture Roll text. If you read it for yourself, you know its true.
I was struck speechless, which for a preacher at any stage of his development, is a remarkable thing. I looked around at all those grinning faces beaming up at me with such good will, expecting me to tell them the truth about Jesus---and I saw they thought I was doing a marvelous job of it, so far.
Finally, I stuttered, "Suffer? Suffer? No, it doesn't mean Jesus touches them and they all suffer and wilt like the man with the lame leg. Suffer doesn't mean 'suffer'. It means 'let'. Jesus is saying, "LET the little children come unto me, don't keep them away." They all looked up at me, grinning. By now they were coming to realize I truly believed the lies I was telling them about words meaning different things than words actually meant. I could see in their eyes they knew I was a total idiot, but they liked me anyway. Because even if I didn't have a clue on God's green earth about the things I was saying, I at least had come and tell them whopping good stories. About Jesus wilting people's legs and making children suffer like dead daisies by simply patting them painfully on the head.
Any teacher who doesn't learn more from his students than they do from him, isn't fit to continue teaching. That week, I purchased a reliable modern translation of the Bible. I didn't want to keep on telling little ghetto kids--who hadn't grown up speaking 500 year old King James English as their second language—more lies about God. I've used a reliable modern language version in my preaching, teaching, and storytelling ever since. It is the only way I could keep looking God in the eye.
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