A Prescription For Perfectionists - Sarah Richey

Continuing with our series of entries from Judgment & Love, here is Sarah Richey's chapter. Again, J&L is a collection of 35 true-life stories illustrating the powerful truth that when love is shown in the face of deserved judgment, lives are changed. To order your copy at the reduced price of $10, go here or click on the button at the bottom of the post. 

The day I graduated from college, I had a lot going for me. I was graduating with honors, had a new job in youth ministry, was buying an apartment and moving to a new city, and had a hand- some young fiancé to go with me! My expectations for that Summer and my new life were high and when people would ask, “How are you doing it all?” I would demurely say something about taking it in stride, enjoying every minute, not worrying about the details. What I didn’t tell people was that for a few months prior, a steady sense of fear and foreboding had gradually taken over my thoughts. In reality, I was so consumed by being the perfect graduate/bride/youth minister/homeowner that I floated through the two months before my wedding in a haze, not wanting to make any mistakes. God forbid that I become Bridezilla or not actually be perfect for my new job. I started having tension headaches and trouble sleeping. I lost all hope in the future; it was as if fear had knocked out my drive to hope and dream and I became numb as I smothered the fear and kept up the appearance of a young, thrilled, bride-to-be.

About a month before the wedding, my parents took me to see a doctor to check out my headaches. She was a Christian, had married young while in medical school, and was now a successful doctor in the city. During the physical she kept asking, “Are you sure you’re not stressed about anything? You’re getting married, that’s a pretty big deal.” I kept replying that I was fine, not at all worried, so looking forward to the big day. I remember her looking at me and wondering if she could see straight through to my terrified little heart. “Uh huh,” she said, “Well, you’re completely healthy, maybe try some allergy medication and see if that helps. Sarah, you have a lot going on right now, it’s normal to be a little stressed.”

People still talk about how calm a bride I was on my wedding day, although all I remember is feeling paralyzed, afraid it was all going to go terribly wrong. I wasn’t afraid of marriage, I was afraid of failing to meet all the expectations I had built up in my mind about who I was and what people expected from me and how the perfect 22-year-old should act and get married. I was constantly judging myself, weighing every move, and critiquing everything I did.
[CONTINUE READING]

The Gypsy and the Hobo: Mad Men Ep. 11

(Warning: Mad Men spoiler alerts ahead—if you aren’t caught up on the last few weeks of Season 3, and don’t want to be, don’t read this post!)

“Don, open the drawer or I will.” ....holy $%@&!

This is 2 weeks late in coming but let’s talk about Episode 11 of Mad Men’s third season; it’s the one we’ve all been waiting for, right? Betty confronts Don about his past, evidence of which was kept in a shoebox in a locked drawer in his desk, and Don comes clean and tells her everything, everything! (Well, not about the school teacher sleeping in his car, but everything else.) Don’s face has never been so stricken and I, for one, thought he was going to bolt for the door. Incredibly, he stays, Betty pours him a drink, and he tells the truth.

Out of their conversation comes some of the best Mockingbird fodder I’ve ever seen on TV. As he starts to explain, Betty asks, “What would you do if you were me? Would you love you?” and Don replies, “I was surprised you ever loved me.” This is something profound that we never knew before, Don Draper feels unlovable. He goes through it all, the prostitute mother, the stepmother, and finally breaks talking about his brother Adam who committed suicide after coming to find Don and being turned away. In tears, he says, “He wanted to be part of my life. I couldn’t risk all this.”

What we have here is the transformation of a man, by the truth about who he really is coming to light and his wife not giving up on him. We see it the next morning, when he sees the old photos lying where he left them the night before, and lets them stay there. When he walks down stairs and kisses his children and puts his hand behind Betty’s head and looks into her eyes. When he calls the school teacher and breaks off the affair. When Carlton asks him during Halloween, “And who are you supposed to be [dressed up as]?” Don has the contented (and scared?) look of a man who is no longer hiding. This is transformation!

Sure, it’s also Mad Men…Betty’s losing it by the day and I’m not holding out for a complete Gospel metaphor all the way through to the finale this weekend. But what made this episode so thrilling was that Mad Men got real: we all feel like Don. We all have that one thing (or many!) that makes us unlovable, that we know if people ever found out about, we’d just die. But what we all long for is for those things to come to light, and to not die. To be free from our past, from things we’ve done, and still be loved.

my father moved through dooms of love

from the poem by e.e. cummings

my father moved through dooms of love

through sames of am through haves of give,

singing each morning out of each night

my father moved through depths of height

* * *

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:

no hungry man but wished him food;

no cripple wouldn't creep one mile

uphill to only see him smile.

Scorning the pomp of must and shall

my father moved through dooms of feel;

his anger was as right as rain

his pity was as green as grain

septembering arms of year extend

less humbly wealth to foe and friend

than he to foolish and to wise

offered immeasurable is

proudly and (by octobering flame

beckoned) as earth will downward climb,

so naked for immortal work

his shoulders marched against the dark

his sorrow was as true as bread:

no liar looked him in the head;

if every friend became his foe

he'd laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,

singing each new leaf out of each tree

(and every child was sure that spring

danced when she heard my father sing)

then let men kill which cannot share,

let blood and flesh be mud and mire,

scheming imagine,passion willed,

freedom a drug that's bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,

a heart to fear, to doubt a mind,

to differ a disease of same,

conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,

bitter all utterly things sweet,

maggoty minus and dumb death

all we inherit, all bequeath

and nothing quite so least as truth

—i say though hate were why man breathe—

because my father lived his soul

love is the whole and more than all

Original Sin in the Garden...State

A lot can be said about New Jersey; people either love it or hate it, and the jokes abound on either side. I’ve been known to jump on the Jersey-bashing bandwagon every now and then, but I was pleasantly surprised by a recent New York Times article that I found to be very Mockingbird appropriate. The article, In New Jersey, Ideal Conditions for Corruption, came on the heels of a vast corruption bust involving various state politicians, mayors, and rabbis and takes a look at just why it is that NJ seems to be so infected with scandal. Long story short, it turns out that people in the Dirty Jerz really understand Original Sin! From the NY Times:

Over the last decade alone, nearly 150 of the state’s senators, mayors, county executives and council members have been arrested and charged with leaping at the chance to engage in this lowest-common-denominator crime, at times for laughably small sums of money. But the history goes back much further than that. “Everyone says it couldn’t happen to them, until it happens,” said Robert C. Botti, who became mayor of Union City in 1982 after his predecessor was sentenced to seven years for seeking bribes for school construction contracts.

It turns out Mr. Botti then rigged bids for janitorial contracts and ended up in prison for 18 months himself.

It wasn’t always like this, proud New Jersey residents say. But, in reality, it always was. As far back as the 1870s, a grand jury in Hudson County indicted two police commissioners accused of awarding contracts to fictitious groups. And by the 1970s, fraud, extortion and kickbacks had become as common as traffic jams on the New Jersey Turnpike.

The examples go on and justifications are given, but in the end, New Jersey residents seem less than surprised.

Many New Jersey residents are less impressed. In interviews around the state, several simply shrugged at the latest indictments, the third, fourth, or fifth wave in their lives. “I don’t know if I wasn’t surprised because it’s New Jersey or because it’s politicians,” said Cynthia Rose, 30, a makeup artist who lives in Jersey City. “I hate to be so jaded,” she added.

In Hoboken, where Mayor Peter Cammarano III is accused of accepting a $25,000 bribe just weeks after taking office, Stu Buchbinder, 30...predicted that Mr. Cammarano’s replacement would be equally susceptible. “Will they take bribes? Probably.” He paused. “Possibly they’ll be smarter about it and wait longer,” he said.

It is no news to these people that we are powerless to change/save ourselves by our own merit. Jersey jokes aside, sin is inherent in human nature and and at times it seems there is no other way. Reading this article, I'm reminded of the AA parable about the man who is addicted to jaywalking and though he is injured over and over again, can't stop until one day, he's hit by a fire engine. Or Romans 7. Lucky for us (and New Jersey), "Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Prisoners Dancing for A Second Chance

These videos (and more!) were posted on You Tube by Byron Garcia, a security consultant for prisons in the Philippines. This is what he says about the prisoners dancing:

"This is a tribute to all Prison facilities in the Philippines (8 and counting) who are now adopting this non-violent approach to rehabilitation! Thank you, inmates deserve a second chance! If we make prisons a living hell for them, then we might just be sending out devils once they are released. Cruel methods to achieve discipline are a thing of the past! So, keep on dancing!"

A great article about them was written last year in the NY Times.

The Runaway Bunny vs. The Little Engine That Could

I was reminded recently of the wonderful children's book, The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. For those of you who haven't read it in a while, it's about a little bunny who decides to run away.

He tells his mother, "I am running away," and she replies, "If you run away, I will run after you. For you are my little bunny." So the little bunny schemes, "If you run after me, I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you." And the mother never hesitates, "If you become a fish... I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you." And it goes on, and the little bunny becomes a bird, and a crocus, and a sailboat...and the mother becomes a tree, and a gardener, and the wind, and so on, always finding her little bunny. In short, it's brilliant! I'm no connoisseur of children's books, but I can't think of one that better describes our relationship to God. We run away, and he becomes like us to bring us back to him.

So, reading the Runaway Bunny reminded me of another favorite and classic children's book, The Little Engine That Could. Just thinking about it makes me feel nostalgic; the little bright blue engine, the colorful vintage pictures of the dolls, toys, the clown, the candy!

But flipping through it, I realized that now its message is lost on me. "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." conjured up uneasy memories of self-esteem workshops in middle school and a stressful feeling that I should ditch this post and get back to studying for an exam. It seems that life is just a little too real for the Little Engine for the thoughts occupying my head are less often "I think I can, I think I can" and more "Why didn't I?" or "No, I guess I couldn't". The pictures are fun, but I fear that I may have read the Little Engine a few too many times, and the Runaway Bunny not enough.

From Henry James

From James' The American; the wealthy and self-made Christopher Newman describes an experience he had in a cab on his way to Wall Street to ruin a fellow businessman,

"'One day, a couple of months ago, something very curious happened to me. ... At all events, I woke up suddenly, from a sleep or from a kind of a reverie, with the most extraordinary feeling in the world--a mortal disgust for the thing I was going to do. It came upon me like that!' - and he snapped his fingers - 'as abruptly as an old wound that begins to ache. I couldn't tell the meaning of it; I only felt that I loathed the whole business and wanted to wash my hands of it. The idea of losing that sixty thousand

dollars, of letting it utterly slide and scuttle and never hearing of it again, seemed the sweetest thing in the world. And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going on inside of me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about. ... I seemed to feel a new man inside my old skin, and I longed for a new world."

Health Assessment 101

Last Sunday at our new church, RJ spoke about suffering from II Corinthians 4, and verses 8-10 stuck out to me:

"We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body."

We talked about our propensity to want to "fix" people's suffering/problems and offer words of advice instead of love and empathy, and I was reminded of a little grace in practice I found in one of my nursing textbooks. The chapter was on the patient interview and discussed some things a nurse should try not to do while talking to patients. One of the points was "Giving Unwanted Advice" and said that even if a patient asks "If you were me, what would you do?" we shouldn't answer "If I were you, I'd..." because we are, in fact, not them. And in answering what we would do, we are disabling the patient to understand and come to terms with their condition and make decisions about their lives.

Is that what we are doing when we try to help someone through suffering by offering advice? "Well, how has your prayer life been?" "Have you been reading the Bible?" "You should do x, y, and z..." The truth is, we are hard pressed on every side, and to deny it or offer solutions not only makes people feel like it's their fault (which sometimes it might be) but, I think, it also hinders those who are suffering from experiencing the grace and "life of Jesus" being revealed in them.