Words from WW Blog

It’s a ripple effect of texting and other forms of social media, like that bloated feeling a person has after his fourth trip to the Chinese buffet food bar. I wouldn’t call it a catastrophe, but I might put the label of “famine” on it– punctuation famine, that is!

Grading seventh-grade language arts assignments for the past five months has made me realize it isn’t a slip, like when I think I’m typing an exclamation point and I realize I typed the number 1! (In fact, I just typed that three times to get the punctuation point111!) No, the punctuation shortage has become an epidemic. Commas are no longer common, capital letters have fled to the South, and semi-colons are less understood than the 70-year-old hoarder getting counseling on Dr. Phil’s show.

Pretty soon punctuation marks may disappear from our keyboard as if they were carryovers from the Greek alphabet. I have some students who understand the meaning of a comma in the midst of a sentence, but there are other seventh-graders who shave more often than they have one of those squiggly marks appear in their assignment.

So I’ve had to start taking on the role of the mean teacher and taking off points for not capitalizing the first word in a sentence. I need to take the next step toward being defined as cranky and chop off some points for writing a one sentence paragraph that includes sixty words and no separating signs that would allow the reader to take a breath.

I’ve had “martin luther king”, “denver”, “december”, but no one uses lower case letters when they write “The Nuggets” or “Broncos”. Quotation marks are seen simply as being an unnecessary nuisance, like a speed bump on a drag strip! Question marks are questionable, and a colon is believed to just be a body part.

So I’m leading these enlistees through a punctuation boot camp. They are going to get down-and-dirty in the new jungles of strange species of punctuation. When they see their parents they’ll begin to think of parentheses. When they pass a fire hydrant they’ll recall the use of a hyphen. When they watch a hockey game they’ll think of “periods”. I’ll be like a drill sergeant making them view an apostrophe as being an extended hand to keep an ‘s’ from falling off the cliff!

My hope is that come May they may remember to capitalize the month and then say “I did it!” (exclamation point).

It’s interesting to think of how my hair started out, light and fair, and to consider that in my later years of life it’s gradually been returning to a lighter tint. The grey has begun to force out the brown, like the weeds taking over an uncared for lawn. Of course, I don’t really have a say in the accumulating grey population, unless I want to use one of those products that try to fool people about your hair color.

My life could easily be separated into several hair chapters that tell my story. In going through old family photo albums I can see the progression, or regression in some cases. It begins with a little boy who has been a barber’s dream cut. The electric razor has simply mowed down the hair like our lawnmower at home going back and forth, one row at a time. Five minutes tops and I took a seat beside my older brother who sported the same style, no comb necessary.

Short defined me in my early years: short in height, shorted in prized possessions because, being the youngest, I always received the hand-me-downs, and my short hair. A picture I discovered recently of my South Zanesville Junior High 8th Grade basketball team has me sitting on the end of the front row, noticeably shorter than everyone else, wearing unfashionable geeky glasses and…with short hair. Growing my hair out like 95% of my classmates was not a choice. Mom and Dad had decided the matter, and besides, it saved a lot of unnecessary time being wasted at the barbershop getting all “handsomed-up”!

The hair was permitted to be grown out some– but nothing wild– about the time I hit sixteen. When I say “grown out”, I mean it became necessary to carry a comb with me. It was as close as I came to living on the wild side back in my high school days. It wasn’t necessary for my dad to wait on me at the barber anymore, which may have opened the gates to freedom just a crack. Morris Barber Shop in Ironton, Ohio was right across the street from J.C. Penney’s where my mom worked as the bookkeeper. That meant I could spend as much time as I wanted over there.

My brother had joined the Army just about the time his hair was getting long and been roughly reunited with the buzz. Some other boys in my class were beginning to walk on the wild hair side, growing it out long and parting it in the middle. Vietnam was still going on and the unrest over our country’s involvement was filtering down into sit-ins, protest marches, and long out-of-control hair kept in place with headbands. Not me, though. I was Baptist and clean-cut, like the friends I hung around with.

And then I went to college. I remember coming home on Christmas break during my last year at Judson College. Our basketball team had played in a tournament at Spring Arbor College in Michigan, and then I had taken a bus to Columbus from somewhere close to Spring Arbor. I had grown my hair long, parted it in the middle, and felt like it made my 5’8″ frame look more muscular and imposing. My mom was not impressed. In fact, she was more depressed. Her first words upon seeing me at the Columbus Bus Depot were “Lord, have mercy!” The next day Morris Barber Shop was open I had the “hair nonsense” cut away and was quickly brought back to normal-looking. I’m pretty sure Mom used the word “hippie” in describing me.

A couple of years after that tightrope hair-style walking over a chasm of foolishness, I grew it out to an acceptable length that wouldn’t cause the elderly crowd in any church I worked in to shudder and call a special deacon’s meeting. I tried to find a length with a side part that made me look like I could still relate to young people, while “pastorally” enough for those in the church who paid my salary.

Carol had entered the picture by then. We both wore eyeglass frames that were so big they could have doubled as windshields for our car. Her hair was long, down to her waist when we said our “I do’s”, so mine just needed to be long enough for her to be able to run her fingers through…or, at least, that’s what I hope I’m remembering.

On three different occasions since those years I’ve gotten buzzed for a cause or as a result of a lost bet. The first time was to show my support for a man named Dave Buffmack, who had a brain tumor. Dave was a great guy. I can still hear his laugh, which resembled a sly snicker. The next time I got buzzed was as a result of our VBS kids raising $1,800 for missions. The stipulation was that I would get a mohawk, but if they raised over a thousand dollars I’d get a blue mohawk. I believe one mom wrote a check for $1,000 to make help create the final vivid picture. I went to my barber right after the close of that VBS to get the blue mohawk shaved off. Like my mom’s words from years before, I can still remember Phil Hanson’s words when I walked into his shop: “What bet did you lose?”

The last time I got buzzed was at the end of a basketball season when I lost a bet with one of my players– perhaps the worst free throw shooter of all time. He couldn’t make a free throw in practice so I told him that if he shot 90% for the season I’d shave my head. In the 14th game of the season he shot two free throws and made them both. Those free throws ended up being the only two he shot the whole season in our games. In fact, I’m pretty sure he tried to stay away as far away from the basketball as possible in our final five games. At the conclusion of our team banquet, I was buzzed clean.

It was almost like coming full-circle back to my childhood days. Five-minute haircuts, Morris Barber Shop, no comb necessary. In some ways, those were golden days.

Now I’m into the silver and grey days, signs of wisdom and experience. One of my students recently asked me how old I was. I turned the question back to him. “How old do you think I am?” He put a hand on his chin and considered what the answer could be. “Well, I know that wrinkles and grey hair can be signs of stress and age…so…I think you’re probably somewhere between…30 and 45!”

Sold! The “A” he received for the quarter, however, was earned, not a payoff! I’d bet my hair on it!

I’ve debated back and forth for years with a close friend of mine about the assurance of eternal salvation. I’ve continued to lobby for my belief in the security of my salvation, and therefore eternal life, when a person accepts Jesus as their personal savior. My friend has a hard time accepting that because of the simplicity of it. That is, that someone can say he believes in Jesus and then live a life of leisure, luxury, and looseness.

He has a point that is a bit problematic for one of the foundational beliefs of my theology. In our culture of entitlement, there are people who identify themselves as Christians, but lead lives where God always seems, so to speak, to be invited to the wedding but not the reception.

On my friend’s theological side, however, there always seems to be the risk of seeing salvation as being like a privilege that is in danger of being taken away. My Baptist upbringing at times came at the problem by injecting some guilt into the spiritual illness, similar to a vaccine shot. There wasn’t a list of forbidden behaviors, but there were looks of consternation and grunts of disapproval that were meant to keep us on the golden way. Church attendance (Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night) was one way that our faithfulness was measured. Too often we weren’t thinking about our personal relationship with Jesus because we were focused on how long we had before we needed to be back at church. I always missed Walt Disney on Sunday nights because we were at church. We’d be home in time for Ed Sullivan, but that didn’t have the same zing for a kid who loved Old Yeller and Hayley Mills.

I’ve digressed, however, into a paragraph of “writing whine”.

This morning I was reading something that writer Philip Yancey wrote. He says, “I learn to trust God with my doubts and struggles by getting to know Jesus. If that sounds evasive, I suggest it accurately reflects the centrality of jesus in the New Testament. We start with him as the focal point and let our eyes wander with care into the margins.” (Reaching for the Invisible God, pages 139-140)

If I focus my eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of my faith journey, all the other stuff will work itself out. My discomfort is with those who focus on the other stuff and then insert Jesus in at the end like an uncomfortable punctuation mark. That is what also causes my friend to break into a special kind of rash– people who can cause themselves Christians but not identify with Jesus.

My friend and I may never come to an agreeing point in our debate about “one saved, always saved!”, but it isn’t imperative that we travel the same path to get to the desired destination. We’re like Jesus’ disciples, following the same Teacher, but very different in who we are.