Reaching Out
My daughter is having an interesting Lenten journey this year. She decided to stop writing in her blog and eating meat for the duration. I'm proud of her. After all, the season is not about sacrifice, or at least not ours. If I understand it correctly, and that's maybe not something you want to wager on, it has to do with focusing on what's important and losing distractions.
Me, I gave up vegetables, but it's not like I'm going to get credit for that.
Beth actually had a funny story about all this. There was a church potluck and absolutely nothing for her to eat, living in Texas where they not only are in close contact with their inner carnivores, they fry everything. For Thanksgiving her relatives deep fried a turkey, a sort of trendy touch that they must be slapping their foreheads about, wondering why it never occurred to them before. I think they fry brisket in Texas, I'm pretty sure. If they go to KFC, they probably bring home a bucket and fry it some more.
Anyway, she's at the potluck, and since some of the older women at church have adopted this orphan from the West Coast, there was a little concern about Beth's eating habits, being, at that moment, essentially water. She didn't think they'd really quite grasp the vegetarian concept, so she simply explained about it being Lent and all and they relaxed some.
"It's okay," she told me later, "if you're doing it for Jesus."
I can't really say I've done much of anything for Jesus lately. But I will note that, starting on Ash Wednesday and ending on the Wednesday before Easter, I will have had my hair cut twice and been in the dentist's chair twice, having some of that restorative work done I've put off for years.
So I'm thinking I have a new book idea: Getting Closer to God Through Good Grooming.
I may be on to something, seriously. I know it sounds superficial, but if shagginess or embarrassment or halitosis keeps me inside, I'm not sure how much good I'm doing. Outside, of course, I'm not sure how much good I'm doing either, but my wife thinks it's not a bad idea and she knows a lot of stuff about Jesus.
All I know is if I don't get out and about, for whatever reason, I don't get touched or touch others. Sure, my wife will rub my back or stroke my arm when we pass in the hallway, and my son will rest his head on my shoulder from time to time, but on any given day I might not be touched at all by another human being, as busy as our lives are in this house and our different schedules.
Last Sunday I went to church and then to lunch, and I got some hugs and handshakes, passed The Peace, and greeted and otherwise interacted, me with the short hair and the teeth and all, and I wonder today if that wasn't a holy day, in some way. It sure was sunny, at any rate.
And maybe, given that isolation is a fact of life for me, this is all about small steps and the fact that perhaps God is not finished with me yet. Maybe I have some learning yet to do. You think?
All I know is that Pastor Bob spotted me, greeted me, then grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me into the light.
"Let me see that haircut."
It was a joke, he reads this blog from time to time I guess, I wrote about my dumb hair issues, but still. As with the rest of them that day, he did a simple thing, which was to touch me, and all of a sudden I was back in the world, shorn and scraped and fluorided and capped and filled and shaved, and this is a good thing.
For me, anyway, who never really can count on being around other people, and being touched, or at least when, or at least by whom, or at least by Whom.
4:51:18 PM 
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