Stuff Christians Like (16 page)

What to do? What to do? You have more options than you think.

Instead of throwing it away, retire your Bible to the mantel in your house. If it’s worn down and beaten-up looking, people will naturally assume it’s because you’ve been studying it so much,
as opposed to, say, keeping it in the trunk of your car next to your tire iron. Everyone who sees it will think, “Wow, she loves the Bible.” If you don’t have a mantel, a bookshelf will work just as well, as long as your Show Bible isn’t spooning with your collection of romance novels.

Open the drawer of most hotel rooms around the world and you’re likely to find a copy of the Bible. The Gideon’s International organization passes them out, which is awesome. But often, their green or brown Bible is sitting in there all alone with only the occasional phone book or a “Here’s-where-the-buffet-restaurants-in-town-are-located” brochure for company. Give that Gideon a running mate by adding your Bible. Maybe yours is the version the next hotel guest would actually prefer. Maybe you’ll get a new ministry, praying for the people who stay in Room 412 in the Cleveland, Ohio, Ramada Inn. At the bare minimum, it would be pretty cool to see lots of people start jampacking hotel bedside tables with Bibles. Imagine if you could barely open the drawer because it was so heavy with Bibles people had donated.

Sometimes, you see an immediate need and have to give your Bible to someone right away. God says, “Yeah, this person needs my Word, right now, right here. Let’s do this thing.” And so you have to gut your Bible on the fly, dumping out any bulletins, sermon notes, and other random slips of paper as fast as you can. Then you hand the Bible to that person and think quietly to yourself, “I hope I didn’t write anything in the margin like my prayer that God would remove my heart of hate against you.”

Stop, just stop, it’s too late. I saw you. We were just told to turn to Nahum 2:4 by our pastor and out of the corner of my eye I saw you flip to the table of contents in your Bible.

Don’t, don’t try to explain yourself. I thought you loved God. I thought that when we weren’t at church together you were off somewhere reading your Bible, but clearly that was a mistake on my part. How long has this been going on, this, ugh, I don’t even like how the words feel in my mouth, this “using the table of contents to find books of the Bible”?

Do you know what I did with my table of contents? I ripped it out and rolled it into a homemade shofar horn that I blow when it’s time for my family to come down and read our nightly Bible studies.

I felt like we had made so much progress. When we first met, you had a Bible with those indents, those “dumb thumbs.” As in, “I’m dumb, I can’t find Titus, here is where I place my thumb.” But we got through that, we pushed through and got you a grown-up Bible without indents marking the different books.

And then today, today I catch you using the table of contents?

Who are you?

I don’t even know you any more.

Sure, you can find Psalms. Congratulations, you know where Psalms is. Everyone can find that book. It’s sixty pages long and in the middle. Yeah, that’s right, in addition to the location of the books of the Bible I know the length of each book.

Go on, look up Nahum. It’s too late to save face now. You’ll find it on page 1466 and it’s only seven pages long. But what am I telling you for? You’ve probably confused Nahum with the Marvel comics anti-hero, Namor the Sub-Mariner, prince of Atlantis, grandson of the Atlantean Emperor Thakorr.

I’m so embarrassed for you.

I hate having things in my pockets. When I sit down in church, I immediately empty everything I’m carrying onto the floor in front of me, creating an obstacle course of pens and keys and mints for anyone unfortunate enough to scoot by me. But one thing I love carrying is my “God Wad.”

The God Wad (or Wad o’ God if you prefer names with an
o’
in them) is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a collection of 3x5 note cards I carry around with Bible verses on them. You can usually judge the health of my walk by the girth of the wad. If I’m spending lots of time in God’s Word, expect to see a God Wad that’s a few inches thick. If I’m slacking, my pockets will be riding empty.

I’ve carried some of the verses, like the official “worrier’s prayer,” Philippians 4:6 – 7, so long that the note cards feel worn and leathery. Others, like Romans 5:5, are new and fresh and still haven’t gotten broken in when I’ve pulled the verse out in the middle of a tense moment and said, “Yikes, I’m going to need some extra God Wad today.”

In three years of carrying them, I’ve only given one verse out. A Somalian woman who was cutting my hair opened up to me about what it felt like to be a refugee, and I felt like God wanted me to share a bit of the wad. So I did. I had written a new card that morning and handed it to her after my haircut. When I went back the next time to get my haircut she was ecstatic about how dead-on that verse was for her situation. I thought to myself, “I knew that when I wrote that verse down in the morning to add it to my God Wad, there would be a Somalian woman I’d never met before who probably needed it. I’m so wise.”

I didn’t think that, actually. I was just glad I had some pocket God to share with her. And that’s how the God Wad tends to work. You never know when you’re going to need it or who it’s for. I walked out of a meeting one day at work and saw some of my God Wad sitting on a filing cabinet. I must have dropped the
note cards during the day. I felt a little like Johnny Appleseed, but I quickly picked them up and said to myself, “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, then it loves you too. You really love me, God Wad. You really do.”

My plan is that if more people than just my mom buy this book and I become a Christian Thousandaire, I’m going to buy a laminator. Then, I’ll laminate my God Wad and be able to carry it forever.

Dare to dream, Jonathan Acuff. Dare to dream.

On most Friday nights we take our kids to the pet store or “the free zoo.” My three-year-old daughter likes to touch all the lizard tanks and the rat cages and then put her hands in her mouth. I used to pride myself on my hand sanitizing skills, but one night while driving home from the pet store, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that she had removed her sandals and was enthusiastically licking the bottom of them. Awesome.

When you hear your name called on the television game show
The Price Is Right
, that’s a good thing. It means you’re about to go bid on fantastic prizes and possibly spin a giant wheel to
win a motor home and a Corvette or a croquet set and three lawn chairs. Jumping up and down and yelling with excitement is an appropriate response. But you shouldn’t do that if you’re getting called out in the middle of church to go pick up your kid from Sunday school.

At most churches they won’t call out your name during the service. If the church is small enough, they’ll send a Sunday school volunteer to come find you and let you know that you’ve won a screaming, inconsolable child. At my church, they flash a number up on a screen that corresponds with the laminated tag you got when you dropped off your child. There, in the middle of the sermon, in two-foot-high type, you’ll see, “Child #413 in Room #218.”

I have to admit, as soon as I see a number called on screen, I do two things immediately. I look at my own cards to make sure it’s not my kids. Then, with a sense of relief at finding out it’s not, I scan the room to see who just got the hook. Even with thousands of people in the crowd, I anxiously scrutinize the seated heads, watching for that one person who stands up. Oh, there you are. You lost the kid lottery. But how are you going to handle the walk of shame?

I think there are two appropriate ways to pull it off successfully.

Pretend you got a cell phone call. As soon as you see your number come up on the screen, put your cell phone against your ear, point to it, and make that face that says, “Excuse me, I need to take this call. Very important call, very important call. Has nothing to do with the screaming kid in room #218. Weird coincidence. That kid must be some sort of monster. Probably has horrible parents.” If you want to go an extra step, actually pretend you’re having a conversation on the phone, whispering things like, “You need me to volunteer at the homeless shelter again?
Right now?
Okay. I’m on my way.” In addition to tricking people into thinking it’s not your kid, you can earn some extra holy points as well.

This move has been perfected by parents with screaming kids on airplanes the world over. As soon as you see your number come up, you stand and do a double-arm shrug as if to say, “Kids will be kids.” Smile and point to your watch. “It’s like clockwork. Same time every Sunday.” It works even better if you have a little audio file on your cell phone that plays that “waaaa whaaaa” defeated trumpet sound they play in cartoons when the Road Runner drops an anvil on the Coyote.

I haven’t been called out of church (yet) to pick up one of my kids from Sunday school, but my day is coming. My daughter L.E. recently got her first stitches—in the chin of course—my daughter McRae inspired that phone call to Poison Control, and we had our first homework sent back incomplete from the teacher. It’s a magical time of firsts at the Acuff house right now. And when my number does come up, please expect to see me walking briskly through the aisles during service whispering into my cupped hand, “How many orphans? Of course. I’ll be right there.”

Whenever we miss a few weeks of church, I feel compelled to explain the absence to my daughter’s Sunday school teacher or anyone else who will listen for that matter.

If we’ve been out of town for a few weekends in a row, I’ll make sure to use some not-so-subtle sentences that tell the teacher where we’ve been when I drop off my daughter at the door. “Here’s L.E. She can’t wait to tell you about the beach.” Or, “L.E. is excited about Sunday school and wants to share all about her trip to the mountains, where we were last week, and not worshipping satan somewhere if that’s what you assumed by our absence.”

Why do I do that? Part of the reason is that at our church, there are so many kids that they have to carefully assign headcount to certain rooms. And there’s a big chart of sticker nametags hanging on the door. If you miss too many weeks, they remove your kid’s name from the wall. Like that scene in
Back to the Future
where Michael J. Fox disappears from the photo, your kid no longer exists in that room.

It doesn’t stop with Sunday school though. I’ll catch myself trying to explain why we missed church to random people who happen to sit in our same section week after week. I don’t know their last names, but I still feel compelled to let them know we had perfectly legitimate reasons not to be at church for a few weeks.

Maybe it’s a pastor’s kid thing. Church is what we did every Sunday morning. Not attending was out of the question. That would have been like giving both God and my dad the middle finger, so we went. Maybe it’s a fear thing too. I think people who are regular church attendees have a closer relationship with God, and in case I ever come up in their conversations with him, I want to make sure they have the most accurate attendance information and can pass on my excuses directly to him. Or maybe I think God is up there with a checklist like Santa Claus, and when he sees me miss church, that’s a huge black mark.

It’s probably a potpourri of all three things, which stinks a little, but I’ll work it out next week, at church. Which is where I’ll be. If God asks you, please let him know I’m going pretty regularly. Except when we’re at the beach.

I love my in-laws. They’re great people. I’ll be honest with you though: They’re dead weight when it comes to the after-church car sprint. I didn’t realize this until one Sunday morning when they slowed us down on the dash to get our kids from Sunday school and make it home as fast as possible.

I was happy to sit with them during church. But when we were dismissed at the end of service, I needed them to be like remoras, riding along with me as I progressed shark-like through the masses. Instead, they were like tugboats or anchors or whatever nautical device means “slow.”

For their sake, and anyone else who needs a refresher on getting to your car quickly after church, here are a few simple tips:

I can’t say this enough, people. You’ve just spent up to an hour sitting. Your muscles are going to be tight and not ready for speed. So when the minister asks you to bow your head, please do, but keep right on going over and touch your toes. Stretch your calves. Loosen up your joints. If you do it the right way, not only will you get in a good stretch, but people will probably think you’re really spiritual.

The last thing you want is to be sitting next to a “gatherer.” Gatherers are always surprised church is over despite the fact that it ends the same time every Sunday, all year long. They slowly pick up every item they brought with them…one…by…one. “Let’s see…Here’s my Bible. And there’s my bulletin. Now let me grab my pen. And my cough drops. And my little journal for sermon notes. Here are my keys. Oh, look! They fell off the key ring onto the floor. Here’s my house key. Here’s my car key…” You need to sit on the end of the aisle so that you can burst out of the seat like an Olympic sprinter coming off the blocks.

I wish that word was not in my vernacular, but there it is. I have little kids, so that word’s here to stay for at least a few years. What’s
not
here to stay is me and my kids in the church
bathroom. Every minute you stay there equates to minutes you could be doing something else. So either train them to use the bathroom during Sunday school—that’s on their time—or convince them to use the bathroom at home or at Walmart. That way, they won’t get mesmerized by the uniqueness of the away game at church and take ten extra minutes. And you’ll get to your car a lot faster.

Did we take a vote? Nobody ever tells me anything. I swear, you take a few years off and when you come back to church, the phrase “Sunday school” is getting pummeled like a piñata full of Harry Potter books. We have to call it “Group Time Discussion” or “Happenings” or “Lifetime” or a million other words that essentially mean “the time you meet together on Sunday and talk about the Bible and life in a classroom-type environment.” Or in other words: Sunday school.

But I’m cool with that. I promise I am. I’ve often heard that when the phrase “estate tax” was changed to “death tax,” voters started caring about the issue, because previously they thought the estate tax only applied to rich people. And maybe it’s like that—if you tell a first-time visitor where Sunday school is, they’ll immediately slap you in the mouth and get back in their car. But if you say “small group,” they’re okay and will probably become lifetime members that Sunday.

Just promise me that we won’t correct people that still roll retro and call it Sunday school. That happened to a friend of mine who said her three-year-old really enjoyed Sunday school. “Oh,” a woman in the church hallway said, “You mean small group?” Sure. Small group. The three-year-old is going to pick up on a subtle difference in the vernacular. Her parents mailed her pacifier to Cinderella when she needed to kick the habit, but the name nuance is going to matter to her. Sure.

Years from now when my kids are older, they’ll probably think of Jesus whenever they even smell a Goldfish cracker. I’m sure this is a kid thing, not just a Christian thing, but on about fifty-one Sundays of the year, that’s what they have for snack. And at our church, if your kid cries a ton, before they flash their number on the video screen in the sanctuary asking you to come get them, they put them in a wagon, pull them around, and stuff them full of Goldfish. It’s like this little red wagoned parade of wailing in the halls. Eyes streaming tears, mouth full of fish, tiny hands clutching the side of the “Bye Bye Buggy,” counting the minutes until a parent can come rescue them. Good times.