Columns

By Roger Barbee

As a youth growing up in a south-central North Carolina textile town during the 1950’s, I attended a Baptist church with my siblings and mother. In that church I sang songs like “Jesus Loves Me This I Know,” was taught Bible stories such as Noah and his ark, memorized Bible verses like the 23^rd Psalm, and was taught about the Ten Commandments. Some of the lessons I took away from those Sunday School classes and sermons have butted heads with my adult reading and learning. For instance, I was taught that Jesus worked as a carpenter in his father’s shop when in fact both were most likely skilled handymen who were competent workers in several areas of building. Another misconception that I have lived with concerns the 3^rd Commandment, the one about taking the Lord’s name in vain. For a variety of reasons, mostly my own ignorance, I have always viewed the breaking of this rule as a verbal one, such as the all-too popular exclamation, “Oh, my God…,” or when President #45 repeated three times the words GD in a North Carolina speech. A recent reading of Pastor Clarence Jordan showed how wrong I have been.

If you are unfamiliar with the writing of Pastor Jordan, I caution you. If you read a collection of his writings, such as The Inconvenient Gospel, your understandings of Christian doctrine likely will be confronted. A Christian scholar of Greek who lived The Sermon on the Mount, Dr. Jordan will challenge any staid Christian learning you may carry with you. So when I began reading the new collection of his speeches, I noticed one chapter titled The Ten Commandments and thought that I may as well skip that chapter because I knew them; not in order mind you, but I knew that they were commands, not suggestions, and I tried to obey each one. To paraphrase: Oh, ye of little understanding.

This chapter, like each one, is actually a speech given by Pastor Jordan. The Ten Commandments is one he gave at Goshen College in May 1965, in which he concentrates on the commands concerning our relationship with God, so only the first four are discussed; but in his explication of number 3, Pastor Jordan rattles my shallow understanding because he shows how actions, not just words, can take the Lord’s name in vain.

Pastor Jordan says, “A person who has never come within the Christian fold can’t take the name of Christ in vain. He’s never taken it. A Buddhist can’t take the name of Christ in vain,  no matter what one says. Only those who come within the church, who take on the name of Christ, can take his name in vain.”

If Pastor Jordan is correct, and I think he is, every Christ follower becomes bound to keep the name Christ clean. Keeping the name of our Lord above reproach means that we are not free to express our anger at that other driver by flipping her off. Taking on the mantle of Christ means that we cannot cast a vote for a person who tells lie after lie. Becoming a Christ follower means that we must actively refute any combining of our religion with our country. If we are serious about the 3^rd Commandment then we will shelter the sojourners. Being a Christ follower demands that I support justice not injustice. Wearing that name requires me to love not hate.

I took on the name of Christ when I was baptized and now realize the enormity of that decision. Words, like all I was taught in that Baptist church, are nice. But actions, as St. Paul writes, are what matter and our acts show how serious we are about being a Christ follower.

By Roger Barbee

Old Wrestlers

Soon following our move to Lake Norman  five years ago, my wife Mary Ann looked for a representative for a particular beauty product she used. Scanning a long list of saleswomen, she randomly chose one and called her. After their long conversation had finished, Mary Ann came to the library to tell me how pleasant Terri the saleswoman was and how much she looked forward to working with her. It was then that her phone rang, and Terri asked, “Did you say your husband’s name was Roger?”

In 1823 the English Romantic poet, Lord Byron, wrote his poem, Don Juan, in which he writes: “‘ Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; /Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,…” Over the years many other writers have expressed the same idea in various words, but no matter what version is written, all readers eventually learn the truth of Byron’s words.

There it was for me: Strange but True;  Life not Fiction.  The husband of Terri and I had wrestled against each other in high school. Mike wrestled for Mooresville High School, and I for A.L. Brown in Kannapolis. We competed in the same weight class for two years over fifty years ago and now we meet again, just not on a wrestling mat.

We four had the obligatory lunch to meet and talk and explore. Mike and I then continued sharing lunches, coffee in my shop, and he guided me around our new home, Lake Norman, which he knew well because his career was with the power company that built the Lake.  We soon discovered that we had much in common.: Both of our hometowns had been textile towns when we were wrestling against each other; our parents had worked in the mills; we lived in mill houses, and both of those houses are still family occupied. So much, besides wrestling, shared.

Each week he would call and ask, “Want a coffee?” then in a few minutes he would appear with a soda for himself and the promised coffee for me. Each weekly visit found Mike helping me with some project in the yard or my shop. He is most responsible for the deck that expanded my small shop– giving me much needed work space. A trained engineer, he made certain it was correct and safe. Exact, even. He would rake the abundant pine needles fallen from the 42 pine trees in our yard to use for mulch in his gardens.  Our weekly visit often included lunch, and when we ate at his favorite fast-food eatery, he would pull a rash of coupons from a pocket before paying and say, “A poor man spends money like he is rich, but a rich man spends it like he is poor.”  Then as we ate, some finer points of theology or politics would be discussed. I will always remember how he once looked at me during one of these “discussions” and asked, “Are you that naïve?”

When I work with a project on the deck that Mike more or less built or move in my wheelchair around the yard gleaning pine cones, I see his presence. The bluebird nesting-box with the red roof still graces the pine tree where he fastened it after I “mentioned” to him how it needed to be there. When I admired a long row of irises in a neighbor’s yard, I asked Mike one day as we returned from a road trip to knock on the unreachable (for my wheelchair) door to inquire if I could have some. The kind, elderly lady must of approved of Mike because she gave me permission to take any irises I wanted, and now next to the back garden gate is a small, varied-colored growth of purple irises that Mike and I planted; and, like our friendship, it grows and thickens and blooms.

Both our lives, like all lives, have had their dips and twists and failures and mountaintops. But for two boys from the mill hills of small, textile towns, we have been blessed and have done well. And as I share life with Mike long after our competitive days, I appreciate more and more the odd, interesting, and fulfilling paths that we all travel, whether planned or not. Mary Ann and I moved to Lake Norman not knowing that the “Stranger than fiction” of Byron would happen, and that a friendship would be forged out of a time long ago when two scrappy, mill-hill boys competed against each other. Byron also writes that “…truth is always strange.”  He’s right, of course, but not always in the way it may appear. It’s not strange that Mike and I respected each other as wrestlers. Nor is it strange that there is something deeper now.