lifestyle – Mostly From Memory

Church Clothes: An Essay on Discomfort

Do you remember when you were a little kid and your momma would make you wear really uncomfortable clothes to church?

I’m supposed to be packing my church clothes for a Youth Conference that I am attending later this week, but I am procrastinating. This is what I do when I procrastinate: write essays. This essay is about church clothes. Having been going to church for 37 years-and 9 months before that-I have a long and conflicting relationship with church clothes. I was raised-and firmly believe- that you ought to dress your best when going up to the House of The Lord. Whether that is a pair of cowboy boots and your cleanest blue jeans, or a business suit and tie. This is the rub: I really enjoy looking nice in a suit and whatnot, but I also really enjoy being comfortable. And unless you are just the picture of health with a trim figure like a Greek statue, or have you enough money to pay someone to make you a suit of clothes that fit your exact body proportions, there is a strong chance that your suit is just going to be plain uncomfortable.

I’m not convinced that comfort should be the first priority when dressing for church.

Do you remember when you were a little kid and your momma would make you wear really uncomfortable clothes to church? I remember one Easter having to wear a button up shirt and these teal dress pants. I hated them. I looked like I stepped off of page 37 of a JC Penney catalog from 1992. Not only was I required to endure these clothes all through church, but I wasn’t allowed to change until after the egg hunt at Uncle Dave’s. I still think that is how a lot of people feel about dressing for church.

Most of the time, I do not really pay attention to what other people wear. And from a scientific study I did in college on this topic where I wore the same suit and tie for a solid week to see if anyone would say anything, I don’t think most people pay attention either. But it is hard to not notice when someone feels uncomfortable in their clothes. Especially a suit. I used to look out my window at work down at the courthouse steps and watch young men walk unsure of themselves in an ill-fitting suit to a matter of grave concern. You see uncomfortable people at funerals and weddings, their awkward conversations informed by clothes that they don’t really understand how to behave in.

There is a way to wear a suit like a lawyer or like you have a court date.

Here is a people watching experiment for you to try on a Sunday afternoon: go out to eat at the most crowded restaurant you can find right after church. Better yet, go to a buffet. Try to guess which people went to church and which people just decided to go get some Chinese food. It should be easy to tell by what they are wearing. I made a Bingo card for you to fill out.

Suit & T-Shirt	Tucked in Polo	Elderly couple with matching died hair	Gold-buttoned blazer	Hebrew letters on an article of clothing
Penny Loafers	Suit & Tie	Paisley	Sun dress	Church Logo T-Shirt
Cowboy boots	Braided belt	Child in a sailor suit	Seersucker	“Praise the Lord!” Greeting
Bow Tie	Wingtip shoes	“Production Team” T-Shirt	Suspenders	Pleated Khakis
High Heels	Western Shirt	Combover	Church Logo Hat	Square toed dress shoes

Uncomfortable: that is how dressing for church felt until I started paying attention to girls around about Middle School. It was then that I quit depending on Mom to tie my tie and started wanting to pick out my own suits and dress shoes. I think everyone goes through an identity crisis sometime during Middle School. Being interested in dressing yourself, while not knowing how to dress. The real conflict can be articulated thus: I don’t know what I want to wear, but I know it isn’t what Mom has been choosing. It takes a while to realize that your Mom had pretty good taste. Aside from maybe the teal Easter pants.

I got these hickory stripe tuxedo pants from Zach. I don’t know if I ever got cooler than that.

I’m less worried about my clothes and more interested in that guitar that I might’ve should’ve kept. Alas, it didn’t sound near as good as it looked. I suppose there is a lesson to be drawn from that.

Fashion is so fickle. When I was a teenager I probably spent far too much money on dress clothes. Trying to be fashionable, or cool. Some of those clothes are cool again, but probably won’t be for long. I will see teenagers this week at PEAK wearing stuff similar to what I wore 25 years ago.

My sartorial ideals have always been too lofty for my meager salary.

It took me a long-a very long-time to figure out exactly what kind of church clothes (or any clothes for that matter) that I wanted to wear. But Today, I feel that I am closest to my real essence when I am wearing a suit and tie. Ultimately, I think I accidentally took less cues from my peers and current fashion trends and more from history while establishing my wardrobe standards. And it happened by seeing old photographs not necessarily related to fashion from say 1962 or 1937 of a men in suits and realizing I would wear that today. When you take this classic approach, you are making a statement: I’m going to wear this and be confident and comfortable no matter what is trendy. This means that you may or may not be in style as the years pass. But what you will be, is established. And possible timeless. And we need more established people.

Well, I have to go pack.

Broken

It may not work, but I am going to do my best to fix it.

“This guitar is broken!” I said in exasperation to the young man I was helping move across town.

“You can have it.” He said, looking nonchalantly at the tired old instrument with a large crack in the heel of the neck. I laid it in the back of my truck like a wounded soldier amongst the mirrors and pictures wrapped in moving blankets. This guitar had been neglected if not abused. I winced as I thought back to things that I had not cared for properly as a child.

I took the guitar home and surgically removed the dirty strings and cleaned it thoroughly. Under the light of my work bench I could see that the crack wasn’t all the way through, but still substantial enough to make the guitar unplayable. I felt like the doctor when they say things like, It may not work, but I am going to do my best to fix it.

I inserted wood glue into the crack with a needle and syringe and clamped the body and neck down to the work bench to hold tension on the crack. This will only hurt for a little bit. Then I turned out the lights and didn’t look at it for three days. When I finally came back to it I could still see a black line where I probably didn’t clean the crack sufficiently, but the joint felt solid. Now I just needed some strings. Before I took the time to take a trip to the Guitar Dungeon, I happened to be at a friend’s house as he was changing his guitar strings. I noticed that he had an interesting string removal ritual. I usually clip my old strings-which have been played to death, black with grime and riddled with divots and dents- with a pair of wire cutters, and then to avoid a finger injury from the sharp string end under tension, I unwrap the bit still attached to the tuning post with a pair of pliers. He was taking his time and unwinding the string gently from the tuning post, so the entire string was still intact. Then he carefully placed each string in a neat little line, as if he too could still feel the life pulsing in those sparkly bits of metal, just waiting to be touched so they could burst forth singing. It works out nicely because the strings could be reused if you break one of the new ones. He did poke his finger with a sharp string end and there was a bit of bleeding. As he took the last string off he tied the whole bundle in a single knot. That’s when I asked him if I could have them. And he obliged. I have a hard time throwing some things away. Or seeing things thrown away. And those strings had been watching me like a puppy at the pound.

The next day I put the used strings on the old broken guitar and gave each another chance at life. I decided to leave the guitar tuned down a whole step, because I wasn’t sure if it could handle the tension of standard tuning. I held my breath as I got the last string tuned, then I cautiously inspected the crack. It was still solid. I played an F chord-not the first choice of most guitar players. And not the easiest chord to play in standard tuning. But we weren’t in standard tuning, and the F chord seemed so natural now and it rang out beautifully, deep and rich.

I have wondered what to do with this instrument brought back from the gates of death. I can’t in good conscience sell it. Because it was a gift, and also because I feel like I need to stay close to it in case in needs further repair. And maybe no one would want to pay for a broken instrument. This instrument has already served its time in the heavy hands of a careless owner. It now needs the gentle touch of a seasoned musician. Someone who has lived enough to know what pain feels like. I feel like I want to keep this resurrected instrument where I can see it every day and be reminded of the many second chances that I have been given. I want to be able to pick it up and make sweet music with something that came so near being cast off.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. Isaiah 42:3

Dieting

“I’m going on a diet, starting tomorrow. By summer I’m going to have to introduce myself. I’ll be so skinny y’all won’t recognize me.”
Mom. Circa 1998.

My Mom was a serial dieter. My Dad was not. The first time she tried to make them go on a diet Dad would just swing by Nonna’s house and eat with them on the way home from work. When he got ready to go on home he’d say something like, “I guess I better go home. It’s time for my salad.” He gained weight on that diet.

Sometimes Mom would go grocery shopping after she got fired up about dieting and she’d buy a bunch of SlimFast shakes, and those chocolate devil’s food cake snacks. And then us kids would promptly eat all of her desserts in the next two days.

Have you ever noticed how many trendy diets there are? When I was just a lad the Low Fat Diet was popular. That one just sounds like it makes since. Then the Atkins Diet seemed to be the rage when I was a teenager. Later on there were a bunch of diets that I never really fully understood because I was not dieting at the time. Like the Paleo Diet, the Keto Diet, the Carnivore Diet, and the Tight Rope Diet. I just made that last one up. These diets are like a bunch of religions. Sooner or later you’ll run into someone that is spreading the good news of this diet-whether or not they have been changed by it. The funny thing is all of these diets have a “prophet” that did lose a bunch of weight and now you can too. The problem is only the people who are sold out enough to actually make the diet a lifestyle see any progress. The bottom line is any diet works not because you are eating all organic Vienna sausages, or gluten free cabbage steaks, but because you are burning more calories than you are consuming. I don’t care how you want to slice it, that is hard. It is also not fun.

I believe the main reason most of us don’t enjoy dieting-even though we know it works-is because it does not work fast. It’s that time of year though. A lot of us are thinking about dieting whether we are talking about it or not. If you are interested I’d like to share some weight loss tips that have worked for me in the past.

The most success I ever had losing weight was getting the stomach flu. It was the first or second Christmas that Sarah and I were married. She got it first and was having a horrible time. I wasn’t feeling great either. I told her that I didn’t think that she could hold it as well as I could. I would like to thank the Lord for allowing me to get back home-we lived 11 hours away at the time- before it really hit me. I think this method worked so well because I had no control over it. No seems like an insufficient word. At any rate, I lost 15 pounds in less that a week on the flu diet.

I also had pretty good success losing weight when I had my first kidney stone. It was so uncomfortable that I hardly had an appetite. On top of that, once I found out that it was a kidney stone I quit drinking all the sugary drinks and starting drinking about five gallons of water a day. When I finally got rid of the stone I had also gotten rid of some extra weight I had been carrying.

The most practical way to lose weight though is to get rid of your car and cycling everywhere like my neighbor does. It seems like he didn’t really have any input making the final decision about not driving so I don’t know if he is enjoying it. But he is skinny.

If you have kept on a diet this far into January I am proud of you. I want to warn you that Chick-Fil-A is probably going to be giving away free breakfast in February and that might shake your plans up a little bit. They do that on purpose. That’s why I’m waiting til after February to start dieting for real. By Summertime y’all ain’t going to recognize me.