Then there was Frank, very much the black sheep of his family. His brother was one of the major power brokers of our area, his surname often attached to large financial projects. Yet here was Frank, hustling his way through a series of work-a-day jobs.
How he came to be the black sheep I’m not sure. Was he that way before he went off to fight in Vietnam? Wealthy families often buy their way out of such conflicts. Frank was sucked into it. Days after his discharge, he married his sweetheart, apparently long pre-arranged, from another financial titan family. He told me how the extravagant affair blew his mind. He had just seen friends blown to bits in Nam.
Some time after Nam he studied the Bible with Jehovah’s Witnesses, which further cemented his black sheep status. It kept him permanently out of power-broker status too, though he might not have joined his brother there at any rate. Witnesses now are like Christians then, of the first century. There’s not many power brokers among them, not many “powerful,” not many “of noble birth,” not many “wise in a fleshly way” is how 1 Corinthians 1:26 puts it.
In time he was appointed an elder in the congregation. I worked with him a lot. An intelligent and empathetic man, he was a good source of comfort to those beaten down in various ways. Nonetheless, he told me of some huge family gathering in which all his relatives hobnobbed with each other over financial deals, and here is he feeling very much out of place with his factory job. I made some stupid and pious remark about “choosing the better portion,” as though he were Mary attending to Jesus, leaving her sister to do all the work. It didn’t do it for him. “I felt like a fool,” he said.
This story comes up—it happened many years ago—because at our meeting for field service, the conductor led off with Ephesians 6:16, where Paul twice recognized a need for boldness:
“Pray also for me, that the words may be given to me when I open my mouth, so that I may be able to speak boldly in making known the sacred secret of the good news, for which I am acting as an ambassador in chains, and that I may speak about it with boldness, as I ought to speak.”
“Why do we need to cultivate boldness?” the conductor took his cue from this verse.
I answered that when we call on people, we are often not in the commanding position and that many are deeply conscious of it. Indeed, beware the tactless person who is completely oblivious to it. We are often not the most powerful, not the most wealthy, not the most educated, and that it puts one at a disadvantage. Paul was in the hoosegow when he wrote what he did. How’s THAT for being in an advantageous position—set on a course of recommending the person who had been executed as though a common criminal?
Partly, I said what I did for the benefit of that conductor, a considerably younger man—who ISN’T younger than me these days? He caught my eye—I knew he’d picked up on it, though no one else did. Days before we had worked in a well-to-do area. We had chatted with a retired college professor. Afterward, I observed to my companion an area where he could have chimed in had he wanted to. Yes, he knew that, he said, and he has done it in the past only to see it backfire. The householder plays both the age card, the education card, and the wealth card to advise him that he should apply himself more to “better” himself—leaving him in the similarly awkward position of painting himself a Mary who leaves Martha to do all the work. It’s not necessarily easy to explain the chosen simple way of life to the high-rollers.
I have worked through all this stuff. Long ago, my new bride introduced me to some well-off relatives. What does Tom do for a living? they wanted to know. He does janitorial work, she answered. A disappointed, “oh.” “He owns his own business,” she added. Same sound, but with opposite inflection! It’s all facade! It’s all temporary. It doesn’t mean a thing. All this was after my college education days, which I did little with—my fault, not theirs. I guess I’m sort of an offscouring too, just like Frank. But, then, the apostle Paul outright says that Christians are “the offscouring of all things,” (1 Corinthians 4:13) so one can hardly complain about it.
Some big names hail from the university I attended. But they all start dropping when they reach my age—the great and the small alike—so that there is little difference between them, and what counts is only the “treasures that one has stored up in heaven.” Meanwhile, I took advantage of those janitorial days to “read,” via Books on Tape, over half of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Books of all Time. I really only stopped when the library ran out of books beyond the pop ones. It is a habit I heartily recommend and it did not happen for me in college, where people are mostly cramming for tests.
****** The bookstore
Leave a Reply