Stuff Christians Like (17 page)

I’m not really sure what those three words mean anymore, but my friends who are cooler than me and have nicer hair use them all the time. Seriously, they’ll call breakfast sausages “postmodern” if the mood strikes them right. So I thought if I combined all three words into one catchall section of miscellaneous essays, the combined power would be unstoppable, like if the Ninjas Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow from GI Joe formed a band with Terence Trent D’Arby. That last sentence was straight up Missional Postmodern Relevance at its finest.

Now clearly, the idea of buying a souvenir while in a foreign country is not something unique to Christians. Everyone who travels does that. What’s unique is the belief that these items will serve as a symbol of our trip, a celebration of the culture we experienced, and a constant reminder of how God moved and the Holy Spirit was present and lives were changed in powerful, everlasting ways. Which honestly, is an awful lot to ask of a pair of rubber sandals.

What usually happens is that about a week after you get home, you put those things in a box under your bed. But I thought it would be interesting to take a quick walk down mission trip memory lane, get that box out, and see what we’ve all put into it.

Nothing says “I went on a mission trip” like a piece of tribal art hanging on the living room wall. It doesn’t matter that 98 percent of the house is decorated in rustic Americana antiques. There, in all its glory, is a dark wooden mask or giraffe statue proudly saying, “Yeah, that’s right—it’s a giraffe. The rest of the house looks like Martha Stewart, but I don’t even care. I had to wrap this thing in dirty clothes and cradle it gently in my suitcase to even get it home without breaking it. You’d better believe this is hanging on my wall.” Eventually the husband or wife who didn’t go on the mission trip will move this art to a less popular room in your house, then to the guest bathroom, and eventually to your garage. This is the migratory path most mission trip art travels.

I love these. Occasionally, you’ll go to a friend’s house for dinner, and one of the items they serve will be in an oddly shaped
bowl you’ve never seen before. “Oh, this?” they’ll say casually. “We spent some time abroad on a mission trip.” And although it’s a lovely bowl or basket holding bread, you know all the other dishes in the cabinets hate it. “Look at that bowl. Handmade, brought from thousands of miles away. ‘I’m so fancy. Look at me and my earthen details. I have to be hand-washed. Don’t drop me. I’m delicate.’ Punk bowl.” (Your cookware doesn’t talk? You don’t do this in your head? You should.)

When my youth group went to an island in the Lesser Antilles—such a delightful phrase to say!—we all got some rainbow-colored, hard plastic sandals. I’m not sure that I’ve ever owned any other clothing item that was rainbow and hard plastic, but for those two weeks, I refused to wear anything else on my feet. We loved those sandals and were convinced we would be wearing them the entire summer. But for some reason, what works well on an island in the Caribbean doesn’t work quite as well in central Massachusetts. They got put into a box pretty quickly, but I swear
if I still had them, I’d bust them out now, if only to frighten the much softer, much more comfortable Crocs I see everywhere.

As a sophomore in high school, I didn’t have a whole lot of access to swords. Until I went on mission trips, that is. Suddenly, it was completely okay for me to buy a two-foot-long machete. What would have been confiscated by my parents if I brought it home from the hardware store down the street was suddenly cultural, even religious, because I bought it on a mission trip. Did I still accidentally cut myself with it and practice throwing it into the ground like some sort of adventurer with acne? Without a doubt.

And if your question is, “Is it true that when your wife goes out of town you carry around the Maasai warrior club your brother got you from Kenya for protection against the cat burglars you feel are lurking in your very safe, very quiet suburban neighborhood?” the answer is yes. But only because I’m a wuss with an active imagination.

We’re supposed to do this, right?

As Christians, the compassionate, Christlike thing to do when someone says something unfunny is to pretend it is funny and fake laugh your head off, right?

Or maybe what we’re supposed to do is be the truth in this situation. To not lie, and to honestly say, “I have to confess, my Christian brother, your joke about chili is not funny, and I’ve heard you say it seventeen times since I joined this small group, and it has progressively gotten less funny with each telling, which I did not anticipate being possible when I heard it the first time.”

It’s quite the pickle. I’m unaware of a scene in the Bible that gives us clear direction on this problem. I can’t recall Jesus ever saying to Andrew, “I forgive you, but I can’t abide by the lack of humor found in your ‘Why’d the rooster crow three times? ‘Cause Peter crossed the road’ joke. That’s not funny.”

But even though Jesus might not have addressed joke quality head on, I do think you can make a case both for and against fake laughing using some of the fruits of the spirit in Galatians 5:

Who are you to judge what’s funny and not funny? Give someone your fake laugh out of love, like the math teachers who used to give me an “A for effort.” Did I suck at math? You bet I did. But I tried. So did your friend. Bad joke or not, fake laugh out of love.

As a Christian, you’ve got to reflect loving truth back to people. What if your husband tells you an unfunny joke at home, you fake laugh, he thinks it’s funny, and then he tells all his friends later and they don’t laugh. He’s embarrassed, you’ve denied him a “joke improvement opportunity,” or JIO as we call it at the Acuff house, and all his friends had to experience something unfunny. Everyone loses in that situation. Don’t fake laugh.

It was a passing comment. It was a quick joke and the conversation has already moved on. Let it go. It walked into the room briefly, fell on a banana peel of unfunny, and was dragged back into the “closet of no laughter” before you even had to stare at it for very long. Keep the peace. Fake laugh.

“Oh, was that a joke?” is the worst thing you can hear some-one say after you’ve unleashed what you thought was hilarious.
(“You’re fired” is actually worse, but the first one happens far more often.) Help your friends so they never hear this question. Be honest with each other. Don’t fake laugh.

They’re going to get funny. They’ll get better. Have patience, have patience, don’t be in such a hurry. (You just got Psaltyed, which is what I’m now saying instead of “You just got served!” Oh, the irony of an unfunny, obscure joke in the middle of an essay about unfunny jokes. I’m going to rip the fabric of time if I’m not careful here.) Trust in the Lord and he’ll renew your friend’s mind and sense of humor. Have patience. Fake laugh.

Life is very, very short. The only day we’re given is the one we’ve got. Every rose has its thorn. (Poison lyrics? Really?) In marriage, they say never go to bed angry. Same logic applies here. Don’t let the sun go down on something unfunny. Be patient in how you break the news to them, but don’t let another moment go by that could be funnier if you were only a little more honest.

If you can’t actually bring yourself to guffaw out loud, at least have the self-control to say what fake laughers the world over say when they don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings: “That’s funny.” If anyone ever says that to you, they didn’t think what you just said was funny, because if they did, they would have just laughed instead. Since most people don’t realize that, show self-control and gentleness and all the other fruits of the spirit and say, “That’s funny.” Fake laugh.

Sarah didn’t fake laugh when she heard the Lord tell Abraham they were going to have a kid even though they were both in their
nineties. She laughed out loud in Genesis 18:12 and got busted by God in perhaps what is my favorite random scene in the Bible:

Sarah: I did not laugh.

God: Yes, you did laugh.

Is that what you want to happen when you get to heaven? God reviews a highlight film of your life that shows you fake laughing over and over again while you just shake your head and say, “I didn’t fake laugh.” And he says, “Oh you fake laughed, you did fake laugh.” Don’t ever fake laugh.

Chances are, when you read the title of this essay, you knew exactly what I was talking about. That odd bouquet of faded red or blue hymnals, old yellowed paper, and slight undertones of hand sweat. That’s because smell is the strongest sense associated with memory.

I miss that hymnal smell. It’s what church smells like to me. Worship music splashed on video screens doesn’t have a scent. Even a good song like “How Great Is Our God” won’t create a memory that transports me back to that time when I was a kid and the hymnal was heavy and my heart was light.

If I get rich and famous, please know that I will create a cologne and a perfume that smell like old hymnals. (The perfume will be called “For Hymnal.”) Girls can wear it if they want to marry a pastor. Guys can wear it if they want to meet a nice Christian girl with a good, old-school church upbringing.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to find a small church and roll around in a bunch of hymnals when no one is looking, like Scrooge McDuck in his money vault. I’ll probably take one too and hang it from the rearview mirror of my car.

I took a break dancing class when I was in the third grade in Ipswich, Massachusetts. I know what you’re thinking: “Of course you did. You were growing up on the mean streets of a New England beach community. Breakin’ was the only voice you had to express the soul-crushing hardships of being middle class.”

In high school I took tap dancing and ballroom dancing. I know what you’re thinking: “Of course you did. Nothing says ‘I’m super popular’ like strapping on a pair of tap shoes and speaking to the world with the pitter patter of your feet.”

In college I took swing dancing. I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, we all went through a Brian Setzer stage. We all got caught up in the swing craze for about fifteen minutes in 1998. That was a crazy time.”

Now, as I stare down a topic that a wheelbarrow full of people have emailed me about, I just can’t do it. I can’t lay into interpretive dance. I like dancing too much. It’s ingrained in who I am, and given the chance, I’d probably be on stage jumping around to a contemporary worship song with a ribbon. I can’t make fun of it. That said, I can laugh about mime. In fact, I’m pretty sure even God laughs at that a little.

There’s something about painting your face, wearing all black except for white gloves, and pretending you can’t speak that’s simply hysterical. It’s like some sort of fine potpourri of comedy. Even when it’s outside of church, it’s pretty funny. But Christianity + Mime = Awesome.

A friend of mine went to a women’s Bible study once. One of the members said that she had something God had laid on
her heart that she had to do. After disappearing for a few minutes, she emerged from the bathroom in full mime regalia. She then proceeded to perform a mime version of the crucifixion of Christ. (There’s nothing funny about the crucifixion of Christ, so if you just laughed a little, you should feel pretty ashamed of yourself.) She carried an imaginary cross, was nailed up, and because by mime law you have to do this, performed the invisible box move where you pretend you’re trapped inside a box no one else can see. Of course the box was the tomb and the mime was Jesus, but that’s beside the point.