THE FINAL F: FAIL PROOF?

I was FALLIBLE, imperfect, mortal and frail. I was liable to make mistakes at any given moment, at any time. This drove me nuts. I did not like to admit that I was subject to the frailties of humanity. I was Super-Donna, able to overcome anything through the sheer force of my will. I had intestinal fortitude. I knew how to grit my teeth and bear anything. My motto was, “Never let ‘em see you sweat!” I often turned down help with a work or a project because to accept help meant I was not capable of doing it on my own.

Do you know, dear reader, how much energy one needs to keep up the front that all is well and everything is under control? I have lost count of how many nights I spent “rehearsing my misery,” going over in my head the mistakes and mis-steps of a day. I had more moments than I can count of borderline depression, days when I would declare to myself (and sometimes others), “I’m standing up, but my spirit is sitting down!” There were times when I didn’t want to pretend any more, moments when I just wanted to cry out in my distress and hope that someone would come to my rescue. But the church girl in me did not want anyone to know that she was insecure. “What will they think of me?” was always my main concern. The knowledge that I was fallible always led to self-loathing because I would never be perfect.

I remember the Sunday I stepped into church and mentally noted that most of the women wore white. Talk about things that make you go “Hmmmmmmm.” I had chosen that particular Sunday to wear a forest green outfit so I stuck out like a green sore thumb in a garden of white flowers. The mission president finally told me that telephone calls had been made to the women asking them to wear white that Sunday. How had the person making the calls forgotten to call the pastor’s wife? In spite of the fact that this situation had nothing to do with anything I had or had not done, the perfectionist in me was horrified that I was not “correct” that day. I spent the rest of the service waiting for the benediction so I could bolt away from the reminder that I was not as much in control as I thought I was.

Here is the issue that often adds fuel to the church girl’s fire: The expectations that some congregations lay at the feet of its First Lady are often unrealistic. There is no manual for the “role” of the pastor’s wife, yet there are churches that act as though there is a Standard Order of Procedures for the Pastor’s Wife and the wife is supposed to be well acquainted with the text. Surely the wife can sing, work with the children, play the piano and keep her composure while people critique her clothing, assess the behavior of her children and bad mouth her husband to her face as she smiles and pretends that all is well and nothing is amiss. The church girl, the overachieving people pleaser, steps into that place of unrealistic expectations and immediately goes into church girl mode to work and work and work and work, hoping her hard work will satisfy the unspoken demands of the congregation as well as still the turmoil in her soul. Unfortunately, the foolish church girl builds on the wrong foundation, a foundation that is fake and flawed, one that is subject to failure. It is a foundation that someday will collapse under the weight of her pretense.

F #2 and #3: Fake and Flawed

F #2: I Was Fake
Proverbs 3:5, 6 pops up again. I trusted me for my walk as a First Lady. I clothed my Donna persona with an image of confidence and self-assurance. But, away from the ministry limelight, in the deep shadows of my life, I was quivering bundle of doubt, anxiety and fear. What if someone discovered that I was not all I seemed to be, that I was just as human and subject to the failures of humanity as they were? What if it were found out that I was just projecting an image of piety, that my relationship with God was more form than substance? A national bible study teacher, Beth Moore, says that anxiety is a result of our wanting to be in control; I definitely wanted to control how others perceived me, so I faked it!

I remember a mini-conference in my hometown, a series of which the State Convention President was holding to get better acquainted with the local associations. I had been asked to assist at the offering table and I made sure that everything about my appearance was, well, perfect. I made a short but eloquent talk to encourage giving (again, from my perspective). Smug and satisfied with Lady Donna, I sat down next to the President. I had known this man and his wife for years and I greatly admired both of them for their work in the ministry. I had only sat there for a few minutes when he turned to me and asked, “Well, Donna, what are your doing? A little studying, a little praying?” I was doing neither at that time. I was faking my way through ministry, confident in my church work thesis, that the works I did would speak for me. I do not remember how I responded to this pastor’s query, but I do remember what I felt. I felt the façade of my pretense crumble as that pastor seemed to look into my soul to see the emptiness, the void I was trying to fill with myself. As my late pastor/husband so succinctly labeled it in one of his sermons, I was “dressed up on the outside and messed up on the inside.” I was Fake.

F #3: I Was Flawed
There is an old gospel song that contains this line: “I may never reach perfection, but Lord I’ve tried.” The church girl in me took that song to heart, that church work was paramount and boy, did I try. And since I could not stand being imperfect, I became a perfectionist.

Pefectionism
Refusal to accept any standard short of perfection
Philosophy: A doctrine holding that religious . . . perfection is attainable, especially the theory that human moral or spiritual perfection should be or has been attained.

Are you kidding me? Was I really so foolish as to believe I could reach perfection? YES I WAS! And because I was flawed and I was so determined not give any appearance of flaw or imperfection that Donna the perfectionist became the self-appointed critic of the flaws I observed in others, a way of proclaiming myself as "not as bad as" or "better than." This is a flaw of the perfectionist's psyche, the determination to hold every other person’s feet to the fire of that perfectionist’s exacting standards. For example, I would tune out a speaker or preacher who used incorrect grammar in a talk or a sermon, irregardless of the biblical content and context. I would critique the teaching method and style of a bible class instructor or facilitator, silently comparing their pitiful effort to how much better I could “perform” in their place without a thought as to the biblical principals and concepts I could learn.

Yet, in spite of my determined effort to overcome my flaws, my melancholy temperament lent itself to scab picking. I am not trying to gross you out, dear reader, but I was a scab picker, I spent a lot of time taking out my imperfections to mourn over them. I would hold them up to the light of how other women looked and what other first ladies did and I always, always, came out dead last. I was a perfectionist who was also a pessimist, so I was never good enough even as I stalked perfection. My glass was always half empty; my life was always a mess, and I knew how to sing the blues loud and long. My perfectionism drove the church girl in me, but my pessimism always put the brakes on any progress I thought I made by raising the question, “What’s the point and why bother?” In my foolishness and my fake-ness, I cloaked my flaws with a perfectionism that I undermined with pessimism. All of which ran a poor second to the good work God could do in me if I just got my Fake and Flawed self out of the way.

The First F: I Was Foolish!

As a church girl I did not know Proverbs 3:5-6:

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not to thine own understanding
In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He will direct thy path.

Even if I had been acquainted with this scripture, I probably would have just used it as a tool in my church work, a weapon to wield against those people who were not living up to my expectations. To use the lines from the poem “Invictus,” I was “the captain of my fate, the master of my soul.” I was in charge of me and I would be the only one who would chart my course for church work even as I did it under the guise of humility and submission.

I was a true legalist; I judged not only the church worthiness of people by what they did or did not do, but also my standards determined if they were worthy of my church girl attention. Heaven help the preacher who used bad grammar in a sermon; I immediately tuned him out, deeming him illiterate and sub-standard. If I knew of a particular “sinful” predilection of an individual, then that individual became persona non grata, always under the purview of my jaundiced eye. If anyone offended me, he or she made my hit list which meant I did my best to avoid any contact with the miscreant. I became very skillful in ignoring people without their ever having a clue that they were being ignored.

Since I was in control of my world, I was also correct in my assertions and my assessments. In my foolishness, I established the rules by which I measured everything and everyone. When some mere mortal did not meet the standard of my expectations, I became judge and jury. There was not a smidgen of grace or compassion in my scrutiny. I was hard-core. I saw all the negatives in life and it was my responsibility to not only point them out to my pastor/husband and anyone else who would listen to me (one reason why my pastor/husband, for a period of time, banned me from riding to church with him on Sunday mornings since I always seized those moments to voice my negatives), but it was also my duty to provide the cure.

I was foolish, because I was in control of nothing even though I did my best to control anything and everything around me. In spite of my "good intentions," my thoughts, my words, my reactions and my responses were still subject to the whim of my personality and the tenor of my circumstances. While I did a pretty good job of controlling me, myself and I most of the time (meaning I never snapped or lost control of myself in public), I still had my moments and most of the time I had those out of control "moments" with family. I was Foolish!

I. The Church Girl In Me

I hear you, dear reader. “Duhhhhhh. “A pastor who has a church girl for a wife? Where is the problem? Isn’t that ideal for every pastor, a church girl wife?”

Okay, so let me hasten to define “church girl.” A church girl, from my perspective, is that woman who is very experienced in church work and said experience supplants any spirituality, any genuine relationship with Jesus. A church girl is that female in the church who works hard to perfect her church work skills, one who takes great pride in the work she does. The church girl’s efforts are not about the love of Christ but her works are about labor for praise. Her efforts are not about John 4:24 worship but they are about work for accolades. It is not about the work of the ministry but it is about church busy work. I was that church girl.

I have a memory that I suspect reveals the genesis of the church girl in me. It was Easter Sunday morning and I was about four or five years old. I was sitting on my mother’s lap in all my Easter finery in some large probably Methodist church in Texas. You know how we used to do it back in the day. I had on my little straw hat with the ribbon around the crown, my frilly little dress, the white socks with the lace around the cuffs and my white patent leather Mary Jane’s. The crowing accessory was, of course, my little white gloves. As I sat in my mother’s lap I considered the back of the pew in front of me and then looked at my white gloved hands. Another glance at the pew and back to my hands and it came to me in that moment; I could dust the back of that pew with my gloved hands, which is exactly what I did. Voila! A church girl is born!

My church girl mantra was “I’ll do it!”
You need someone to make the announcements on Sunday morning: I’ll do it!
You need someone to type the church bulletins? I’ll do it!
You need someone to copy the bulletins? I’ll do it!
You need someone to work with the youth? I’ll do it! ,
You need someone to be president of the choir? I’ll do it.
You need someone to do anything, anywhere? I’ll do it!
I’ll do it; I’ll do it; I’ll do it!

Whew! The problem with my being a church girl was that while I was prepared to do the work, I was not prepared for the challenge of the labor. I understood the work, but I did not understand real worship. I was well acquainted with the work, but I had barely a nodding acquaintance with the Word.

Oh, and one more thing about this church girl. This lack of sincere Christianity was not evident in my life because I knew how to front, how to wear the mask and appear to be that which I really was not. Yes, I knew how to front; I just did not know how to follow Jesus.

1 Timothy 2:3 says, “Endure hardship as a good soldier of the Lord Jesus Christ.” I was not prepared to endure, forbear or long suffer in anything. In fact, since I was a church girl whose work was peripheral to any genuine work of the ministry, I was not prepared for any kind of warfare. Though I had been in the church all my life, I did not even know there was such a thing as spiritual warfare, which also means I had no clue about the need for the whole armor of God.

Had there been a draft board for the army of the Lord and the board called me in to test for my fitness potential as a soldier, I would have been classified as 4-F, “registrant not fit for spiritual service.”

4-F. I was 4-F. I was Foolish. I was Fake. I was Flawed. I was Fallible. This, dear reader, is an accident waiting to happen in the church.

Next: I was Foolish.