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During a trip to Paris over spring break, I realized my family was actually on vacation while I was on an excursion.

We began each morning the same way: me jumping out of bed and raring to go early and them–not interested in catching any tourist worms. I grew so frustrated sitting in the lovely little room reading all the magazines while they slept, that I made them a deal.

“Sleep in as long as you want tomorrow. I’ll be at the Louvre when it opens and will meet you at Winged Victory at noon.”

Deal.

And a great one.

I took the metro and arrived just before opening. I had a Paris Museum Pass (get one!) and entered effortlessly. Flocks of people went through the metal detector at the same time and we scurried down the corridor lined with shops and food courts. Once inside the sunlit area under that glass pyramid, we separated.

They all headed west to see Mona Lisa. I turned east and had the museum pretty much to myself.

For nearly an hour.

I cannot stress this enough–everyone’s seen Mona Lisa. You know what she looks like. Today she’s hiding behind glass and a barrier–a small woman hanging on a wall. The hordes crowd around her and you can’t get close enough to see Leonardo’s brush strokes or anything else of worth. All you can do is peek around the shoulders and heads of other people come to worship.

Stop by to pay your respects but buy the print for close scrutiny–the Louvre’s got too many other great things to see and most people have limited time.

Meanwhile, back on the east side of the museum, I rode an escalator and found myself in the Assyrian section. I had just taught a Bible study on Sargon and I could see his mammoth bas relief filling a temple!

Here was the Code of Hammarabi; here were paintings I’d studied in art history casually hanging on a wall and no one was around. I felt like I’d been invited to the Getty manor when J. Paul Getty still lived there and I could savor the art like an owner.

The excitement of seeing these paintings surged and washed over me.

Thank you, France!

The occasional guard nodded at me, but no tourists appeared. I oohed and ahhed and reveled in paintings I’d loved–Rembrants, Holbeins, Van Eycks–to my heart’s content.

Glorious joy filled me–I wanted to skip or dance, but I remained restrained.  Like stories I’d read as a child of young people wandering through the greatest museums of the world alone and free, that was my experience in Louvre on a March morning during spring break.

So go early, but veer to the left and see the world before you pay homage to Her Highness.

I met my family at the Winged Victory promptly at noon–they’d just gotten out of bed. They wanted to see Mona Lisa so we headed west with the rest of the hordes. I plugged in my Ipod and listened to my favorite, Rick Steves. He’s got a free podcast on seeing the Louvre everyone should hear. (Rick Steves’ Paris also includes a hilarious photo of Rick trying to conquer the Louvre in one day: he’s lying collapsed on the floor in the long gallery!)

We spent the day there before traipsing out to Angelina’s across the street for the world’s richest hot chocolate. Everyone was happy: they’d slept in, I’d filled my soul with great art and we ended with chocolate.

Mai oui!

Any tricks you have for visiting art museums, or the Louvre? Are you an early riser or a late one and how does it affect your tourism?

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What does it mean to control another person?

I’m exploring this issue now because a novel I’m writing involves slave owners during the War of the Northern Aggression, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about for years, ever since learning I come from a long line (200 years worth) of slave owners.

As mentioned in my last post, I don’t get it–on several different levels.

I suspect one reason has to do with my American social-economic state rather than anything else. I don’t know what it means to have servants.

Perhaps one of the reasons we’ve all fawned so over Downton Abbey, and before that Upstairs, Downstairs, is because servanthood is such an alien concept to many of us in the United States.

But that’s not true in other parts of the world.

Our foreign exchange student from Brazil couldn’t get over our appliances: the dishwasher in particular was a marvel to her. She also, however, couldn’t understand all the house work we personally did. Why didn’t we have any servants? Her family had had at last one live-in servant her entire life. In fact, our student grew up sharing a bedroom with the maid.

I distinctly remember reading Barbara Pym novels and asking my husband why I didn’t have a char woman like all middle-class British women.

He, of course, didn’t know what I was talking about.

Years ago I played bridge with a group of Navy wives in Monterey, California. We always introduced ourselves in terms of our husbands: their rank, their branch of the service, their particular specialty and where they had dragged us to live. One beautifully groomed woman was married to an airdale–a Navy flyer–and they recently had returned from the Philippines.

I was intrigued. What was life like in that country?

The four-member family lived in a plantation-type house with wide verandas and an elegant yard. They had seven servants.

“Seven servants?” I sputtered. “What did they do?”

She had a yard boy, a nanny, a cook, a house cleaner, a laundress, someone who only ironed, a shopper and a driver.

I couldn’t imagine. I held all those positions and more–every day of my life!

“What did you do?”

She was a genuinely kind, lovely woman. “We had terrific Bible studies, played lots of bridge, read and worked on our tennis. We had elegant parties and traveled.”

That was her life as the wife of a Navy flyer. This submarine wife dug her own garden beds, tended her own children, hauled them to the commissary, taught a Bible study, hung clothes on the line, never ironed and drove her own car. I hadn’t played tennis or bridge in years before moving to Monterey. I had, however, read quite a bit.

I wouldn’t know what to do with a servant, much less feel comfortable “playing” while they worked.

My great-great-grandmother was helpless when her slaves were freed. She had never had to physically care for her family before. She didn’t know how to cook and took to her bed. My great-great-great-grandmother, somehow, had acquired enough skills to tend to the newborn and the family muddled through until they could hire someone to help.

The Bible speaks of our being servants one to another, about submitting our lives to one another. As an American, I don’t see myself as having more value than another person–so it’s hard to let the young woman who cleans my house just clean my house. I have to pick up first, even if it does hurt my aching hands (the reason I hired her to begin with!)

What does it mean to control someone, without losing your soul? What is the difference between hiring a servant and owning a slave?

I’m still trying to puzzle it out.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to remain grateful for my dishwasher, washer and clothes dryer–mechanized servants I have no problem ordering around.

But forget the iron.

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Growing up in Southern California, the only thing I knew about my “roots” was an alleged connection to Abraham Lincoln.

In my teens, I had eyebrows like Abraham Lincoln, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine myself distant kin of the Great Emancipator.

In 1995, I began to investigate my family’s history. We had just enough information written down to get me to Old Abe’s generation and I began my hunt for the “correct” Nancy Hanks–because while the 14th President had no direct descendants, he had tons of cousins.

August researchers Gladys Hanks Johnson (from Texas: “we were told not to mention kinship to Lincoln outside of the house”) and Adin Baber finally concluded there was no real way to make that connection because some 24 possible Nancy Hankses lived at the appropriate time and place.

So, we’ve just claimed him. I’m Abraham Lincoln’s second cousin seven times removed–maybe.

Meanwhile, though, I turned my attention to the person I could claim–James Hanks, whom I believe was the president of the United States’ second cousin. Hanks was a Colonel in the Confederate Army.

What?

I’d grown up with that Lincoln connection. Where did the CSA come from?

And worse–I’d always seen myself as the Clara Barton type: tall, handsome (not beautiful), hard working, Union supporter.

The truth was straight out of Gone With the Wind: my great-great-grandmother Louisa had red hair, slaves, three husbands and grew up on a cotton plantation in South Carolina.

But it was the slave ownership that transfixed me. How? Why?

Prowling through microfilm in a darkened family history library, I found evidence that turned my stomach. At the start of the Civil War (or the War of the Northern Aggression, if you prefer), James Hanks owned 28 slaves on his farm in east Texas.

I called up my father to demand, “Why didn’t you ever tell me we owned slaves?”

“What are you talking about?”

“28 slaves, Dad, at the start of the Civil War. How can the family have forgotten they owned slaves in two generations?”

He didn’t have an answer.

Genealogy is a puzzle, you explore backwards. The further I worked on my family lines the worse the slave ownership got. My family, the people I’d seen as one-at-the-hip on this issue with Abraham Lincoln, owned slaves as early as the mid-17th century. 200 years of owning  living souls.

You can’t judge the past by the mores of the present, I know that and so do you. But it made my skin crawl.

And I still haven’t gotten over it all these years later.

I can’t quite wrap my brain around God-fearing people who peppered their stories and wills with references to the same God I worship, selling other people.

Yes, they may have loved them, they worshipped with them in churches through Virginia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. They traveled vast distances through deadly woods, to set up new lives. They nursed each other through sickness, taught each other to read. But one set held the upper hand and their blood runs through my veins.

Friends from the south remind me that well-loved slaves were practically members of the family and life with well-meaning people actually would be better than the sweatshop mills immigrants endured in New England. I can see their point–sort of.

What does it mean to own another person–to control their freedoms, their movements, all the points of their lives? And who wants that sort of responsibility?

Slaves owners had to provide food, lodging, clothing. They were dependent on their owners.

But their owners also were dependent upon them. Louisa Hanks’ slaves were free by the time my great-grandmother was born in 1865 Texas. Louisa had never had to care for a baby before. She’d never cooked, never cleaned, never taken care of farm animals or done laundry. A beautiful red-headed beauty, she’d borne six children, watched several die, but didn’t have hands-on experience with day-to-day life.

In a sense, she was as crippled as the people she’d recently freed in terms of every day life.

All these years later I still don’t know how to reconcile my family’s history with how I view all men and women as created equal in the eyes and plans of God.

It’s a mystery I cannot explain. But I’m writing a novel about Southern slave owners, and I’m trying hard to understand.

Any suggestions?

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Perhaps we did replay holy week when we entered the  sanctuary at dusk on Good Friday. We waved to friends, found a pew and settled down for a moment of calm. It was surprisingly quiet. The picture of Jesus wearing a bloody crown of thorns on the bulletin cover suggested this was a solemn night, but until we began, I had no idea what  Tenebrae meant.

From the Latin for shadows or darkness, Tenebrae is an ancient service that underscores the solemnity of Jesus’ last day on earth as a man. The pastors wore black robes, no colorful stoles, and the lighting was turned down low. The altar area had been stripped to the bare wood the night before and the tall cross that looms on the wall was shrouded in black. Seven candles were lit on the altar and the hushed service began.

There are different ways of handling the Tenebrae, but it usually involves candles lit in a darkened church. The officiant reads passages of Scripture about Jesus, a hymn is sung, one-by-one the sober accolyte extinguishes the candles until the service ends in total darkness.

In our Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, we use the grand hymns of the faith and they take us directly to the melancholy emotions of Good Friday. We began with the soul-haunting spiritual “Were You There when they crucified my Lord . . . sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”  That’s how it felt.

The readings start with Jesus’ betrayal at the last supper (Matthew 26:20-25), “the shadow of betrayal,” and proceed through the high points of his last dreadful 24-hours, ending at the tomb.

Go to Dark Gethsemane tells us “all who feel the tempter’s power, Your Redeemer’s conflict see. Watch with him one bitter hour, Turn not from his griefs away, Learn from Jesus Christ to pray.”

One candle was snuffed out.

The lack of one candle’s faint glow hardly made a difference, just a softening of the light. We could still follow the words in our bulletin as we moved through several more passages of Scripture.

The Shadow of Desertion (Matthew 26:30-35) where Peter vows to stay with Jesus no matter what will come. We sang a hymn along the lines of “Jesus, I Will Ponder Now on Your holy passion. With your Spirit me endow For such meditation Grant that I in love and faith May the image cherish Of your suffering pain, and death That I may not perish.”

The second candle, too, didn’t shed a lot of light but as the service intensified, the room felt darker, heavier, grimmer.

The Darkness of Praying Alone (Luke  22: 39-46). His disciples asleep, Jesus pleads with his Father to take the cup away–if that is His will. “O Darkest Woe! Tears, overflow! What heavy grief we carry! God the Father’s Only Son In a grave lies buried.”

The next flame was quashed.

The Shadow of Accusation (Mark 14: 43-63 ) Judas leads the Roman guards to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene and he is hauled before the rulers. It was noticeably darker in the church now as we sang a hymn like “O Dearest Jesus, What Law Have You Broken? That such sharp sentence should on you be spoken? Of what great crime have you to make confession, what dark transgression?”

Another candle extinguished.

The Darkness of Cruxifiction (Matthew 27: 27-38) talks about the Son of God hanging on the cross. Stricken, Smitten and Afflicted describes Jesus–”see him dying on the tree. This is Christ, by man rejected; Here my soul, your Savior see. He’s the long expected prophet, David’s son, yet David’s Lord. Proofs I see sufficient of it: He’s the true and faithful Word.”

The gravity of what we heard was underscored by the dying of another candle.

The Shadow of Death ( Luke 23: 44-49) tells of Jesus’ anguished cry of triumphant: “it is finished,” and Bach’s music written 450 years ago underscores the agony:” O Sacred Head, Now Wounded, with grief and shame weighed down, Now scornfully surrounded With thorns, your only crown. O sacred head, what glory And bliss did once combine, Though now despised and gory, I joy to call you mind.”

With this candle’s flame snuffed, the sanctuary was almost black.

And The Darkness of the Tomb (John 19: 38-42) ended the service by marking when Jesus was laid into the tomb. The final candle was blown out. Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs?

The church fell into total darkness and silence save for the rustle of the pastors carrying the still lit Christ Candle from the sanctuary to symbolize the death of Christ–Jesus leaving the earth. The back door closed softly behind them and suddenly, seemingly out of nothing, came a dramatic

thud.

We flinched from the horror of the stone rolled shut before Jesus’ tomb.

One last song, a smidgen of hope: There is a Redeemer.

We exited in silence, trembling from the grim majesty of what we  witnessed. The Son of God, died on a cross, laid in a tomb.

It is finished.

Sin and death reign no more.

And Easter Sunday morn is just around the corner.

Thanks be to God.

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I’d always had this image of my soul as a piece of marble, hewn from the quarry of life.

I came to God as a chunk of rock–dirty, marred and rough. It took a sculptor’s eye–God’s–to see the perfect soul within. He just had a little work to do to make my soul as round and perfect as a white sphere.

Michelangelo used to visit the Carrara quarry in the Tuscany region of Italy, hunting the perfect slab of marble for his work. He’d walk among the stones looking at the veins in the “wild” rock trying to find the piece that would bring forth Moses, or the Pieta, maybe even David. He had an eye for beauty and could at marble three-dimensionally, seeing past the ragged edges to the “life” within.

I think God’s like that, too, when he examines my life.

The life experiences God has taken me through are opportunites for that craggy piece of rock that’s my soul, to be shaped and formed. In my mind, someday I’ll reach heaven with a soul in the perfect shape: a white sphere without angles–smooth, polished, glowing and whole.

But to whittle down my soul to where it can be that perfect sphere, means sometimes chunks have to be jack-hammered away, broken off–occasionally in large pieces like a calving iceberg, other times like Michelangelo’s chiselled tapping.

Each chip knocked from my rocky soul brings me closer to the core of who God created me to be: in his likeness, whole and complete. I like to think the longer I’m a Christian, the smaller and more precise the taps need to be.

Sometimes, however, I err and the hammer and chisel come down hard. It hurts to realize what I thought were steps closer to perfect, actually only displayed a marred vein of self within my stony heart.

It’s challenging to realize I need to be thankful God recognized the slab needed to be removed–because my concept of perfection doesn’t always match his.

I’m confident one day I’ll get so close to holiness, all it will  take is a little polishing with water and sandpaper.

But until then, I’ll focus on delighting that God is the sculptor of my soul and His eyes see a multi-dimensional vision of who He created me to be.

Thanks be to God.

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I don’t know how long I’d been a parent until revelation struck as to the point of children in my personal life.

As a mother, I’d seen my role as training up these children in the way they should go so that when they became adults, they would be perfect like me.

I saw the relationship as pretty one-sided: I taught them, ordered them, directed them and took care of them. It was about me as the authority figure and them as the cherubs waiting to lap up every suggestion with peace, harmony and joy.

Charming and wonderful though my children are, they somehow acquired minds of their own and used them.

(It took me awhile to remember the point of raising children was to produce adults, not giant children, so it actually was good they developed intelligent, rational minds of their own.)

The problem was, they didn’t always agree with me and that often proved frustrating. Some days I actually wondered why God gave me these particular children–with their strengths of character and determination to do things their way.

I mean, why was I arguing with a two-year-old?

Who was the adult here?

And why did these miniature versions of my husband drive me crazy and make me so angry?

While praying about my attitude, I circled back to the fact it was no surprise to God the children who lived in my household. That must mean, therefore, that he had matched me with children from whom I could learn things about my character.

Afterall, they were stuck with me, too.

That means the children in my life were planted there for a purpose: to improve my soul. To enable me to learn how to control my emotions, to become more disciplined so I could care for them.

Their spiritual foibles were opportunities for me to spend more time in prayer. Their demands meant I could learn to put myself second to someone else.

In serving them, even when totally exhausted, I served Jesus as well.

It was a sobering moment, but also a good insight because it enabled me to take a step back from the emotion of parenting and look at the children through the eyes of a sister in Christ.

Ours was a mutual arrangement of learning and submitting–not in the sense I did what my children wanted, but that I thought through our give-and-take with a broader perspective.

And, when they called me on my mistakes, I considered them and apologized if necessary.

They’ve grown up now, and really are my Christian brothers and sister.

And my Christian character is much improved as a result.

Thanks be to God.

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Do I base my characters on real people?

Sort of.

This is Ben. He’s in the Navy and his encounter with SEALs prompted my story Bridging Two Hearts. He is NOT the hero, but the hero is like him in a few strategic ways: fun-loving, loyal, determined and brave. Ben’s adventures in Afghanistan also provided a kernel of an idea for my latest Christmas novella.

I take those kernels–attributes of people I know–mix them in with others and my imagination and come up with a unique character. Sometimes I’m surprised, though, when they talk like their inspiration. 

Nancy’s a homeschooling mom in Hawai’i. I’m using a woman like her in A Bridal Lei for Happiness. Nancy also provided me with information I need to make the story up-to-date. Confirming the kernel of that story is still valid: the bridal couple on the right.

This is an unnamed Elvis impersonator. One of these characters takes a literary agent hostage in The Reconciliation Garden.

Megan is a wonderful teacher who  has lost 90 pounds (she credits Weight Watchers). She’s an inspiration in a lot of ways, but particularly in my story about the 2004 tsunami: A Girl of Great Worth.

It took all three of the next characters, combined, to produce one impudent bespectacled four-year-old, Luke, in Getting to Theo’s Wedding. I used their confidence, logic and willingness to reduce an older sibling to tears . . .

A young James Earl Jones made the cut, too. He plays the part of Navy Lieutenant Theo, in Getting to Theo’s Wedding! His voice has turned up in several other roles in my stories.

I use historical characters, as well. Elijah Hanks’ brother, the Reverand Thomas Hanks, my great-great-great-grandfather appeared as himself in The Dogtrot Christmas. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of Thomas, so his younger brother and sister-in-law will have to do. 

And, finally, of course, there’s only one real hero in all my stories: my husband:

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Perhaps I read too much, but I tend to see my life as a book. You know: chapters, index, footnotes.

We all can figure out the chapters in our life book: natural demarcations when our life changed in a significant way.

I perhaps have more chapters than the average person because we moved 13 times during my husband’s Navy career. So in addition to all the usual chapters like school and marriage, I have all the places I lived (and often can only identify the baby in the photo based on the house in the background), the churches I attended, and the libraries I frequented.

That makes indexing my life both easy and more complicated. If I think of a friend, I usually have to work through a matrix of how, where and when I knew them–to put them into context in my life.

And the footnotes? Those are the “whys” of how I know them: soccer teams, boy scouts, Bible study, fellow dog owner, walker, and so forth.

Because of all those moves (thank you, American taxpayers), I have good friends spread across the country. I lived with them for pockets of time–usually the length of a chapter–and then we moved on. Sometimes it takes me completely aback to realize they’ve been happily living their lives all those years since I last saw them. The children actually grew up and are no longer doing their homework and playing computer games in the family room.

And yet the friends are as familiar to me as if I had walked around the block with them yesterday.

It may be the result of how I’ve lived my life; how I’m emotionally handled all those friendships and separations. Wonderful volumes of life lived and then put on the shelf as a cherished memory.

I used to liken my husband’s deployments to reading a book. When the pages are open on your lap, you’re in the midst of the story–breathing, living, responding to the main character. But when you closed the book and moved on with your day-to-day life, that character with whom you’ve been so involved disappeared and you didn’t actively engage with them: they weren’t in the conscious, focused part of your life and mind.

Back when my husband sailed under the seven seas, we had little contact with him once the submarine sank beneath the waters. 30 words a month for a family gram–a radio message sent out in electronic spurts and picked up by all the subs in the fleet–were all I could send him. He could not respond.

I got used to him disappearing for weeks and months at time with no contact beyond a note or two he’d left behind.

One day, we walked down the long rough Connecticut driveway to the mailbox. There among the magazines and the bills was a letter in an unknown hand with an odd stamp. When I opened it, a poloraid photograph fell out. The note read, “I thought you would like this,” and was signed by a name I didn’t recognize.

When I turned the photo over, I saw my husband wearing his uniform stepping through a hatch, a wide grin on his face.

My heart leaped and I gasped, “He’s alive!”

The toddlers looked up in confusion. “Who’s alive?”

I laughed. “Here’s what daddy looked like just the other day!”

They danced about my feet and giggled, but my heart leaped and I couldn’t stop smiling.

Even though I knew he’d return and I’d see him again, I’d closed the book and forgotten that he lived on somewhere else.

As do my friends.

Some people will tell you the reason they look forward to heaven is the opportunity to see loved ones again. That will be a wonderful day but for me, right now, I liken it to a book with more terrific stories and lives than I could even imagine here on this side.

I already have the joy of seeing my loved ones–friends and family alike–in the book held snug to my heart just waiting to be opened and relived.

And I like to think I’ve still got some favorite chapters ahead of me and splendid characters to love.

How about you?

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I did not grow up in a Bible-reading home. Indeed, the only Bible we owned was a decaying, brown-paged Gideon’s Bible my father swiped from a hotel room.

It anchored the bookshelf on the far right, pushed back and half hidden by the more important family books: a dog-eared, spine-broken atlas and a fat unappealing dictionary. The rest of the shelf held The Golden Home and High School Encyclopedia my mother purchased one volume at a time at the grocery store.

I was in and out of that shelf all the time looking up everything in the encyclopedia but I never touched the moldering pages of the holy book. Raised in a pseudo-Catholic household, I somehow knew I wasn’t supposed to read the Bible, so I didn’t.

The summer I was fifteen, however, I went on a Madeleine L’Engle kick and read everything she wrote that the local library owned. More than once, L’Engle commented about the need for readers and writers to read the Bible so they could better understand the literary culture of western civilization.

That sounded like a plan to me, so I dug out the old Bible and took it with us on a camping trip to Canada. When I had exhausted all the other books I brought with me, I opened it up to the first chapter of the New Testament and ran into all those begats.

I didn’t even last one chapter, slammed the musty volume shut and reread another Madeleine L’Engle.

But later that year, I started playing volleyball with some Lutherans around the corner from my house. One thing led to another, and I began to attend their Wednesday night Bible study. Obviously, I needed a Bible.

The old stolen Bible was unappetizing, but someone in the household had acquired a paperback called Good News for Modern Man. It was just the New Testament, but that was okay because we were studying the book of Romans, which someone told me was in the New Testament.

I opened it up. I loved the line drawings. I saw all those begats, but they looked so much more appealing in large type with simple drawings and white pages.

Okay, like my father I stole it, but I read that Bible, so easy on the eyes and soul,  for the next year.

A cheap paperback (even now it only costs $7.45), the binding broke and pages fell out. I held it together with a green rubber band.

I found that Good News for Modern Man tonight, still on a shelf but with the rubber band long disintegrated. In between the pages, some of which were turned upside down when last stuffed between the shiny cover, was a written reflection from the first retreat I attended.

I committed in writing on that retreat to read the Bible and to pray.

And so I have. For 40 years.

Madeleine L’Engle may or not have approved of that paperback Bible. She urged English  majors in particular, to read the gorgeous words in the 1621 King James version. The 1966 Good News for Modern Man gave me the stories, paraphrases of the original translation, not the beautiful words.

But it was enough to start with it and those words, sharper than a two-edged sword have not returned void.

After all, it’s the Who found in the Word that’s important, not the how I read about Him.

What was your first Bible like?

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Stereotype: A fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.

As a writer, I sometimes work in shorthand, to keep my characters set in my mind while I do other things with them. I can label them as “this” or “that” and more easily predict what they will do. Stereotypes can be very helpful in a culture because then a writer doesn’t have to spell everything out.

When I say Harvard professor, you may think tweed jacket with patched elbows, erudite air and liberal opinions. If I say plumber, you may think muscular man in pristine clothing, neatly dressed and thin.

Or would you?

(I would because that described Rick our plumber).

See, you have to be careful because stereotypes don’t always work.

And they really don’t work in real life.

Once when the world was young, I attended junior high school with a girl whose family had fallen onto hard times. She followed suit, and while she was smart, she hung out with the wilder side of kids in our port town. The mascara got thicker, the gum chewing intensified, the skirts rose high and language . . . she managed to stay in check in class.

I steered clear of her and my mother, a teacher at the school, watched with troubled eyes as this promising girl went down ugly paths.

One day she annouced she had become a Christian.

A young Pharisee myself, I said, “I’ll believe that when I see her in heaven.”

In my mind, she was a Wild Girl.

And she stayed that way for years and years, even as I, too, became a Christian and joined her church. We were in each other’s weddings, welcomed each other’s children and visited over long distances.

But I always, in the unspoken back of my mind, stereotyped her as a wild girl.

Even when she wasn’t.

One day I realized I had carried that image of her as a 13-year-old hurting girl, for over 20 years. Wild Girl was a wise and courageous woman of God. I needed to let that ridiculous stereotype go–especially since she had given me so much life-changing advice! So I did. There’s still a little wild girl in her, of course–the fun part, but Wise Woman is a more accurate description.

Picturing people as stereotypes gets in the way of loving them. My sister-in-law is politically and religiously about as far removed from me as you can get. She’s also brilliant, funny, charming and loyal. But it took me a long time to see that because I was so fixated on the stereotype of who she was.

I kept her at an arm’s distance for several years after she married my brother. But when she announced her pregnancy, I knew I had to set aside our profound differences and focus on what we had in common. After all, she was the mother of my niece or nephew.

When I reached out to her, she met me. I focused on motherhood, books, laughter, irony and truth. We never discussed religion or politics; we made a silent pact.

Was that wrong?

Twenty-three years later, I love my sister-in-law. I still adamently disagree with her and we rarely go near the Molotov cocktail issues. We share books, proud stories of my parent’s grandchildren, family news and irony.

It’s a rich relationship I value, though I wish she’d change her mind on . . .

All because I chose to set aside the stereotype of what I thought she was and looked for the soul, the real person, behind her eyes.

We live in a society that emphasizes stereotypes and then invites us to deride the people we’ve labeled. It’s easier that way; faster, more efficient.

As a Christian, I cannot afford to use a stereotype as shorthand in my relationships. God calls me to “love one another as I have loved you.” When Jesus stopped at the noontime well and met a woman drawing water, he knew what she was: a five times married woman shunned by her community. But Jesus stopped to really look at her, to see into her heart and soul. As the Son of God, He knew what she needed: life water, forgiveness of sin and grace.

I love to turn the prism of my point of view and try to see someone from a slightly different angle. When I do that, the stereotype changes. What I see as one person when confronted head-on, looks completely different in profile.

That’s true of the soul, as well as the body. May God grant us the grace to see past the wild girl stereotypes to the person within.

Because you never know who you’ll find waiting.