Last Night … June 7, 2013

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Arriving back at my motel room after an exciting evening with the dear souls of Primrose United Methodist Church, along with the visitors who gathered for the occasion, I received a phone call from a friend. She asked me what I had done that evening, and I told her I was finishing up a two-night revival at a church.

She giggled a bit and said, “Boy, that sounds old-fashioned”

It got me thinking. For after all, to produce the pucker of the kiss of death on ANY idea, all you have to proclaim is that it’s “old-fashioned.”

So it made me wonder if the two nights I spent in Little Rock, Arkansas, really WERE old fashioned.

• Is it old-fashioned to gather with people you don’t know, with the aspiration of coming out of the experience a little better?
• Is it old-fashioned to tap your foot to music and release a tear when a lyric to a song lands with truth on your heart?
• Is it old-fashioned to share a piece of pizza with a new-found friend, content with the simplicity and never wishing it was lobster in drawn butter?
• Is it old-fashioned to laugh out loud, without fear of being considered boisterous?
• Is it old-fashioned to clap your hands in appreciation, and also in praise to a God who has decided to be your Father?
• Is it old-fashioned to contend and come to agreement that “NoOne is better than anyone else?”
•  Is it old-fashioned to listen to music you’ve never heard before, and instead of rejecting it because it isn’t in the normal rotation of your tunes, you listen and receive a blessing?
• Is it old-fashioned to welcome strangers in and work real hard to make sure that when they depart they know how much they are loved and welcomed back?
• Is it old-fashioned to offer a tank of gas to a traveling group of troubadours so they can make their way up to Illinois?
• Is it old-fashioned that even though you are the pastor of a church, to get out of your car to wash the windshield of their van, as a symbol of your appreciation?
• Is it old-fashioned to come to the front of a church and sit in a chair to receive prayer because you’re not quite sure that there ISN’T room for improvement?
• Is it old-fashioned to believe–and experience–more people coming out the second night of a meeting than were there the first?

You see? You can feel free to call me weird, and you can try to keep up with each trend that comes and goes in our society, but whenever I run across anything that claims to be “new and improved” I ask myself two important questions:

1. Does it help people?
2. Does it make us better?

I don’t believe there ARE things that are old-fashioned and others that are up to date. I just believe there are things that bless–and the more you pursue them, the fresher they become … every day.

P.S.: Thank you, Primrose United Methodist Church.

P.S.S. Happy thirty-seventh birthday to my son, Jerrod.

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Kiss Off … May 23, 2012

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I’ve mulled it over and I’ve decided it is NOT because I’m getting old. It could be that I have an unnecessary preoccupation with evaluating things instead of just accepting them at face value. And speaking of face, what I’m talking about here is kissing.

Kissing should always be considered a positive experience–and perhaps this is why I’m so confused with the reputation that the word “kiss” seems to have acquired over its journey from Eden until now.

French Kiss (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After all, we have the “kiss of death,” which is a way of marking someone for extinction while expressing possibly a bit of remorse over their demise.

“Kiss and tell”–for those people who enjoy showing slides of their vacation much more than actually traveling.

The title of this essay–“kiss off”–which is more or less the personification of a “Dear John” letter.

Most dastardly of them all may be “kiss my *****” … where some distasteful body part not normally associated with smooching is inserted for an angry effect.

Oh–and I almost forgot to mention KISS–a rock and roll band that religious people told us worshipped Satan (which only confirmed to us that the devil had all the good rock).

How did the word get such bad publicity?? I have some theories. Although kissing has many pleasant overtones, there are certainly some minefields in the experience which we normally don’t speak of because we nervously hope they will go away. But we at jonathots are not afraid of such minor peccadilloes. So let me name the six things about kissing that plague our minds:

1. Bad breath. When I watch a movie and see people roll over in the morning and kiss, I have to wonder if someone had the intelligence to slip a mint into the mouth. Nothing can ruin a good kiss more quickly than bad breath. Perhaps you can rile up your passions enough to overlook it, but still–in the back of your mind, you are constantly trying to retrieve the flavor of mint.
2. French kissing. There’s nothing wrong with it–but somewhere along the line, we have convinced a whole generation or two that real, romantic “interfacing” does not occur unless the tongue joins the party. Even Republicans, who normally don’t like anything from the French, prescribe to this particular approach as being superior. Here’s my thought. Sometimes a tongue is just a tongue, but a lip is ALWAYS a lip. (He who has an ear, let him hear.)
3. Speaking of lips–then there’s lip size. I remember when I was thirteen years old, I was frightened to death that my lips were too big. I had no basis for this terror inciting my soul to near seclusion, and if I had possessed any understanding about the art of kissing, I would have comprehended–the bigger the lips the better the landing strip. Because thin lips can leave you placing your greatest affection on teeth–and although the sentiment remains, the stimulus, at that point, departs.
4. Then there’s the length of the kiss (which is very similar to Number 5–who pulls away first?–so let me put them together.) Perhaps that’s why the beauty of the first kiss is always extolled by the poets. It is so terrifying that no one is concerned about longevity or has a stopwatch to confirm the barometer of passion. But after a while, when you’ve been with someone, this does become an issue. Matter of fact, it can even be a competition. I’ve even seen kisses which have lost their oom-pah continued, simply out of stubbornness over the individual parties refusing to be the first one to leave the premises. You would think a kiss would have a certain life of its own and there would be a common awareness of when to just let the thing go–but no. Matter of fact, there are many couples who have had long discussions about how “they know the other person doesn’t love them anymore” because their kiss is abbreviated or in some way less than explosive. (There was even a silly song from the sixties that said you could tell a man loved you because “it’s in his kiss.”) There’s enough insecurity in romance without feeling the pressure of the Olympic trials and needing to break some sort of record. Some kisses are long; some kisses are short. Some kisses are awkward; some kisses are memorable. Kisses should never be critiqued. They should be viewed the same way you do when you look at a picture done by your three-year-old as he explains to you that it really IS a horse and not just four brown lines on the paper.
5. Covered above.
6. And the final problem with kissing–the peck. Matter of fact, it can cause a peck of trouble. After people have been in a relationship for a long time, they still feel the need to kiss, but it has degraded to this brief brushing of the lips against each other, which barely allows time for puckering. It’s so dumb. People are prideful about it. “He didn’t kiss me good-bye …” “She left without kissing me …” Come on, now. Is a peck really even a kiss? And what does it communicate other than the fact that we are getting old and we might just be afraid that if we pushed any harder with our lips we might break our teeth?

So even though I’m a great advocate of kissing, I am not afraid to discuss the need for improvement. And I must warn you that to ignore the pitfalls of life assures you that you will spend some time in the ditch.

So here’s to kissing. May it ever endure–but let us not be afraid to expose our preferences and our indifferences on the issue. Because if kissing is going to survive into future generations, it will need to be given proper scrutiny. Otherwise, we will eventually think that romance is just “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.” I don’t know about you. That would leave a bad taste in my mouth, leading to bad breath, which, as I told you earlier, may be the greatest guaranteed kiss off of all.

  

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