Insecurity

I’m still making my way through Frank Schaeffer’s Patience with God. Last night, I read Chapter 9, “So Naked Before a Just and Angry God”, which is about Frank’s experiences at a boarding school when he was young.

Frank talks about how he and a friend, a stocky boy named Nichol, liked to agitate an emotionally volatile and unpopular boy named Higgins. One night, they did this once more and got into trouble with the headmaster, a level-headed and formal evangelical named Mr. Parke. (Picture Mr. Hundert on the Emperor’s Club.) Mr. Parke made them wait a few hours for their punishment, to induce in them the same sort of insecurity about the future that they liked to induce in Higgins. Mr. Parke then told them the lesson he was trying to teach them:

“Now you know how Higgins spends his days. You see, you chaps are happy boys. When you get up in the morning, it isn’t with a sense of dread. You’re expecting a pleasant day. When Higgins gets up, he’s expecting unpleasantness. He knows that chaps like you think it’s funny to wind him up, to take advantage of the fact that he loses self-control. Well, for him that is a sort of hell…”

Frank says that he learned about God from Mr. Parke’s example. But this passage made me think about my attitude when I get up in the morning. When I was in elementary school, I’d get up with an attitude of eager anticipation about the day. Some of that ran into my Junior High and High School years, especially if I had a crush on a girl and was hoping she would notice me. When I had friends, I was happy to see them after my summer vacation. Late in High School, however, I developed a sense of dread about each day—maybe because by that point I was uncomfortable being around people, not that I was really bullied. And that’s the sort of attitude that I have nowadays. Instead of saying “Good morning, Lord”, my attitude is usually “Oh Lord, it’s morning”. One thing I like about my current job, however, is that it’s predictable and runs smoothly, plus the people are friendly, and that helps me.

At Harvard, I knew an old woman whose husband had passed away, and she was having a hard time getting over it. She told me that her husband used to wait for her after her classes, with a big smile on his face, ready to drive her home. Now, as she deals with her husband’s absence, she’s lucky if the cab driver is even friendly!

I watched Stephen King’s It last night for the umpteenth time, even though I saw it a few weeks ago. (I noticed different things in my viewing last night, however.) One of my favorite scenes occurs right after Beverly Marsh fights back at her abusive boyfriend and leaves him to reunite with her old friends in Maine. A cab driver asks her which flight she’s going to, and she replies that she wants to go to Maine. “Okay, then we’ll find one that goes to Maine”, the cab driver responds. “What’s in Maine—family?”

I like this scene because the cab driver is hospitable. He creates an atmosphere of security, in a world that is often insecure.