Mom warned me.
Dad told me it was a bad idea, too.
But my mischievous teenage soul couldn’t be stopped. Grandma Ethel was coming to town and I thought it was time she heard The Streak.
Now for those of you under 30, here’s a bit of a history lesson. There was a brief period in our nation’s esteemed past where people found it fun to run through public places wearing nothing but a smile (although the less brave wore something over their heads … assuming, I suppose, that no one would then recognize what they did see). It was called streaking. And a songwriter named Ray Stevens cemented it into pop culture with a song called The Streak.
This song centered on an older woman named Ethel who encounters streakers at the supermarket, the auto repair shop and the basketball game and then joins in.
Well Ethel in the song and Grandma Ethel were the only two Ethels I knew so I felt it incumbent on me to introduce them.
First, you need to know a bit about my Grandma Ethel. No one ever called her by that name. Instead, she was known as Sister Tucker and for good reason. My grandma was a saint. No one ever remembers her doing anything wrong. And though she lived most of her life in poverty, she was very giving. I often mused at how she laundered welfare money for the church … receiving her check from the State of Texas and forwarding it on always in cash to the church, the Quiet Hour and the Voice of Prophecy. Grandma Ethel was night and day different from the Ethel in the song.
But it was time they met.
The day after Grandma arrived, I rode my 10-speed down to the Damascus, Oregon general store, bought a 45 of the song and returned home. Dad was in the front room with Grandma his face buried in the Oregonian. Mom was in the kitchen getting supper ready.
“Grandma,” I said as I slid open the lid on the RCA console stereo system that occupied one entire wall of the living room, “I have something for you to hear.” My dad gave me the “you wouldn’t dare look,” and my sisters immediately appeared out of their room for the show. “This is a song about a lady named Ethel, I thought you’d like to hear it.”
“That’s nice, Stevie,” she replied as I set the needle down.
Grandma listened quietly to the song as my sisters and I snickered at the words.
“What’d ya think Grandma?” I mischievously ventured when the song ended.
“How much did you pay for that?” Grandma asked. Uh-oh. I could feel it coming.
“It was a dollar,” I replied.
“Stevie,” she said solemnly, “you could have given that money to the mission field.”
My sisters disappeared as quickly as they had come. In the corner of the room, the newspaper in front of my dad’s face began to shake as dad struggled to not laugh aloud as he quickly walked out of the room. And from mom, not a peep.
It was just me. Grandma. And the naked truth, so to speak, wearin’ nothing but a smile.
“I suppose I could have,” I respectfully replied as I put the record away and left the room.
Grandma made her point. Her priorities and mine were as different as she was from Ethel the Streak. And I knew which ones were right.
Frivolity had collided with faithfulness. Passivity with purity.
Many times I go back to that golden moment. Because it fascinates me. And reminds me of how difficult it is to view reality clearly. If you’ve ever painted a white room white, you know what I mean. A room that looks perfectly white can suddenly appear rather gray when a purer shade of white is rolled upon a wall. Much like grandma rolled reality onto me. Much of life, I began to understand that day, is lived not wrong, but not right either.
The prophet penned it well, “all of our righteousness” – our selective perceptions, our shallow knowledge of purity, our keen ability at self-justification, our unrecognized transformation to worldly thought – when placed next to the purity Christ calls us to “is but filthy rags.”
Repaint our lives, oh Lord, to a shade that’s pure and true. Change our hearts, oh Lord, that we may be more like you. Amen.