Every time I came up near this guy it seemed to go this way. However I usually crept away crying because I was not the stoic this guy is! This is another unused chapter from my book With Strange Fire.
Well, full disclosure, he wasn’t a boy and his name wasn’t Sue but it was just as feminine of a name. It was actually two names so Mary Sue would work, but for our purposes we’re going with simply Sue. No Johnny Cash anti-hero either was our Sue, even if he’d fit all too well at the website “Jerks 4 Jesus”! His last name was one of the most common Mennonite or Amish names you could come up with.
Sue was a founding member of the church, he was a sitting elder when we first joined and fond of speaking like he was God on high. I wish one of us had been high because it might have helped our interactions. One of my heathen buddies described him as having the joy of a Baptist Sex Therapist. I don’t know, I thought he had the mien of someone with permanently inflamed hemorrhoids.
Born of Mennonite stock Sue became an Evangelical born again Christian during his teens, and he married Mindy Sue, another Youth With a Mission graduate. By the time I met Sue and Mindy Sue they’d been married many years and didn’t have children. They were in charge of youth ministries at Possum Creek.
I don’t know why or how they didn’t have a pile of kids in a place that whispered the theology of fill your quiver with as many holy arrows you could breed. I suspect the founding members weren’t pushing the replenishment movement theology at that time. As time went on it started to be a feature, not a bug but Sue and Mindy Sue were somewhere else.
You know how they say you marry folks who are the opposite of yourself? Between Sue and Mindy Sue that was just beyond any possibility of being true. She was calm and kind most definitely, but it simply seemed deeper than that, like perhaps they’d never even occupied the same planet or even universe. If she couldn’t temper him, no one could.
During my first few years at PCC I tried to be most kind when running up on Sue. It never failed, he threw down verbal lightning bolts from on high, grinding me down into the dirt, letting me know I was the silliest of critters not even worthy of his notice.
Example: At church one day he was standing near me, nodded, and I said something mentioning about a recent news article I’d read about the age of children “blah, blah, blah” *insert your favorite canard about children in the world here* I was just attempting polite small talk with someone that didn’t do small talk. I just didn’t know it yet. I mentioned the children because he and Mindy Sue were ever busy with youth ministry. This time bought me an angry screed from him involving how if I had been properly homeschooling and not socializing my kids with the WORLD then there would be none of that stuff I was talking about because GODLY parents KNEW to keep their kids AWAY from THE WORLD!!!!!! Teeth gnashing and jaw clenching ahoy.
Did I mention he had not one scintilla of humor? His funny bone was broken, and any time he overheard one of my many attempts at a witty jape he’d let me know just how “unGodly” he found my sense of humor. Too bad, because I, like the main character in Jane Austen’s book “Pride and Prejudice” Miss Elizabeth Bennett, dearly love a laugh. He was as humorless as Mr. Darcy, but not as handsome or rich.
The sad thing is that he was highly influential at Possum Creek Church, a board member, and I remember watching how everyone around him treated him like he was a fragile piece of Lalique glass filled with volatile nitroglycerin. My impression is that he was someone not stable in manner enough to be a church leader.
I see this exact same manner in NIFB’s Steven Anderson, a volatility that threatens to explode and take out others. This is not a positive in a leader!
Just like worms in a science experiment eventually learn to avoid the electrified prod I eventually learned there was no polite conversation or small talk with this man. Every conversation devolved into his annoyance. Sue was mad at the world, and saw sin everywhere. Whenever he was near me again, we’d nod and I’d hoof it on out of there like one of the Three Stooges running away from Boris Karloff in one of their sillier films. Whoopp, whooopp, whoooppp!
During those bucolic early years of membership at PCC my children were too young for Mindy Sue and Sue’s youth group. I was happy about that after hearing people I knew whisper about Sue upsetting their high school aged children, and the children leaving church and becoming *gasp! shock!* an unbeliever! For a parent enmeshed in a high demand non denominational church there was no worse fear or fate for a child. It put your reputation as a “Godly parent” at jeopardy. It meant you weren’t going about it the right way. You yourself was lacking hard in some fundamental bedrock way.
Because of the kids youth and my slip sliding away from Sue whenever he ended up near me I had some blissful Sue-free years. It came to a screeching end all too quickly. Why? Baseball, sweet sweet church league baseball. Sue loved to play ball, just like my husband and many others. Our church joined the local church league to play baseball.
A couple of golden afternoons a week we’d assemble at the local ball field in nearby Brandy Station and play America’s greatest game among the wheat fields and corn fields. It was a rudimentary place with no rest rooms, no drinks, no bleachers. Much more primitive than the nearby Little League park. Sort the opposite of “No shoes, no shirt, no service” and high class places like 7-11. Shoes not required while listening to the crack of the bat on leather. Many of the wives and kids attended these games. I did too, along with our children. We’d whoop and holler at home runs, or groan when the umpire ruled against us.
Mindy Sue never once attended, but that wasn’t unusual. Usually only about half the players had family show up at any given game. I went to many of them, but not all. It was a great place to have some of that sweet fellowship our church thought was so vitally important.
Our church team differed in two big ways from some of the other teams. First – we had no female players. Other teams did, heck even the big burly Baptists with similar theology on female submission had women on their team. I have wondered if we might had allowed women to join had someone stepped forward, but with the strict gender roles preached and practiced I’m pretty sure it would have been strongly discouraged.
The other way we differed was that our team dressed in a rag-tag confused collection of whatever athletic gear each person had. All of the other teams came dressed for business, matching tees screeching out the variety of church names in every color of the rainbow. Especially the assorted Baptist churches. They were intimidating in their matchy-matching way and their guys being roughly the size of Buicks.
It was around the end of the second or third season our church played that I made a suggestion to host a fundraiser at the yearly league play offs.
Every year we’d hold an all day tournament between all the teams. The ball field was part of a bigger area that the local fire department used to host an old fashioned carnival complete with corn dogs and Ferris wheels once a year. The rest of the year it was used as a ball field. During the carnival they’d pull down the plywood off the lone pavilion and sling hash, err, hot dogs and the like. For the tournament they’d allow us to run copious electrical cords off that pavilion in order to provide hot food for sale. Every year a church had someone grilling burgers and someone else grilling hot dogs. Another church selling drinks. Still someone else hawking fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts and coffee.
The tournaments started early morning and ran until we had to switch on the lights illuminating the field. It wasn’t like that area was swimming with restaurants or even restrooms so churches selling food were one of the few options. Most of the churches in the baseball conference were far flung, heck our church was a good almost twenty miles away. Many of the players on our team lived beyond that in the countryside. It was not uncommon to host a pile of players at our house between games as we were the closest to Brandy Station than anyone else on the team.
During one of the last regular games of that season I made the suggestion that we sell that perennial staple in that part of the world – pulled pork sandwiches slathered with creamy coleslaw during the tournament. Offered to cook the pork and man the table all day. I suggested this was the way to raise enough of that sweet, sweet tournament moolah to finally buy customized matching tee shirts with the proud name of Possum Creek festooned on the back.
Before anyone else spoke on my suggestion Sue exploded like Mount Vesuvius in full on attack mode. He viciously ripped into me for any stupid foolish female idea that they needed matching shirts, that’s that sinful pride reemerging. The Devil had a hold of my soul if I thought mere monetary commerce wasn’t sinful at a CHURCH function. He went on to say it was akin to gambling! Never explained that one to me, but that might have been because I slunk away again from him, suitably chastened for being a silly woman yet again.
Well sir, you could have heard crickets after that moment because no one spoke in defense of my idea, defense of me or anything else, and we rapidly disbanded. In the ensuing days I had some of the players reach out to say it was a good idea and that Sue had been completely out of line in what he said to me. When the pastor called me to state the same I did ask him if he planned on saying something to Sue about his harsh words. No, the pastor said, it wouldn’t do any good. To have spoken up for me would have likely added fuel to the foolish fire, or so our pastor claimed. It still stung hard that no one spoke up for me.
This was literally the first time I ran up hard against the notion that people at Possum Creek might be a big old pile of contradictions. I felt about as unsupported and dismissed as possible, even as I was asked to go ahead with the pulled pork idea. I demurred because of the lack of support for the idea in front of Sue. I knew to do the fundraiser would just bring more angry words from Sue and tears from me. I’d already choked back tears the day he publicly eviscerated me for the very notion in front of a large group from our church and other churches. I felt absolutely abandoned in that moment by everyone at church since no one spoke up then.
No amount of people agreeing with me later really mattered. I should have expected it to happen again, but I thought it was a one off occurrence. I should have left then and saved myself a pile of heartache later. Typically we ignore the largest of red flags while they are happening. A religious community that accepts in the moment abuse towards a member does not hold any respect or love towards that member.
The next year our church somehow scared up the dollars to provide every player with a baseball jersey with the church name on it. There was a line item in the church budget for baseball for the first time.
What happened to Sue? Less than a year later he left Possum Creek Church, he and Mindy Sue departed for another church. That very last Sunday after Pastor Thomas had laid hands on the couple and prayed a leaving blessing over them we were invited to say goodbye after the service.
After what had happened at the ball field I found myself convicted to pray for Sue each and every day. But I still found myself quite nervously sidling up to say goodbye, afraid I’d get the frailing of my life. I told him I’d been praying for him, and I got to see the rarest of things. Sue smiled and thanked me for my prayers.
I don’t know where Mindy Sue and Sue are now. I hope it’s somewhere they are happy, and that Sue found a way to safely discharge his anger that didn’t involve hurting people. He taught me that with some folks you just need to stay away from them. They’d just use the Bible to hurt you.