End of an Era

When I heard that Lifeway stores were closing last week, I had a rush of mixed emotions, because the stores have been a part of my life for so long.

Once, back in pre-history, Baptists were cared for by something they had invented called "boards." We had a Foreign Mission Board and a Home Mission Board. Pastors looking to retirement had the Annuity Board, but the rank-and-file members knew about the Sunday School Board. They were a service that made sure we had those all-important Sunday School record books, the offering envelopes and even those pesky grade slips for Training Union. Those yellow training union report slips were the bane of my existence, because some schemer had listed "Daily Bible Reading" as worth 21 points, so even if you were there, studied your lesson, were attending worship, etc, you could only make a "79," a "C," in Training Union.

The Sunday School Board took care of us, though. They made sure we had Bible School materials, and of course we could get our Baptist Hymnals there. My home church, even in the 70s, was still happy with the 1940s version called the "Broadman Hymnal," when most of the other churches in our town were using the more contemporary 1956 "Baptist Hymnal." And of course, Broadman was inseparably linked to the Sunday School Board.

And they had stores! The Baptist Book Store was only put in privileged towns. I think there were only a half dozen in Texas when I was a kid, but you could actually walk in in get your materials, rather than having to fill out an order form and mail it and wait for them to get there. And Lubbock was only 60 miles away. There was a Baptist Bookstore there, at a major crossroads called Broadway and Avenue Q. I could wander through the aisles of the store while my parents checked off items from their church list.

It's so strange to think about now, but I was introduced to Robert Heinlein at -- yes -- Baptist Bookstore. His juvie novel, Have Space Suit - Will Travel - was on the shelves there with all the juvenile mission biographies and the sanctified books we bought. I thought Heinlein was probably a missionary Baptist himself until I was a senior in high school and we got Stranger in a Strange Land in our library, and I checked it out, thinking it was another of his juvies. Let's say I was a little shocked, and thought, very un-Baptistically, that perhaps Heinlein had lost his salvation before he wrote that book -- or because of it. I had bought nearly all of Heinlein's juvies, but I will always be able to say that I bought my first science fiction book at Baptist Book Store on Avenue Q in Lubbock.

They had everything, including disposable communion cups and pre-cut communion bread squares boxed and sealed in plastic -- both of those things an abomination to our local church where we drank our Welch's grape juice from crystal communion cups and the deacons' wives baked the unleavened bread, which was broken while the pastor quoted, "This is my body, broken for you."

As a student at Texas Tech, I even bought my first non-King James Bible there, and really felt I had done something. I would even buy a (gulp) Good News for Modern Man and a Living Bible there later. By that time, in the "cool" seventies, they even had a youth section, and played vinyl and cassettes of contemporary music like "He's Everything to Me," while a three color disk turned slowly in front of an incandescent bulb, changing the shading of the Jesus posters on the wall. One poster had "Jesus" in a Pepsi logo, and said, "Come Alive - You're in the Jesus Generation." I bought it.

The Baptist Bookstore flourished in those years, before the Great Divorce between the Southern Baptists and the Texas Baptists, when we all felt like children of the Divorce, and wondered if we had caused it, and if maybe they would get back together. But before that, we lived an idyllic existence. We all got our church music there. We got our Sunday School materials there. In the eighties, when I was made VBS director of our local association, I would go to Baptist Bookstore and buy a load of VBS materials on consignment to set up during the annual VBS convention I hosted, where I showed them the materials we would all use, and ran through this year's filmstrip, and thankfully had some ladies who knew how to do the crafts we would all do and taught the potential workers. And the people would buy their materials there, and Baptist Bookstore gave us, I think, a 10% commission for sales, money which I turned back to the Association so we would have plenty to finance next year's  convention.

Then, things happened. Boards became passe, and the Sunday School Board got a cooler name, "Lifeway." And the Baptist Bookstore, not wanting to seem so one-denominational, became Lifeway Bookstores, then Lifeway Christian Stores, when they realized that books were not really that cool. Of course, Christian Bookstores were on the way out. I watched other bookstores as well as our own, as they moved the books to a far wall to make room for posters, T-Shirts, and records, then cassettes, then CDs. The survivor stores also brought in home schooling materials.

I remember the time I went to the checkout shelf at one Christian store and they had "Jesus candy" for sale there.

And then, one of the competitors for Lifeway decided it was great to be open on Sundays, from 8-5 as well. They were gracious enough to give their employees Easter off, but every other Sunday was just another day. I often wondered who shopped there at 10 AM on Sunday.

Lifeway managed to keep itself unstained from these things, but they had lost their vision. More and more, I found that if I needed something, I had to go online because stores didn't want to be overstocked on inventory for dated materials. There had been a time in the past when I could just tell them the name of my church, and they let me walk out without paying. Our church got the bill later. Then I needed my account number. Then came the time when a lady told me that they didn't do account numbers. That I needed a church credit card or needed to fill out some paperwork.

And now, Lifeway's brick and mortar stores are shutting down, and as far as I know, all that is left is Mardel's Book Store, and I wonder if they are only staying alive because of their parent company, Hobby Lobby, who usually has its own brick and mortar nearby.

Online shopping is easy, usually cheaper, and nearly always "in stock." But there is something about holding a Bible in your hands before you buy it. When you are buying a Bible, you are buying a companion for life, and one of your grandchildren may have it some day. You want to know how a Bible smells, how the pages sound as you turn them, and how the leather feels in your hands. And they still haven't figured how to do that on the internet. I made the mistake one year of ordering our Bibles that we give our seniors outside of a brick and mortar. It was before online took over, and I ordered them by phone, dictating each student's name to be imprinted, and paying by credit card. They got it all right, but the picture in the catalog I had was deceiving. Twelve seniors that year got Bibles that were somewhere between the size of the ones their grandmothers brought to worship, and the one that was on the table in front of the pulpit. No wonder they were a close-out bargain.

Now, all of our record keeping materials will be bought online. All of those Sunday School things -- online. VBS we have done online for a long time, because there is a  smorgasbord of competing companies, all interested in our business. That's also why we don't have an associational VBS clinic any more.

Okay, here it comes. I'm getting old. Would it be too hard to give us a Sunday School Board again? Oh, I know, we now have "Study Groups" and "Discipleship Groups" and "Growth Groups." Forget Training Union (though I was surprised to see they still have Training Union quarterlies online -- they just don't call it that now). Okay, I guess it would not be financially solvent, but then again, the Boards were never intended to turn a profit. There were there to serve.

Don't go calling me an old fogey or some Luddite for having these thoughts. Don't think I'm some close-minded fundamentalist who longs for the good old days. Remember who I am. After all, I once bought a Heinlein book at a Baptist Book Store.

An Open Letter to the New 2019 Congress

Well, congratulations! You got what you wanted -- to be in the driver's seat again. I'm neither elated nor disappointed, as I voted for an independent two years ago for president, and in the most recent congressional elections, I voted third party for congress. I have no problem with having done this. So you might think I don't have a dog in the fight, but I tend to be interested in who gets elected because I expect you all to work for me, since that's the way it's supposed to be done.

Unfortunately, you really got off to a bad start yesterday. You have 235 Democrats in the house, and you elected one of the least popular and least capable for Speaker. You are going to have a tough time convincing me that, of 235 Democrats, Nancy Pelosi is the cream of the crop. She recently told a press conference that she was not going to allow "President Bush" to bully anyone. Please let her know, for starters, that one President Bush has been out of office ten years, and the other one died recently, and that the current occupant of the White House is named "Trump." Maybe that will help.

And if any of you Republicans are listening, why did you vote for a Republican for speaker? You knew you couldn't win that one. Why did you not get together with some of the intelligent Democrats and see whom they really wanted, and promise to help out? You had over 190 votes available, and you could have made a difference, but anyway...

Back to the new majority leadership: I know you are sharpening your axe now. You are going to take down this president. I have all confidence in you that you will do this. At least, everything in your power. And you have some options:

• Censure him. That's easy enough, and it has happened before.
• Subpoena him: If you can't get him, you can at least subpoena everyone who works for him, lives in his house, and works at his hotels. Have fun.
• Impeach him: Go ahead. Make it a trifecta. He would be the third president to be impeached, and you see how much damage it did to the other two. Andrew Johnson finished out his term, left office, and probably said, "good riddance." Bill Clinton finished his term, got full retirement and lifetime secret service, and almost made it back to the same White House where he spent 8 years. The bottom line is, impeachment looks like fun, but it does very little by itself. To make that work, you need the senate to help, and I have bad news for you: the Senate has too many Republicans in it to make anything bad happen to Trump. If you manage to impeach him, it will not be the worst that has happened to him. He's been through bankruptcies, and worse, divorces. He won't lose any sleep. And like his worthy opponent, he's not ever going to jail.
• Pass bills against him. Get him declared the antichrist. Pass a resolution that he's the worst president in history. Pass a bill that denounces him and everything about him. I would like to see you do all this for the next two years, because it's very inexpensive, compared to what you could be doing: pork projects, good-old-boy legislation to get favors, money to holding companies that secretly support the companies that got you here. You know, what the Republicans do, too.

But I'm afraid that there are some of you that are suddenly going to realize that you at least have to pretend to make laws, and you are going to press Madame Speaker to do that occasionally. Oh, I'm not talking about unfreezing the budget. As long as there are chauffeurs, people to hold the doors in the capitol building and the White House, and food in the dining halls, I don't think you are going to worry much about whether those people making minimum wage start taking tickets at the Statue of Liberty and Washington Monument any time soon. You will make the same overtures the president is making, but neither of you will really worry about it as long as your rent is paid and your expense account is still liquid.

But there are a couple of things I would like you to consider if you really, really care about the people you represent, whether we voted for you or not. I put these things in no particular order:

• Taxes. Keep it like it is. Whether we liked Trump and his congress or not, we like the larger standard deduction and the lower taxes, and no, we do not think we are causing the deficit by paying less taxes. We think you are causing the deficit by spending nonexistent money, and of course, you know that the Fed no longer has to even print it. Now it just generates it electronically, like government-sanctioned bitcoins, so spare us the tax increases that supposedly can balance the budget. You could double all our tax bills, and you still wouldn't balance this year's budget, unless, of course, you are planning to spend money only on subpoenas, censures, resolutions, and impeachment votes. Then, you might just balance it.
• Medical care. Please realize that those big, greedy insurance companies are not the sole culprit in all of our problems. For me, it's the twenty dollar Tylenol tablet that they give me with a tiny cup of water. It's the 90 dollar box of facial tissue that was an off-brand, not even Kleenex, that I got charged for, and I didn't even use but one or two of them. It's the hospital room I was in, built some time in the fifties, with the metal bed, and the leaking catheter bag that the nurses were "gonna fix" in a little while, but never did, because, as they barked to my wife, they were "under staffed." But I was better off than most, because the echo from the hallway, "I huuuuurrrrt!" "I need a nuuuurrrse!" made me count my blessings. For that one night stay, I was billed the cost of five Alaska Cruises. One night. And that was just the room. Not the consultation. Not the leaking catheter bag. Not the pills or the tissues. No wonder you have to have an act of congress (excuse the outdated expression) to get an itemized bill, and then, if you are lucky, you can figure out what all the codes mean.
• Medical Care II - oh, and those bills. You don't get them all at once. You get one from this doctor, from that anesthesiologist, that radiology reader that lives in Maine, and -- oops -- that lab technician that was, er, "out of network," even though your medical team and hospital were not. And the double bill that, when you finally prove it to them, they say, "Oh, okay." No apology or admission of a mistake or -- worse -- intentional work. That's what's killing us. Literally.
• Medical Care III - But of course, you have been bravely fighting for us. Privacy. All those privacy notifications, the ones that mean that even our family members who take care of us and maybe pay our bills can't find out how we are because you were more concerned about HIPAA than you are about hip replacements, which can cost 1500 or 15000, depending on where you go and who does it, but you never know until it's over. Oh, that privacy you worked so hard for us to have, so that now we only have initials on our doors, so family doesn't know if the two JJ's next door to each other -- if one is the "Jane Johnson" you wanted to see, or the "John Jones" you never met, so you knock on a stranger's door, hear "come in," and make eye contact with someone you've never met because of, you know, "privacy." If you are not too afraid of the powerful medical industry and their lobbies that will fight you for status quo, you might drum up the courage to organize a bipartisan task force or two and get to work on some medical reform that will stop this powerful group from attacking the people you are representing when they are at their weakest, their sickest, and their most vulnerable, often bankrupting them.
• Other minor things. Today, I got two cloned calls on my cell phone from local numbers with normal names, and both were warning me that this was the last day to lower my interest rate on my credit cards. The third call was from a local man I had never met who was returning a missed call that I never made, probably because a credit card interest rate company cloned my number and called him. I have heard that, this year, over half of all wireless calls will be spam. I have problems believing that 435 elected officials can do nothing at all about this problem which has exploded in the past two years. At work, driving, sitting at business meetings and in funeral services, robocallers are dialing our numbers like never before, and you seem to do nothing. Is it because someone else answers your phone? This is only a tiny example of the many things ordinary people like us face every day, people like you used to be. This year, in record numbers, people stole packages from front porches because most families have two working parents and no way for a housewife in an apron to answer the door when a mailman calls. And you know this. And just in case you don't know, I don't think the first amendment was intended to protect and propogate any of this.

I could go on, but you get my drift. We really want to know that you are out there. I quit voting for one congressman because he refused to answer my emails with anything except a boilerplate that he needed the last extra four digits of my zip code to make sure I was in his district before he would read my letter. Are you all like that?

Part of the deal you brokered with Nancy Pelosi, the most capable leader of the majority party, it appears, was that she promise to be speaker for only two more terms. Let me tell you that, unless you can show you care, in two more terms, it will be given back to the other side so they can elect a speaker as competent as the one you just elected.

Please show me you care. Please pass some legislation that eases my burden instead of costing me more. Please work to lower medicine prices. I know that pharmaceutical companies got you in there, but they gave money to your opponent, too. Show them how grateful you are by voting for fair pharmaceutical prices.

Oh, and one more thing. I have been paying social security taxes for 50 years this year -- ever since I started sacking groceries as a teenager, hoping to buy a red Volkswagen, which I never got, by the way. Had to pay for college. Anyway, 50 years later, I am going to get my first Social Security check. I will disregard the fact that I paid my SS taxes with taxed money, and will get the privilege now of paying taxes on what I get paid, though you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for that. I will disregard that you constantly "borrow" from that money for other things. All I ask is, "Would you please quit thinking it's welfare for old people?" No, it's a return on the investment of people who have worked for half a century, and there is no reason at all for you to be messing with it.

So, what kind of congress will you be? While your new speaker is washing and waxing the private plane she once again has, you might draw up a list of some things that we really care about, and try to do something about it.

If you do, I will not only vote for you next time around, I will even campaign for you. But I have been promising that to every party in power for some time now, and no one seems to care. I hope maybe you do, because I am a baby boomer, and there are still a lot of us, and we all vote.