A Heaping Measure of Cope

How J&JW and SFS are very Big Deals

The sun is well up in the sky and the girls are still dead asleep. Honestly, don’t want to be the person who rousts them and shoves them back in the car. I prefer to be a nice mother, not the mean one invented by my oldest child for all her writing assignments. She called herself “Jane” and I was the “Mean Mama” who made her eat vegetables and brush her teeth. Only, like me, she struggled to spell and so it was sometimes hard to discover what exactly the Mean Mama was doing. Today won’t be too long, though. We’ve made it as far as Shreveport and have only six hours to go.

It is a wondrous thing to be able to drive such epic distances with so little inconvenience. The roads are good, the accommodations affordable, clean, and comfortable, and the way stations full of chips and cold drinks. I can see how one might come here from some other place and be astonished by the grandeur of the sky and the easy practicability of acquiring a hamburger or a venti decaf breve latte.

On the other hand, I am struck by how unhealthy almost everyone is, whether they live in the North or in the South. All of us are vastly in need of laying off the chips and eating carrots or just large slabs of meat, in the manner of Jordan Peterson. The person who checked us in last night, though very friendly, looked pale with ill health and immobility. She looked both defeated and in pain.

And that strikes me as tragic. America, so divided, is at least united by a common feeling of misery, as though there is not very much to live for. We struggle into the car for a boring and thankless job, eat uninteresting food that is bad for us, stagger home at the end of the day to watch boring television until bedtime, and then do it all again the next day. It is the very opposite of the kind of American spirit described by Wodehouse and others a century or so ago.

It is the long, sort of gentle slide into spiritual dissipation, I think. All the dreams of building and flourishing and thriving have been traded away for self-indulgence and cheap plastic.

I forced the girls to watch an episode of Friends last night and was pleased by the way they curled their noses. It wasn’t interesting. The laugh track was intrusive. The content was unfunny. And all the sexual innuendo was embarrassing. And yet it was so popular—at least, I feel like it was in the hazes of my memory—because what else was there? It was the 90s. We watched it and thought it clever. We believed there were no consequences for rampant consumption and sexual promiscuity. It was the pinnacle of “civilization,” a shabby tower of spiritual assumptions that crumbled into the dust along with the Twin Towers

Anyway, while they were enduring Friends, I took a gander at this piece about Shepherds For Sale. The writer, Patrick Miller, begins by explaining that he liked parts of Jesus and John Wayne, feeling that K du Mez “competently” described parts of Evangelicalism, though he “feared” that it would “hurt the church” by “spurring deconstruction” and making pastoral ministry “intolerable.” But it turned out, according to Miller, that it did none of those things and he hadn’t had any reason to be worried. Then he picked up Basham’s book and can assure any potential readers that it’s not about them. Employing the never-worn-out Nehemiah trope, as though Basham is basically Sanballat, he writes: