Under a Rock

"You don’t know what the Muppets are?! Have you been living under a rock?”

“P!NK, you know, like…‘Glitter in the Air?’ No?! Have you been living under a rock?”

“Jim Carrey, you know, from ‘Dumb and Dumber’…Oh, right, you’ve been living under a rock.”

“You know there’s this Family Guy episode where…Never mind, you wouldn’t—I forgot you live under a rock.”

Sometimes I hear that phrase about living “under a rock” several times in the same week. I find it amusing, and sometimes I just answer “No, I don’t know…I’ve been living under a rock. It's okay, you can call me an ingénue.” Then I smile while I wait for them to decide whether or not to ask what ingénue means.

It’s true, I still can’t quite remember what Muppets are, in spite of the fact that I’m sure at least three different astonished people have described them to me. I couldn’t name a single song by the Backstreet Boys, haven’t seen Grease, and never did get fractured fairytales since I’m not sure how Cinderella let her long hair down so some handsome prince (who was a frog before she kissed him and Princess Aurora) could climb up and bring her back her slipper, which the Seven Dwarves returned after it was found by Little Red Riding Hood…or whatever happened. Those stories never made it into our library of books or videos when I was growing up. If any of that suggests that I have been living under a rock, then yes, I guess I have.

Granted, I’ve picked up a lot more pop culture in the last few years—in fact, I’m pretty sure I could sing along with the radio at least once every half hour if you put it on scan. These days I’ve seen a lot more modern media than I even care to, but none of it has convinced me that I missed out on anything growing up “under a rock.” Occasionally I just wonder if kids today are aware that rock can actually reference a hard object found outdoors as well as a music genre…let alone know how to spell genre.

I don’t mean to criticize all the kids raised with all the knowledge that I freely admit is foreign to me; I fault them for nothing except perhaps faulting me for not knowing the same things they do. Really, I simply want to reassure concerned parents that their kids won’t necessarily grow up hating them for having raised them under a rock. In fact, they might even be grateful for it. I am.

See, my parents didn’t raise my brother and me watching Barney. We watched Janice’s Attic, where I learned what caused condensation, what a kimono was, and that if Jesus made even the elephants to be kind to each other then I could be more thoughtful too. We didn’t read Cinderella, but I still know the names of dozens of missionaries and great men and women—Mary Slessor, John Paton, David Livingstone, Josephine Cunnington Edwards, Moses, Narcissa Prentiss, F.A. Stahl,  Joseph, William Booth, Wycliffe, Roger Williams, Corrie Ten Boom, Uriah Smith, Eric B. Hare, Martin Luther, Esther, Daniel Boone, John Bunyan, Joan of Arc, the Wesley brothers, Ellen G. White, Abraham Lincoln, Adoniram Judson, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Jesus Christ—because I read their stories or listened to their dramatized biographies on Your Story Hour. We didn’t sing along with Britney Spears, but we did sing this song at church called “The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock.”

So when people ask me if I’ve been living “under a rock” I have to smile at the irony. My parents weren’t raising me to be living “under a rock;” they raised me to live on the Rock. Sure, they made plenty of mistakes and didn’t raise my brother and me in some blissfully picture-perfect family that could probably find its simile in some TV sitcom I’ve never seen, but I can’t regret for a minute the many things from which they sheltered me, all in an attempt to build the house of my character firmly on the Rock of Ages. Every positive aspect of my life I can trace back to the foundations laid in my upbringing, foundations that could have been built on the world’s shifting sand, but instead were painstakingly grounded by my parents on the unmoving Rock, the Cornerstone many builders are still rejecting (Acts 4:10-12).

If you’re a parent, I want to reassure you that building your children on the Rock is worth it; at least, I’m so grateful that my parents took the effort. If your parents raised you in such a way that you occasionally get asked if you’ve been living “under a rock,” I hope you smile and aren’t at all embarrassed by it. After all, someday—when the Rock cut out without hands returns to bring this world to an end—no one is going to ask you how many episodes of The Simpsons you missed out on growing up.

Living under a rock? No. Living on the Rock? I pray it will always be so.

Circumstantial Evidence

I stood at the register desk and examined the breakfast vouchers. They were obviously photocopied, the writing traced a second and third time to the point of distraction, and cut jaggedly like a first-grader’s end-of-the-day craft project. The two waitresses waiting for my reply glared at the specimens skeptically.

The restaurant within a hotel where I supervise attracts most of its customers from the voucher system; that is to say, the hotel provides free breakfast passes to regular guests, groups, and so forth. Usually these are on pre-printed cards that the front desk personnel simply fill out with the group code, guest name, room number, etc., however on the rare occasions when they run low on the cards they sometimes neatly copy a blank voucher.

These were different.

I was working Sunday after a couple days off, and my staff had already regaled me with tales of the family of vandals that had descended on our restaurant in my absence. With so many kids of all ages and so few manners to go around, the family had single-handedly decimated the buffet room and left their tables in a state of chaos to rival the combined force of Katrina and Rita. According to the waitress who had their section, they had exited a side door without even leaving enough vouchers for everyone. Having been amply warned, I waited for the demolition team to arrive.

And they had, presenting me with the suspicious vouchers. As they filtered through with to-go boxes to carry out their spoils of war, I stood analyzing the vouchers while the waitresses looked on, justifiably critical of the jagged vouchers’ validity.

Julie* shook her blond head, hands on hips. “These are photocopies…”

I agreed, “Yes, but occasionally we do get photocopied vouchers from front desk. It happens.”

“But they never look like this!” she protested.

Again, I had to agree. Both girls adamantly pointed out that the vouchers always were cut with the guillotine paper cutter in the office, never jaggedly with scissors; they weren’t scrawled all over multiple times, and the account codes usually matched on each voucher within a group or family—these didn’t. I couldn’t deny a word of it.

Turning to one of the voucher-wielding conquerors, I asked who at the front desk had given them the vouchers and when. “The girl with the long dark hair in the ponytail…on Thursday.” Conveniently, Hannah* wasn’t on duty Sunday to vouch for the vouchers.

Julie shook her head again and declared that Hannah never would have given out vouchers that looked like that, she was much too careful and precise.

I handed the vouchers back to the waitresses. “We have to accept them. Yes, they look for all the world like phonies, but we can’t prove that they are. Maybe front desk did photocopy them, and the guillotine paper cutter was missing or dull so they had to use scissors, and for some unknown reason Hannah scrawled over the writing a couple times.”

My staff stared at me doubtfully, conveying the clear message that they would sooner believe Casey Anthony was innocent.

“No matter how unlikely that sounds, it is possible…” I finished in a whisper, “Even though they look guilty as sin, the evidence is all circumstantial, and we can’t know for sure that they aren’t authentic.”

Neither of the waitresses appeared even slightly convinced, and, honestly, I wasn’t either.

The next morning Hannah came breezing through for some coffee, and I stopped her with the incriminating vouchers in hand and the staff listening on the side: “Do you remember if you guys gave these out at the front desk Thursday?”

Hannah glanced at them quickly. “Oh yeah, they just had so many of them that I copied some instead of handwriting everything out again. Some of it was in red pen, though, so I went over it again with a black one since I wasn’t sure it would copy.”

Ever since that incident I’ve thought how often we jump to conclusions about people, especially when we think they are just the sort of people to do whatever we assume they did. When Jesus said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” it was clearly not because humans have a great track record for open-mindedness. For some reason we have a natural tendency to critique, categorize, and convict everyone around us. And, not surprisingly, we are often completely wrong in our conclusions.

Christians certainly aren’t exempt. It might sound like I’m beating a dead horse, but seriously…what’s with all of us judgmental Christians? I’m including myself because I know better than to think I haven’t ever done it too, and I hope you think carefully before assuming that you aren’t guilty of it. What makes any of us so holy that we feel adequate to pass judgment on anyone else?  Maybe it’s just that much easier to see a mote in our brother’s eye than to deal with the beam in our own.  

Cliché? No doubt. You already knew all of that, and so did I. For some reason, though, it just hit home when I realized how something that looked so clearly guilty wasn’t what it seemed at all…and how easily in our finite wisdom we can be very wrong. Jumping to conclusions and passing judgment have far-reaching consequences, and I’ve resolved that I would rather err on the side of caution.

“Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Let’s leave the judging up to the all-knowing God who never errs.

*Names changed.