Pizza & Tee Shirts

After I’d spent the day housepainting (got about a third of the place done now) Monday night my son Donald and his wife Helen invited us to join them for dinner at Moon River Pizza.

This place serves a great salad and what we consider the best pizza in Jacksonville. They cater to a younger crowd. By that I mean, I look around and wonder what these people do during daylight hours.

Our conversation centered around poverty (their income’s dropped to half what it was last year) and computers and art and gas prices. Ginny and Helen say my idea of executing oil company executives for treason is undemocratic — but I’ll bet it would work.

And we talked about tee shirts.

Helen runs a tee shirt business and she’s busy silk screening a huge order of shirts for a marching band. She also designs shirts and a comic strip featuring CC & Perl, two of her five cats.

The shirts can be found at http://www.cafepress.com/ccandperl ;her comic strips are at http://www.ccandperl.com/?page_id=5

Here is a shirt design Helen created to celebrate Chinese New Year last month:

As we talked about tee shirts, a group of young people entered the restaurant. None of the guys sported orange or green spiked hair and the girls’ breasts were actually all the way inside their halter tops so I knew right off that they didn’t look like Moon River Pizza regulars.

But as they approached the counter to order, I noticed one young man’s tee shirt. It was gray with huge block letters saying:

I
DON’T
BELIEVE
IN GOD

How strange, I thought, that someone would need to proclaim something like that. Perhaps it’s merely youthful defiance. He and the crowd he was with definitely fell into that age category more likely to die from traffic accidents than from any other cause.

I wondered if he sported that slogan to generate conversation. Maybe it was a challenge for Christians to witness to him. Maybe it was an invitation to argue.

(Once in Wal-Mart I saw a guy wearing a black shirt on which white letters proclaimed: The Voices In My Head Tell Me To Kill People. That shirt was not an invitation to conversation).

Perhaps the young man ordering pizza liked to wear support for his faith — or lack thereof — by the slogan on his chest, the way some people feel so unsure of their own faith that they need bumper stickers to affirm it.

How would anybody know I’m a Christian if I don’t wear a lapel pin or a bumper sticker. Would they ever guess it from the way I act?.

I’ve noticed that the deeper a person’s commitment is to Christ, the less they feel compelled to make public displays of it or to sport religious symbols. Their faith is so rock solid that it needs no external self-affirmations.

The conformation of their belief is internal. They have nothing to prove to themselves. They do not NEED for me to know their beliefs. My confirmation is unnecessary.

Maybe I’m reading too much into seeing the young man’s tee shirt.

Got tee shirts on the brain.

Here’s why:

Saturday for house painting, Ginny wore my favorite tee shirt so she would not get paint on her lovely skin. My favorite tee shirt, so faded that you can’t read the design on the chest any more, the one with holes from pipe ashes burned in it, the one with the frayed collar, the one with the seams tattered to ribbons.

My favorite tee shirt.

She says she’s sick of seeing me in that rag. She refuses to ever put it in the washing machine again. She says she’s going to throw it in the garbage when she’s finished painting.

Don’t tell her, but I’ll fish it out again and keep right on wearing it.

My shirt is an outward sign of my inward condition.