And They Shall Be Given New Robes

Can you guess what this photo shows?

You’re right!

That is a photo of my best bathrobe held up to the light. The starry constellations are holes burned into the chest by ashes from my pipe.

It’s a perfectly good robe; even the elbows provide ventilation:

Besides that, I have a whole drawer full of matching underwear.

But I have this wife.

And on Super Bowl Sunday the thrift store sale offered cloth things at 75% off, so Ginny decided we needed new robes to wear while watching the game. So we bought two new ones. Here is a photo my daughter Jennifer took of my new robe:

My friend Wes was over and Jennifer told him, “Dad looks very distinguished, like that guy on Masterpiece Theatre, you know, Alice Cooper.”

Wes just about choked. “You mean Alistair Cooke,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” she said.

Well, it’s easy to confuse the two men. And I really do look almost as distinguished as Alice Cooper.

Sunday Ginny also bought herself a new robe, a dainty thing originally from Victoria’s Secret. Fetching. I’ll not post a photo of her in that one on the internet.

When Gin and I got home with our new robes, I folded my old one up carefully to go to the Lord’s Store, a mission we have supported for years. She pulled it out of the bag. “You can’t send that thing to the poor,” she said, “The poor deserve better stuff than you wear”.

Maybe she has a point.

Once I got in all sorts of embarrassment and trouble by giving cast-off clothing to the poor; I wrote about that adventure in an article entitled “My Great Brassier Hunt”. If you’re interested you can read it at http://www.cowart.info/Journal%20extracts/brassierhunt/My%20brassier%20hunt.htm

During the Apostle John’s vision of Heaven in Revelation, he saw a crowd of people around the throne of God and John said, “And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season”.

One great Christian mystic, I think it was Leo Tolstoy, advanced the idea that the only clothes anyone will have in Heaven, is clothing we have given to the poor down here on earth.

I hope he’s wrong about that—if he’s right, then I’ll spend all eternity wandering the golden streets wearing that cutesy tee shirt with the fuzzy kittens on the chest that one of the girls gave me one Christmas. Saints will stare and wonder how such a wimp got past the gate.

After Jennifer left, Wes and I talked about how the English Bible has been transmitted to us. Well, he talked; I listened. Here’s a photo of Wes, I took this afternoon:

I asked him what his sweatshirt says and he said, “ïëN ìïõ åéíáé Åëëçýêá” (or something like that).

“No. No, what does it say in English”?

“It says, ‘It’s All Greek To Me’”.

That’s his idea of humor.

Wes, a master printer, tells me that the printers of the 1611 King James Bible worked in teams of three to hand-set the sheets in foundry type from the job case matching the notch lines, then the brayer wound ink the frisket with lampblack and linseed oil, and the next man would pull the devil’s tail to print each sheet. A cutter would check the orthography and thus make a printed Bible. On a good day they could print 500 sheets.

But once some madcap printer apprentice pulled a fast one on his boss. In Psalm 119 where the text says something like, “The princes of the earth have persecuted me” he fiddled with a line to make it read “The printers of the earth have persecuted me”.

I told Wes that I had never heard about any of this stuff before.

“Well, how did you think the Bible came to us?” he asked.

I said, “I thought that every night God came down and put Bibles in hotel room dressers. If you steal one, He comes down again the next night and magically put a new Bible in the drawer”.

I live on the cutting edge of biblical higher criticism.

I have long urged Wes to translate the New Testament into modern English for people who have the same level of biblical knowledge as I do.

He has my advice under consideration.

We also talked about my own writing. Long years ago I promised someone that I’d write a book about finding the will of God. I haven’t done it. The subject is far too deep for me. And I’m not qualified. It would take a far better Christian to write such a book.

Knowing and doing the will of the Lord puzzles me. I have enough trouble just simply believing that God tolerates me, much less loves me and has any plan for my life.

While we were at breakfast this morning, before we even ordered coffee, the our friend the waitress came to the table. Her first words were, “The boss put me on time out in the ally because I had a fight with One-Eyed Annie”.

How’s that for an opening conversation gambit?

She said, “He treats me like a child. He’s trying to make me look incompetent”.

I comforted her saying, “There’s nothing he could do that would make you look more incompetent than you already are”.

That’s me spreading light and joy.

In these hard economic times she supports three other adults, all unemployed, in her home. Wes and I talked with her about her options, about belief, and about God’s faithful provision.

Later, Wes and I drove to a thrift store for him to look at some books on music composition (he’s an accomplished organist among other things). While he browsed text books, I spotted a leather chair and ottoman that had just been put on display. Dreamy comfortable!

I called Ginny at work about it and we decided to buy that chair. But I lacked enough cash so I talked it over with the cashier who knocked $10 off the price. And we loaded it in Wes’s pickup truck. And Jennifer, who’d come over to take Fancy, Ginny’s lovebird, to the vet, helped us unload it into the living room. Jennifer said that my old chair was more worn than my old robe).

While Wes and Jennifer chatted, I gave my new chair a test drive:

Wes said that the circumstances of finding my new chair and of my getting a warm new robe—it’s originally from Bloomingdale’s—provides at least a hint of how much God loves and cares for me.

“John,” he said, “You were concerned about learning the will of God for your life—now you know. He must want you to become a full-time couch potato”.