I’m a child of the 1960s—not old enough to be a hippie but a young child of the ’60s. For that reason, I remember how great the toys were back then. Imagination was a huge predictor of how long those toys would last.
I loved Slinky—not the cheap plastic ones they make now but the heavy ones made out of metal, which made that impressive, well, slinky noise when I held one end in each hand and passed it back and forth for about ten minutes. Then I’d force my little brother to hold one end while I backed up with the other to see how far we could stretch it, eventually pulling it completely out of its intended coil, rendering it useless.
I remember Mr. Machine Robot, a windup mechanical man that, when wound up, marched across the floor, showing all his inner workings through his plastic casing. You could take him apart bolt by cog by nut by wheel and then theoretically put him back together again. Theoretically.
Mr. Machine Robot lived in a bag in the back of my closet for five years because all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—well, you can guess the rest.
Then there was the miracle of Chatty Cathy, my sister’s prized Christmas gift, the wonder doll that spoke three or four classic lines when you pulled the ring attached to the back of her neck. I also remember the big ole can of whoopin’ I got for, with precision, surgically dismembering Miss CC to accurately identify where her voice came from.
Besides those glorious toys, I loved southern words and phrases from the ’60s that have gone out of style or should’ve never been in fashion. Many of them I still use today when an opportunity arises. For instance, the following:
- Southerners don’t say, “You guys.” We say, “Y’all,” or, for five or more people, “All y’all.”
- We don’t say catty-corner. We say cattywampus.
- We don’t say, “Oh wow.” We say, “Good gravy.”
- We don’t have a hissy-fit; we pitch one.
- Southerners won’t tell you, “You’re wasting your time.” We’ll tell you, “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
- We don’t hand you a Coca-Cola when you ask for a Coke. We ask, “What kind?”
- We’re never “about to” do something. We’re “fixin’ to.” Or we say, “Go fix your plate.”
- We don’t use the toilet. We use the commode.
- We never suppose. We reckon.
- Southerners don’t call people unintelligent. We say they’re “dumber ’n a sack o’ rocks.”
- Southerners don’t check for food in the fridge. We look in the icebox.
- Southerners don’t eat dinner. We eat supper. There’s no such word as dinner. It’s not biblical. We don’t observe the Lord’s Dinner.
- Southerners aren’t “caught off guard.” We’re “caught with our pants down.”
- Southerners don’t pout. We get our “panties in a wad.”
Julia Sugarbaker, on the 1980s sitcom Designing Women, proudly proclaimed, “This is the South. And we’re proud of our crazy people. We don’t hide them up in the attic. We bring them right down in the living room and show them off. No one in the South ever asks if you have crazy people in your family. They just ask what side they’re on.”
A few years back, my brothers and sister and I went to Texas to visit Dad. He was residing in a home for folks living with Alzheimer’s. While there, we drove around Hurst, just around the corner from Fort Worth, and visited some of the old schools, churches, and houses we’d lived in when we were growing up.
On that trip, I thought about all the old southern words and phrases that add such richness to the language I grew up with. We drove by one house, and even the old white screen door looked like the same one from my childhood.
Everything looked familiar, except for one thing. I said, “I don’t remember that big old tree being over on the side of the house like that.”
My older brother, Steve, said, “Tim, we lived here fifty years ago.”
“I know, but it’s so big. I don’t remember it at all.”
“Tim, that was fifty years ago. A half century.”
Even now, that doesn’t compute with me. I guess part of the mystery is that I can still see myself looking out the front window of the kitchen while washing supper dishes. I could barely wait to finish. Only then did I have permission to go around the corner and find all my neighborhood friends to play hide-and-seek. We ran the neighborhood until Mom called us home, which was way after dark and fairly close to bedtime.
Sitting in front of the house that day, I remembered my favorite southern phrase. My dad was a preacher, and usually, on Wednesday nights, after prayer meetin’, we’d go to different congregation members’ homes for fellowship. We kids would have a dessert and drink cherry Kool-Aid while the adults drank hot, thick, aromatic coffee.
The only time I ever got to taste coffee when I was little was on the rare occasion Mom let me climb into her lap at someone else’s kitchen table. She consented to allow me the dunk of my doughnut into her coffee. As a matter of fact, one morning, I woke up while visiting my mother many years later, in my early twenties, and she asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee—a passage-to-manhood moment for me. I took a heart picture that day.
Back in the ’60s, as we prepared to leave the homes of our friends after goodbyes were said, I distinctly remember standing in the dark, just outside the glow of the porch light, and instinctively slamming my mouth shut for fear of kamikaze june bugs. After the small chatter while walking to the car, Dad turned around and said to the hosts, “Y’all come go with us.”
That simple phrase, in my ten-year-old mind, was the perfect tagline to an ideal evening. It said, “We loved being with you, and we wish it didn’t have to end.”
The recipient of this declaration of friendship would reply with something like, “Well, I wish we could. The kids have school tomorrow. We better stay here and get ‘em ready for bed.”
As a kid, I thought it was the best idea ever. The reality never dawned on me the horror that would befall my mother if someone actually said, “Well, all righty then. Honey, go get the kids.”
Even at an early age, I was thankful the Lord allowed me to take what I now call heart pictures: moments framed in my mind and soul, benchmarks of remarkable relationships, and perhaps even profound truth that wouldn’t be realized for decades.
It’s much more acceptable in today’s climate and Christian culture to realize, possibly due to our not understanding when we were younger, that we must rigorously, deliberately seek out and nurture community. The truth is, we were never meant to walk this journey alone.
I don’t think it was an easy task back then. The best my parents could muster to make someone feel important, needed, and valued was a simple declaration of unity, an acknowledgment of friendship that guaranteed “You’re not alone,” without actually having to be vulnerable enough to say it.
“We’re in this together.”
“Y’all come go with us.”
Jesus says in John 15:12–13 (NIV), “My command is this. Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
James 5:16–18 (MSG) puts it in a more nuts-and-bolts configuration: “Make this your common practice.” He doesn’t say, “When you have committed a major public sin and need to repent by going forward.” He tells us to make this a common practice: “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.”
Something powerful.
I sometimes wonder what draws nonbelievers to us or what should bring them to us. In a world that has become freakishly isolated, compartmentalized, and cubicle-like, it’s imperative that they see us love one another and know one another.
Jesus said they would recognize him because of our love for each other, and he said that just after he washed the feet of his disciples.
Just before James’s encouragement to confess sin, he says in chapter 5:7–8, “Friends, wait patiently for the Master’s arrival. You see farmers do this all the time. Waiting for their valuable crops to mature, patiently letting the rain do its slow but sure work. Be patient like that. Stay steady and strong.”
One of my favorite topics of conversation with friends—in fact, my very favorite—is how much I look forward to Jesus’s arrival and what that moment will usher in for those of us who are his. What if we lived out the truth that our redemption is sure and solid? What if we encouraged one another with the accuracy and dependability of that truth, fervently excited?
When I talk about heaven and all the fun we’re going to have and make plans to meet people for supper on a specific day a hundred years from now, trust me, that’s not idle talk. I have a hope that it is real and that God is faithful to live up to his promise.
As time ticks by and I realize this motor of mine will one day stop ticking, the anticipation deepens. I think about all the people who will welcome me when I get there, especially Jesus. I think about my friend Greg Murtha, whom I’ve written about in this book. He’s in heaven now after fighting a courageous battle with cancer.
Thousands of friends and family all over the world covered him in prayer and sacrificed countless acts of service to comfort his family. In one of his last posts on social media, instead of lamenting his circumstance, Greg wrote,
Today will you take your neighbor a muffin or a potted plant? Will you buy that homeless guy a coffee? Will you linger a little longer over breakfast with your family, tell these people you appreciate them or, if you’re bold, that you love them? Make today different while you’re able.
I’ve written about a guy I’m in contact with who’s in prison. He is one of society’s outcasts who need and secretly long for freedom from the bondage of self-loathing, guilt, and shame and who refuse Jesus, not necessarily because they are callous to him but because they think he could never forgive them, much less love them. We all probably know these people imprisoned behind walls of inadequacy, self-condemnation, and selfishness.
I’ve told y’all stories about people I’ve met: a little girl racked with guilt over picking up trinkets in a store without paying for them; inmates, including a redeemed murderer and a grieving mom who lost her boy to suicide; the beautiful radio personality I loved to torment and make laugh on air; dear friends, including one fighting a battle with diabetes and dementia; the faith chaser; the tire changer; and the theatrical mourner. I don’t know where some of these folks are now, but I hope our journey together isn’t over. I pray I’ll meet them again one day. I hope the winding, twisting, bending, anfractuous curves of our lives will crisscross once again. Even if we never physically see each other again on this side of the veil, when we’re all finally home, I imagine standing at the throne, shouting my love to Jesus, and then glancing at someone next to me and exclaiming, “Hey, I know you! I remember you.”
When I hang out with my peeps, it’s a comfortable, mostly unspoken addendum to our journey together that this doesn’t end here. We will enjoy this company, joy, and laughter and look after one another forever.
My prayer is that those living in silent desperation will recognize those eternal moments in our eyes. I pray they will give us the chance to share with them where the surety of our future comes from and how dearly treasured and loved they are.
Jesus is the great adventure.
I pray we will be able to boldly, with certainty, turn to them as we’re leaving and say, “Y’all, come go with us.”
