Open?

Last night I connected with Steve and Sherrie G., who basically adopted me as their friend when I was looking for another family during my high school years, my family being too crowded and too intense for me at that time.  The Gould's always had good food and they made me laugh.  And laugh.  It was great to connect with them again, and to tell the long version of the story of the last five years of my life.  And they bought me an amazing prime rib dinner.  Like I said, the Gould's know good food.

We talked about life in Grove City growing up, and Steve asked specifically what I thought were advantages and disadvantages.  They have two kids, now grown and living elsewhere, and we were comparing notes about the unusualness of growing up in such a rural, highly churched area.  We're not the town in Footloose, just to be clear; too many people with advanced degrees from Seminary's talking about reformed theology to be fundamentalists.  All the same, the city is full of churches, and the churches are full.  To be an atheist or agnostic around here is to paint yourself blue, and I'm guessing, to be worried over.  

One of the disadvantages of growing up this way is that the lines of who's in and who's out of God's Kingdom can feel pretty clearly defined, since you can actually sort everybody because you  know everybody! and people get labeled.   I was labeled, and as a result I labeled.  

Such a sadness, too-- many people I didn't get to know because their label and my label didn't match.  And yet, five years after college, the setter on my high school volleyball team, who was sleeping with her college-age boyfriend and partying like crazy, becomes a Christian, gets married and is now a soccer mom, pregnant with her 5th child.  No difference now in the labels, now that they don't matter.   

I think about this today particularly because I just finished reading Andre Agassi's sort-of autobiography entitled Open.  It's a great, page-turning read, and for those of you who like tennis and watched his rise and fall and rise again, it's satisfyingly detailed about what was actually going on behind the crazy hair, acid washed jean shorts, and bravado.  But the thing that sticks out to me most is that one of Andre Agassi's best friends was a pastor, and that his favorite movie is the one about C.S. Lewis entitled Shadowlands.  He's attracted to it because it took suffering seriously and made it make sense.  When I read that, my jaw just dropped, and then I said to myself, Joanna, why not?    Why shouldn't a guy like Andre Agassi like Shadowlands?  Why are you labeling him?  

A good reminder since I'm about to meet about a billion new people.