No Longer Quivering
Spiritual Leprosy
Sins of self-neglect become worse if they cause you to grumble and challenge authority like Miriam who contracted leprosy for challenging Moses. I had been told that a few weeks earlier – that I had spiritual leprosy for challenging the elders. It’s far easier to dismiss a mere, unsubmissive woman who is high on sugar, is a poor steward of her health by neglecting to take her Shaklee vitamins sold by an elder’s wife, and is “sowing discord among the brethren.” (In my case, it was among sisters, though. “The men with the men and the women with the women. That’s how we do things here.” That’s what I heard all the time.)
I was like the crafty culprit who deceived hapless women in their homes while their husbands were away, unable to protect them from the marketplace of ideas and critical thought. When was the last time I’d made a recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook? (Maureen’s was so well worn that she took it apart and put it in a three ring binder – a true sign of a godly wife!) Was I neglecting my Titus 2 duties? Didn’t I grind my own wheat for bread? I definitely wasn’t coming across as sweet, so there had to be some sin in play somewhere, right? “Bloom where you’re planted” was meant to shut me down and shut me up. It was just one of many platitudes and automatic statements we rehearsed and heard rehearsed, subtly but effecively.
I loved Maureen. I still love her. I didn’t know how she did it, though, and I thought that perhaps she had some sage wisdom to help me. She married the son of one of the original members of the original church. As much as I loved her, I could barely take her husband. I find it funny (strange and interesting) that one of her kids married one of the kids of another couple at church who were very similar to Maureen and her husband. Both men had great potential to be rude, demanding hotheads. I’d heard over the phone and witnessed both each husband publicly shame their wives more than once. I heard Maureen’s actually say, “Submit to me, woman!” just before she hung up the phone with me one afternoon – more than twenty years ago. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve talked to her over the phone, and longest conversation took place a decade after we left that cultic church and moved away.
Loveable, Lovely Mountain Laurel
I grew up on a wooded lot, and my mom always said that we couldn’t grow much because of the shade and our acidic soil. When I married and finally moved to a place where I could plant some annuals, I worked crazy hours and didn’t pay much attention to the conditions where I planted things. I quickly remembered that certain plants couldn’t take full sun, and how some couldn’t take a lot of water. My first venture in Maryland when we rented a house allowed my wishful thinking to show through, too. Instead of watching the pattern of how much sun a certain spot took, I planted a whole flat of phlox in a spot that had far too much shade throughout the day. It only had full sun when I had the opportunity to look out the window in the morning. It didn’t last very long.
I moved to Texas in winter, and by springtime there, I was settled in enough to be very attentive to the native plants that grew so well there. Things that I considered to be houseplants grew well in that climate as ground cover, and the types of things that grew well in the moist soil of the woods certainly didn’t do well in the hot, dry, alkaline soil. I quickly took notice of the amazing Texas Mountain Laurel (sephora secundaflora) which bloomed early in the spring. The deep purple blooms were amazing and hung like clusters of grapes, reminding me of wisteria blooms in a way. Even their seed pods were interesting, and they turned into very nicely shaped trees if properly cropped. The very fragrant blooms smelled like grape soda, too, and so much so that you could catch their scent from a good distance away from them. The locals were quite proud of them and had stories to tell about their very poisonous seeds, too.
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