Complete Book of Etiquette

Last month I picked up a 1952 copy of Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette: A Guide to Gracious Living from the Covenant Presbyterian Rummage Sale. I was attending a meeting at Covenant and walked past the book table and this tattered copy jumped out at me. To be honest, I bought it for a joke or maybe a sermon illustration here and there. It has some real gems. There is a section on welcoming a new servant to the household, or how to rank the people at your dinner party in order of importance. The section on religious holidays is, for me, pretty darn funny for its outside-looking-in generalizations about Advent, Lent, etc. One dollar very well spent.

The more I read, the more I was reminded that from Amy Vanderbilt’s perspective this was all serious business. There were things happening behind the scenes of the dinner party or the way in which you welcomed people into the home that conveyed something foundational. In one section entitled Making Your Overnight Guest Feel At Home, Vanderbilt lays out the bare essentials a host should provide the guest. The list would put the Holiday Inn or Hilton to shame. Bathrobe and slippers, current magazines and a mystery novel, ash trays and a bed time snack on the bed table; these are the bare essentials. She goes on to list the contents of The Well-Appointed Guest Room which further convey that for Vanderbilt, the host was charged with caring for the needs of the guest whatever they may be including the shining of shoes or the occasional headache. Burden or blessing, it was important to show the guest welcome.

Many of my generation would laugh at Vanderbilt’s “no gray area” commands for gracious living. Myself included. Yet I wonder if we would be remiss if we didn’t recognize that behind the dos and don’ts there was something important about hospitality and how it wasn’t allowed to be a “gray area.” Guests or visitors never went unacknowledged, never walked around without a cup of coffee or someone asking to take their coat. Love them or hate them, a guest is a guest and hospitality was the only response. We could all stand to remember that. Myself included.

The Promise of a Prepetual Tomorrow

Someone reminded me that I have promised a "blog tomorrow" for sometime now. Like the neon sign in the window of the local bar promising "Free Beer Tomorrow", tomorrow seems to either never come or you realize that you are living in the tomorrow you still thought you had.

Today I am feeling like the latter. I am living in the tomorrow that I thought would perpetually be there. A date on a calendar months away, a promise made for something you never think will happen, an amorphous project without a deadline; there is always another day. Until there isn't. Worse yet, when you realize that your far off dreams of what was possible have slipped past you, and are now old-hat. Like a parent wishing that they could see and talk to their child living overseas whenever they wanted but isn't aware of Skype, or video chatting, let alone web-cams. The futuristic "video conferencing" of decades ago is what he or she thinks of when he or she dreams of seeing a grandchild or talking to their son or daughter. Locked into the dream, they miss the reality. Subservient, captive to the "dream" of decades ago, so often we fail to see the truth of today because we have spent too much time dreaming of "what it should look like when it gets here" and not what it really does. If you were waiting for the 1960's dream of video conferencing, you would miss the 2010 reality.

A trip to Best Buy and $50 solves the video conference problem. What seemed far-fetched at one point is now accomplished in an afternoon. Tomorrow is today, and tomorrow will quickly be yesterday if we do not continually renew our dreams of what is possible. I will give you an example. I have a good friend who lives in the Cayman Islands. We both have BlackBerry Smartphones and will frequently send messages back to each other via a program called BlackBerry Messenger. For the first couple of months after I got my BlackBerry, I was amazed that I could be "chatting" with my friend instantly from across oceans. It was cool, but I got over it. If I stayed impressed, convinced that chatting with folks in other nations would be the apex of what I thought to be possible, then I would quickly be left in a cloud of innovative dust.

This is a personal lesson we can learn from the world of technology. We must never believe our dreams are too big. Like the dream of a video conference "machine" in your own home, the danger of seeing an idea as too big, too complicated to ever happen will always result in you being asleep too long and unaware when the tomorrows of the past become the yesterdays of the future.

How this applies to your life, the church, etc? I will leave that up to you.

Busted Stuff Update

My finger isn't 100% by any stretch of the imagination but I am back to normal typing duties.
Look for a blog post tomorrow.