This is the second of the ‘Susie Stories’… The first was published in the January 2001 issue of the Wesley Chapel Circuit Rider, (It appears below on this site…) while this one appeared in the December issue that same year.

Shortly before Christmas, one year in high school, Susie and a girl friend read an article about baking Christmas breads in coffee cans and decided to try it themselves. After working out the ingredients and getting the coffee cans, etc., together, they spent several hours mixing, pouring, and baking. The finished products were very pretty to look at. But that was all you could do! I offered to take them home to the farm and try to drill holes in them to make candleholders out of them!
Having started the year out with a ‘Susie’ story it seems appropriate to finish it with one as well. Susie and I, you will recall, played in the same crib as babies and, in spite of not seeing each other for years at a time, were very close friends during most of our junior and senior high school years. As I said before, the only home she had known had been a house trailer that she shared with her mother. True, it had been moved, once, to a different town and school district, but it was still their home. And as I had also explained before, having grown up with a single parent during a time when such things were not ‘the norm’ had helped her to become a very out-going and open-minded female, again at a time before such a thing was commonly accepted.
One would expect that living in a home with no men would encourage a girl to excel in the ‘womanly’ arts, as they were described at the time, such as cooking, cleaning, etc. But as a forerunner of today’s ‘modern woman’, Susie had distained all but a rudimentary education in such things. True, she was responsible for taking care of the house, and generally prepared her own meals, and often those of her mother, but generally avoided anything that involved more than basic skills. Indeed, some of her misadventures in cooking became legend among my friends at the time.
A second story occurred the summer after we each had graduated from high school. Over time, most of my friends had met Susie and some of them developed their own ‘unique’ relationships with her. Jeff and Dave might each drop by two or three times a week, while I would usually be by three to five times a week. She also had a boy friend, a childhood sweetheart that she had gotten back in touch with and was seeing regularly. (They eventually married the last I heard.) And then she received a letter from a long-time pen pal wanting to stop and meet her in person while traveling across the country. I’m not really sure how long he stayed, but it seemed like about a week.
During this time her mother’s job and habits left Susie with pretty much having the house to herself. Because of this, we had all gotten into the habit of dropping in at just about any time of the day or night, and seldom saw one another while there. (High school graduates in 1971 were very independent!) And she would generally try to feed us. On this particular week, she fixed a big pot of spaghetti on Sunday to feed her pen pal. As each of us would drop by during the week, she would add a little water to it and reheat it. By the end of the week, we were laughing about eating ‘spaghetti soup’!
There are two points I can make from these stories. The first is this… Susie was the kind of person who would give freely of all that she had to give, be it time, food, advice, or encouragement. You never needed to ask, you just knew that she was there and would do her best to be a good person and a good friend. We could all learn from her example!
My second point is a little deeper…during my visits we would often have our ‘brother-sister’ talks, as she called them, and Susie would open up and tell me what was really on her mind. She might tell me how Dave had stopped around midnight to discuss how unfair life was, in general, and to him specifically. Or she might let me know how Jeff usually stopped in the wee hours of the morning to carry on serious discussions on logic and philosophy. What I learned, though, was this…She wasn’t always happy about Dave and Jeff stopping by in the middle of the night! And during this particular week she talked about how unfair it had been for her pen pal to “just invite himself in” like he had. She never seemed to talk much about what she and her boyfriend were doing, but she would occasionally tell me about various problems they might be having. But when I would advise her to tell each of them about her concerns she would flat out refuse! I tried to explain to her that “You can’t make everybody happy all of the time! In life everybody has to make choices, and sometimes somebody will be hurt by those choices! But they have to be made!” But for a very long time, she refused to accept that as an option! She wanted to be all things to all people!
Many of us want to be all things to all people! We want our friends and co-workers to see us as ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ or ‘bad’, or whatever the current term is, and still be seen as an ‘individual’. We want our parents (or children) to be proud of us. We want to be a part of the community, a part of the ‘in-crowd’, and a part of society and yet be admired for living our own lives. We want to be known as ‘fun-loving’ and ‘hard-working’ all at the same time. And oh yes, we really want to be known as Christians!
Guess what? IT CAN’T BE DONE!!! Being a Christian is not like putting on a special hat or badge. You don’t take off your ‘I Love Jesus’ hat to attend the next function. It is a way of life, not a social stepping-stone. Being a Christian may not always seem ‘cool’ or ‘hip’, and standing up for Christian values may not always be admired by the community or society. But NOT standing up for them will guarantee the eventual downfall of that community or society.
This year, as we celebrate the birth of our Lord, let each of us take a moment to consider what being a Christian means to us, and what it should mean in our lives. And if it seems as though there are conflicts to deal with between the two, the advice that I gave to Susie thirty years ago still applies today, “You can’t make everybody happy all of the time! In life everybody has to make choices, and sometimes somebody will be hurt by those choices!” May your choices be made prayerfully and with full regard as to what it means to really be a Christian.