THE next color in our do-it-yourself rain bow is BLUE. Here we may have to over come a bit of emotional resistance, since blue has long been associated with a depressed state of mind. This is highly unfortunate, for blue is, in itself, one of the most beautiful of all colors. What can compare to the cerulean blue of a summer sky? Therefore, in an effort to give it a some what better reputation, I'm assigning it the significance of PROPER USE OF TIME.
There is simply no disputing the fact that throughout the lifetime of each per son, he has exactly the same amount of time as any other person of the same age. (The exception, possibly, is the air traveler who may gain or lose a complete day, or parts thereof, but this is hardly worth quibbling over!) However, the constant cry of most of us in the late twentieth century is this: "I just don't have the time!" Yet I'm convinced that we would have it if we took a good, hard look at the way we use the minutes and hours, and then made changes accordingly.
A recent survey showed that the average American spends forty-two hours each week watching television. One shudders to think of those on the extreme top of the scale who, to balance out the average, watch much more than that! Not long ago I had a disquieting conversation with a young woman who told me that she'd just read her first book in ten years! "Too much TV," she confessed airily. She was not a worldling; she was a Seventh-day Adventist in good and regular standing.
Every minister's wife undoubtedly has her own secret formulas for utilizing those stray bits and pieces of precious time that come her way. Here are a few that I find useful:
1. Always have some reading matter with you, even when you're standing in line at the supermarket perhaps we should say especially when you're standing in line.
2. Listen carefully to instructions and conversations, so that you don't have to waste time hearing the material twice. Every minister's home has many interlocking routines and gears that must mesh. Tucking notes into lunch bags and boxes to remind various family members of their schedules may save you both time and frayed nerves.
3. Establish firm priorities for your activities. If one had to choose between good and bad, of course the choice would be simple. But when it's a matter of choosing between good and good, activity-wise, then a firm, hard look at what's most important just has to be taken. (As an example, a minister's wife who must entertain frequently may have to give up the satisfaction of home-baked desserts in favor of simple fruit and purchased cookies or sherbet and cookies. It's the hospitality that counts, not the gourmet menu, particularly when the latter may cause her to spend hours in the kitchen that she could better spend helping deprived children.)
4. If you get into a bind where you're really desperate and drowning in things that must be done, sit down and make up a 24-hour chart. Be honest. Note in all its stark reality where you believe your time is going.
5. Refuse to let your mind run ahead of you and sit down on a figurative log, waiting for you to catch up. This not only causes you to miss the joy and satisfaction of each moment, but it causes you actually to waste time because you're so distracted.
Ellen Terry, the famous actress of yesteryear, always kept a large basket filled with baby clothes cut and ready to be made for the underprivileged. When any of her friends came to chat with her, she would pull out a piece of sewing, knitting, or crocheting from the basket and politely hand it to her guest. She used to say that the number of finished articles that she sent out every year was amazing, when you consider that every one of them was made by somebody who, if she hadn't had the basket there with things ready, would have talked for hours with folded hands! (I'm not sure whether, if you adopt this plan, it will firm up your friendships, but the idea intrigues me, nonetheless. All the New Guinea babies need little warm flannel sacks to wear; it occurs to me that I must prepare a basket just like this for those sit-down moments.)
Related to our former rainbow color is another with a rather poor reputation. I'm referring to INDIGO. However, I'm going to call that color FLEXIBILITY. An equally good title for it would be RESILIENCE. I must admit, however, that it is with a certain amount of self-consciousness that I approach this quality, since it is one with which I have never set any world records--or even local records, for that matter. But I am more and more convinced that the stresses of the late twentieth century make this quality absolutely vital to health and happiness. A little sentence I saw the other day says it well: "Every day the world turns over on someone who has just been sitting on top of it."
Probably there is no other group of women in the world so desperately in need of FLEXIBILITY as ministers' wives. If even one day out of the 365 progresses to a planned, completely orderly conclusion, this is probably about the best average that can be expected. Amid the "tumult and the shouting" someone has to stand completely calm and unruffled above the storm. Unfortunately, I find even yet that this role is one I play rather poorly.
In my own home Friend Husband usually leaves the house anywhere between 5:30 and 6:30 A.M. hardly the most fetching part of the day. He arrives back home again, if I'm lucky, about 6:30 P.M., and if I'm not, at 8:00 P.M. or later. Quite often, as a result of the accumulated pressures of editing the church paper, attending a proliferation of committees, greeting cordially the incessant stream of visitors who "know you're terribly busy, but I will only take a few minutes," and reading his mountains of mail, some of it bruisingly unchristian, he is afflicted with a headache, and declares anything but the blandest of foods repugnant to him. But headache or no, we have gotten into the habit of eating a very light meal at night, the soup and cottage cheese and fruit kind of thing. Imagine my annoyed surprise one evening when, as he pushed his cottage cheese about with his fork, he remarked pointedly, "I wish once in a while we'd have a really good meal when I come home!"
These, of course, are challenging words to any wife, myself included. Though I re minded him (rather firmly, I fear) that I never know when to expect him, and that I thought I was following his food directives very faithfully, nonetheless I made a firm resolve to prepare a gourmet's delight the very next evening. This I did, rushing home from school to scrub potatoes for baking (having stopped at the store for sour cream), to bread gluten steaks, to crisp a tossed salad, and so on and on. I set the table charmingly, humming a gay little tune to myself. I'd admonished him when he left in the dark, early morning hours not to be late that I would expect him tonight at six o'clock. He had agreed. Or so I thought.
Six o'clock came and went. Six-fifteen came and went. Six-thirty came and went. My baked potatoes were a soggy mess. My hot muffins were hard little dried-out pellets. My disposition was something less than sunny. Then the telephone rang. Cheerfully, the perpetrator of my sufferings chirped, "Hi, I think I'll be getting away from my office within the next few minutes." (It's about a forty-minute drive home at that hour, with Washington traffic in full swing.) I wish I could say that I assured him whatever time he arrived I'd be delighted to see him. Alas, I think I took a lungful of air and didn't repeat the same adjective twice in describing the in justice that had just been done to his faithful, drudging wife. You see, I hadn't the necessary flexibility. Of course, I had to apologize when he arrived home and that may have been good for my character, but enough resilience to have laughed off the incident would have been even better for it.
In a world of so much inconvenience and trouble far more than enough to go around faith is the key to flexibility. Faith that there really is a divine plan for our lives and that these small, abrasive, everyday annoyances are just an inescapable part of the human condition.
The last color of this do-it-yourself rain bow is a top favorite of mine VIOLET. I suppose this color conceivably might rep resent the assorted bruises that one accumulates as he lives the adventure called life. However, let's reverse it. If one adopts the quality I'm about to mention as a part of his working rainbow, he'll avoid some of those bruises; when that's not completely possible, at least he'll take considerable pain out of the ones he does get. I'm referring to a SENSE OF HUMOR, without which any human being is the poorer, and without which a minister's wife is seriously handicapped.
There is much support in the Bible for the need of humor not a ribald, joke-telling variety, but a quiet gleam of amusement in our eyes as we view ourselves. A "merry heart" is recommended as the best of medicines, you know. I like what one physician is reputed to have told his patients: "The surly bird catches the germ." Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the greatest of contemporary theologians, has said that faith and laughter deal with the incongruities of life. Believe me, life is so full of incongruities that if a human being does not laugh he is bound to take himself so seriously that he makes everyone around him miserable.
Certainly I will agree that nowadays in our world there seems little cause for laughter. World conditions, the brashness and revolt of many youth, the splitting of theological hairs, the daily struggle to keep the budget somewhere in the balanced zone and, as one grows older, the always feeling tired, the not being able to accomplish all one used to do so effortlessly all these things depress and suppress the merry heart. Sometimes, driving along in my car, fighting the heavy Washington traffic, breathless lest I be late to work or to social obligations, I feel such a wave of nostalgia for the world I knew as a girl the safe, uncomplicated world that I feel the quick, stinging tears behind my eyelids. But that world will never come again. I often quote A. E. Housman's words to my self: "I, a stranger and afraid, In a world I never made."
While it is important to see the humor in life's tiny episodes, while it is important to laugh at our own pretentiousness, it is equally important not to make others the butt of the joke. To me, this is unchristian, and completely out of keeping with the sweet dignity of a minister's wife. No human being enjoys being impaled on the sharp point of another's humor, much like a helpless butterfly.
The kind of humor I'm referring to is the spontaneous, joyful, bubbling-over of mirthful good will that makes everyone around you feel better just because they've been in your vicinity. Probably it would be beneficial to keep this little poem parody in mind as a working philosophy:
Smile, and the world smiles with you;
Weep, and you'd better carry your own handkerchief!
So there it is your own personal, private, enduring rainbow that you can live under every day of your life. No one can take it away from you, except you. The weather can affect it not at all. As we've discussed its components, you may have decided that some of your colors are stronger than others; the pallid ones may need to be worked on a bit.
To some, happiness comes
All in one satisfying, glowing piece.
Others, by patching together
Little colorful scraps of it,
Manage to salvage enough
To keep warm.
For every dedicated wife who copes with her overcrowded days, supporting her husband's high calling, these little lines seem just right:
I am glad to think
I am. not bound to make the world go right,
But only to discover and to do
With cheerful heart the work that God appoints.
Why not do that work UNDER A RAINBOW?
