Articles by Daphne Simpkins at Heartlight

Commitment Sunday

daphnesimpkins@prodigy.net (Daphne Simpkins) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500

All the women who owned fur coats did not wear them to church on Commitment Sunday. It was a mostly universal response to the challenge to write down one's financial pledge to the Church -- or was it to God? -- for the coming fiscal year.
Mildred Budge did not own a fur coat, not because she couldn't afford one or want one. There were days when Miss Budge intensely coveted a fur coat so that she could sit on the sofa in her living room and watch Joan Crawford movies, because, Joan and her sisters-in-cinema, knew how to wear a fur coat. And rhinestones. And shoulder pads. And eyebrows. And watching old movies where the stars wore them was really the only time and place that Mildred Budge could actually see herself wearing one for Mildred Budge was an old-fashioned church lady and while she might wear an inherited mink stole, she wouldn't spend money on a fur coat that could be invested in missions instead.

Besides, Mildred Budge had lived long enough to know that she wasn't glamorous -- didn't look like Joan Crawford or Grace Kelly. Mildred Budge looked like other church ladies do mostly year round: a little pear shaped, with hair that was curled, and, occasionally, it went gray but not for long.

And then there was the way that women looked on Commitment Sunday, which could be summed up in this phrase: dressed down. Mildred Budge dressed down most of the time because her wardrobe was limited, but she dressed up on Commitment Sunday the same way she spruced up for the Sunday after Easter.

Every woman and her sister dressed up for Easter Sunday. Not Mildred. She wore her Easter dress the Sunday after, because a woman could find a two-hundred-dollar dress for half price then, and knowing that she would always want a good dress in the springtime, Mildred predicted that her Easter-dress savings could become her Faith Promise pledge.

That wasn't the way the Faith Promise plan was proposed at church.
Mildred Budge had long since given up trying to memorize the formula for having faith that God would supply an extra abundance of money for missions through His members, and when He did, that was supposed to become one's Faith Promise pledge. Only when you filled out the small blue card that was handed out after the missions conference week when everyone was fired up about evangelism, you sat there holding that pencil waiting for the revelation or inspiration to fill in the dollar amount, and Mildred's faith didn't produce that number. Her hopeful reasoning did. She had a lively and reasonable faith that God would give her an Easter dress the week after Easter and that she would save enough in her dress budget to allocate for the Faith Promise fund. It was a kind of backhanded way of participating in this church activity, but it was Miss Budge's way.

The annual pledge made on Commitment Sunday was different. That was a standard ten percent -- before taxes. Your basic tithe. But Mildred didn't like the legalism of that word any more than she liked the words "fiscal year" since any Christian worth her salt or the price of a ruby could tell you that God didn't measure time that way -- never had. How did God measure, Mildred wondered. A tithe was a good way to start but not a definitive answer if you were talking about the Master of the universe who had exhaled His own life-giving breath into you, put shoes on your feet, regularly gave you a good spring dress each year just as if you were a lily of the field, and stocked Blue Bell ice cream in your freezer when it was buy one, get one free at Foodworld.

Mildred Budge agreed with the priests of the Old Testament that a tithe was a given. But ten percent of her annual income felt dry, uninspired, joyless, and when you dressed down in order to write down the words, the pledge felt oddly -- and she wasn't judging others -- legally accurate and illegitimate all at the same time. God knew her bank account and the state of her wardrobe and, more significantly, what security felt like to her and what generosity felt like to her and how she understood that when He blessed her, it was in streams of joy -- a kind of manna from heaven -- that didn't have a real price tag the way real art doesn't though people put prices on it to trade it. Grace wasn't for sale or trade.

So Mildred dressed up on Commitment Sunday because she loved any kind of ritual that encouraged family members in a church to think about the family budget. Miss Budge owned a rhinestone pin too big for her blouse, so she attached it to her purse, and she was careful with her eyebrows -- not Joan Crawford bold -- but fully alive, I've-got-my-wits-about-me eyebrows, though her hand trembled a bit when she took up the small pew pencil.

When she confronted the pale blue pledge card with the little lines and squares to check, Miss Budge obligingly wrote down ten percent, like always. Then, she thoughtfully added a plus sign (okay, it was a cross), and because she was sentimental (and why had they decided sentiment was a second-rate attitude in church?), the old spinster drew a heart around the cross. Hers. And then, in the spirit of renewing her vows of faith, the church lady signed her name one more time: Mildred Budge.

Daphne Simpkins has written over two hundred essays and stories appearing in a variety of national periodicals including The Chicago Tribune. Her memoir The Long Good Night was excerpted in The Christian Century and is available through Amazon, www.eerdmans.com and other bookstores. Merry Christmas Miss Budge! is offered digitally through AmazonShorts. Miss Simpkins teaches writing at Auburn University Montgomery and is a member of the Alabama Humanities Foundation Speakers Bureau.

Jesus, Send the Cops

daphnesimpkins@prodigy.net (Daphne Simpkins) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Mildred Budge was just steering out of Wal-Mart when an ambulance veered in and stopped by the Main entrance to the parking lot. Mildred cast a concerned glance over her shoulder; and if she had looked too long, she wouldn't have seen the speeding white Hummer that turned short and barely missed sending her to heaven in that moment.

"Jesus, send the cops!" she prayed, reaching the traffic light as it turned red.

Like the other drivers, Millie Budge sat with her tidy foot on the brakes, her black and red Mini-Cooper pulsing to the jive tempo of idling machinery, and she marveled that she was not nearly as impatient as her car telegraphed to other drivers. Looking about, she smiled diffidently as the unexpected gaze of a trucker found hers. Then, Miss Budge flushed when he tapped two grease-stained fingers to his brow and mouthed the old-fashioned words, "Howdy, ma'am."

Mildred had always liked men who had a relationship with petroleum-based products and felt inexplicably flattered to be acknowledged by one who obviously was a master of his destiny on the road. She automatically reached to tighten her bra strap but stopped, sending her fingers to fluff the curls at the back of her head instead.

The trucker, assuming that the curl fluffing was a form of come hither, let his blood-shot eyes shine with greeting. Then, he pressed a button and his big truck rocked with noise, and Mildred thought to herself: "I am the cause of a public disturbance!" The idea pleased the staid church woman enormously. If the truck driver with the grease-stained hands had been standing beneath a balcony serenading her with violinists, Mildred Budge could not have been more flattered. Her smile grew.

Instantly, she traveled back in time on decades of romance-induced smiles, looking up into the rearview mirror expecting to find her girlish dimples which she had been famous for at 17, but all she saw now were the deepest kinds of wrinkles that no face cream could fix, and she certainly wasn't going to pump poison into the temple of the Lord by buying Botox treatments. Even though it was against her common sense and religion, Mildred Budge always watched the Botox commercials. And those ones about dermabrasion. She wasn't sure what dermabrasion meant, really, but she thought it had something to do with scraping away time—dusting the layers of wrinkles on one's face with a miniature version of a floor polishing machine. Repenting of one's sins in prayers seemed a simpler matter, and while one resisted repenting, the effects were youthening and refreshing.

Proud that she had resisted the powerful pull of a poisoned smile (though she was still thinking about dermabrasion), Mildred prepared to attempt an artless shoulder shrug (okay, her bra strap was slipping!) that she had recently seen resurrected by the models on "Deal or No Deal" when they opened the money cases for Howie Mandel, who was astonishingly attractive for a bald man wearing an earring. Miss B. had just finished her shoulder roll, when something fast flashed in her rearview mirror, and she saw the reckless racing return of the white Hummer that had found its destination behind her, then hung a U-ie, and was heading violently back toward her.

The Hummer was coming right at her, going to send Miss Budge to heaven this time for sure before she was ready to go, and in that instant with passion pulsing to the right of her and her apparently certain death coming from the rear, Mildred Budge remembered the ambulance parked in front of Wal-Mart -- and they could get to her fast if it came to that-- and she said, "Thank you, Jesus for preparing our way before us." And as soon as she did, grace happened. The heavens opened up and the red light blinked out, replaced by the friendly green. Miss Budge looked regretfully up at the trucker, whose oversized truck didn't have the pick up her red and black Mini-Cooper did.

So he wouldn't think her rude, Millie Budge trilled her fingers in the air as if she were still 17, toed the gas pedal, taking off delicately into the traffic, only to have her graceful, grace-ordained, heaven-blessed departure marred by the sudden swerve of that nervy white Hummer that peeled past the truck.

With all of the insolence of youth at its worst, the Hummer scorched past the two would-be, could-be almost acquaintances participating in the dance of daylight, and Mildred, with her just bought milk in the back seat needing to be in the refrigerator and grateful for the conveniently parked ambulance at the ready in front of Wal-Mart but apparently not needed for her, prayed her ambulance prayer anyway: "Lord, be merciful to us, we're strangers. Sinners," she corrected with a frown, as she saw a car literally pushed off the road by the bullying Hummer. Then the church lady added a prayerful P.S. that incongruously arose to her lips right after an expression of gratitude for grace: "Jesus, send the cops."

The Adventures of Mildred Budge are short stories by Daphne Simpkins that feature a church lady of a discreet age who is salt and light in the secular world around her. Thus, Miss Budge goes where Jesus would go as she loves and reaches out to the lost in the way that church ladies do. Tensions occur. Entertainment happens. People change, and for our heroine who is daily being made a little more like Jesus, those changes most often occur as a budge here or there rather than a giant leap of faith.