The Gospel Coalition

GUEST POST: Josh Blunt

In the previous three posts, I have been privileged to share some reflections on the way my training as a postmodern, seeker-focused church planter gave way to a rediscovery of an ordinary means of grace model.  As my congregation and I navigated those years, the final nail in the coffin of our original attractional bias was way in which it crippled us from handling disharmony, unclarity, and misbehavior through explicit teaching and firm governance.

Church discipline, unresolved conflict, clarifying gender roles, and authoritative church governance all add up to one thing:  ANTI-attraction.  When your main purpose is to get people in the door, it would seem that the less said about these topics, the better.  The reality is that modern, American culture (especially mainstream religious culture) has a passionate aversion to authority, conflict, countercultural stances, and meddling in people’s private lives.  If your goal is uninterrupted church growth, then every battle for church purity is lost simply because it was begun.

As our paradigm shift exposed mixed agendas and expectations within our congregation, unmentionables erupted.  Many who had been attracted when church might become anything balked when it actually became that thing.  The organizational fission that ensued was a product of an unintentional bait-and-switch, perpetrated by our early adherence to attractional church-growth methodology.

In our attempt to attract a crowd, we had been most things to most people.  In transforming a crowd into a governable congregation, we had yanked the rug out from under some folks and drawn a line in the sand.  Those with denominationally-conditioned expectations about religious culture and interpersonal ethics were appalled.  They thought church was for nice people who make one another feel nice and who perennially focus on what is nice.  I don’t entirely blame them for their surprise and disappointment – our methods had enabled them in that misunderstanding in exchange for their presence.

We slogged through church discipline cases and attempted to clarify our position on human sexuality, marriage, divorce, and family.  We brought long-standing conflicts and incompatible models of communication out into the light of scripture and mutual accountability.  We articulated a complimentarian understanding of gender roles based on our reading of scripture and the pleas of recently converted women for their husbands’ training and edification.  We began the work of establishing clear lines of accountability and discipline among our leaders and staff.

The result of all this decidedly repellent activity was that our congregation was masterfully pruned by the Holy Spirit.  Those who had an axe to grind with authority and discipline voted with their feet.  Those who worshipped at the altar of niceness headed for more pleasant pastures.  Those who savored growth and size left, ironically, because they disliked people leaving.  In the end, we were numerically diminished, bedraggled, sobered, chastened, and publicly defamed.

We were also a far more mature, infinitely more compelling, more deeply united, and vastly more gospel-centered group of people.  We were convinced that the Church was Christ’s Bride not ours, that she existed for his good pleasure rather than ours, and that our congregation was only a temporal and fleeting manifestation of something far more eternal and perfected.  To put it another way, we were a true church.

Gaining that cost us almost everything.  As givers exited, costs of salaries and facilities became mutually exclusive.  Our remaining assets were transferred to a larger church with plans for a fresh restart in our newly constructed facility.  Staff members, including me, were released to look for new ministries.  The remnant who had matured so much was dispersed to bless and edify other congregations.  What wasn’t lost was the transformation we had experienced.  Faithful saints had weathered the storm and matured as they discipled converts.  New believers had been tested by fire and weathered the storm as emerging leaders.  Pastors had learned invaluable lessons and been humbled by God’s unsearchable sovereignty over the work of their hands.

I still believe in church planting.  I would simply advise planters to start with an ordinary means of grace model.  This requires the strong support of a healthy, likeminded mother congregation throughout a slower, more labor-intensive maturation process.  It takes an intentional commitment to abandon fads and gimmicks, to hold fast to the Bible in both content and methodology.  And it takes a willingness to do the painstaking work of patient contextualization, continually discerning the fine line between inspired innovations and unbiblical shortcuts.  Christ promises to build his Church; if he promises to do the work, why would we trust our methodology over his?  Why would we employ novelties of the last two decades instead of methods that succeeded for the last two millennia?  I suggest we make simple the new sexy, and ordinary the new extraordinary.

GUEST POST: Josh Blunt

As I intimated in my last post, the journey through a decade of church planting led my congregation and me to reconsider our early bias toward an attractional, seeker-driven model.  I also indicated that this reconsideration led us into an ordinary means of grace paradigm, focused on unadorned, expository preaching, regular celebration of the sacraments, and prayer, as well as the marks of the true Church.

This shift, occurring in the middle of my tenure, caused some radical changes in our life together as a congregation.  What ensued was not a panacea of blissful fellowship and peace.  It was, rather, a period of uprooting and refining that began with bold, unapologetic proclamation of God’s Word.  The remarkable thing was how quickly this first shift began to tear the fabric of our fellowship and complicate our life together.

To explain this, I should mention that we planted in a locale already dominated by our own denominational brand.  We felt we would still be fruitful, since we were ministering in a way that was sufficiently different from other churches in our tradition (contemporary and attractional), and because we were reaching the unchurched.  What we ended up with, however, was an equal mix of three groups:  A) religious people from our tradition, B) formerly religious people from other traditions, and C) formerly irreligious people who converted through our ministry.

The strategic strength (and ecclesiological weakness) of the attractional model was that all three groups heard winsome positives that seemingly affirmed their preferences.  Simultaneously, no group felt confronted with unpleasant limits or boundaries that would offend them or challenge their presuppositions.  In effect, the attractional model allowed us to be fuzzy enough to draw people with a wide variety of spiritual agendas, each one fully expecting that the new congregation would progress into exactly the kind of church he preferred.

In other words, we were a ticking time bomb of agenda disharmony.  One of the ways this attractional ambiguity most crippled us was in the basic elements of our life together.  Our discipleship of new believers, our prayer culture, and our common understanding of the sacraments had been too anemic in the attractional years, and had failed to bring true unity.  We had intended to “major in the majors and minor in the minors,” but instead had merely “agreed on the agreeables and avoided the avoidables.”

Discipleship was our greatest weakness.  In our zeal to attract and retain, we never made time for simple, repeatable, biblical formation of each person’s faith and practice.  The highly religious remained content in their pharisaism, the formerly religious struggled to articulate their newfound convictions, and the formerly irreligious were hungry but helpless without mature mentors.  Our efforts to convert existing small groups into more disciple-producing formats sparked conflict because they chafed against the “fun-and-fellowship-only” bias some had.  In other words, not all of us wanted to grow (at least not in front of one another) and attractional church had somehow legitimized that option.

Similarly, our efforts to pray together struggled to get off the ground.  The attractional model had kept us busy baiting the Sunday morning hook, and very few felt convicted that prayer was the real work of ministry.  We had a committed prayer team who were faithful to invite others, but our disinclination toward longer intercessions in public worship and our weak discipleship habits gave newer converts little opportunity to observe or be formed by public prayer before joining the conversation.  As we peppered more prayer on all levels of life together, there was pushback from some who felt exposed or stretched into discomfort that hadn’t been advertised in our attractional days.

Finally, our understanding of the sacraments evolved, as well.  We adopted a more frequent, reverent, and liturgically consistent celebration of the Lord’s Supper.  We also grew more bold in our defense of our denomination’s paedobaptist theology.  Attractional thinking had led us to soft sell our position and welcome those who espoused believer baptism.  This tolerance was still affirmed; however, we began to realize we had worked so hard at honoring the exception that we had failed to champion the rule.  As we deepened in our understanding of the sacraments, we realized that our membership classes had inadequately trained our people to articulate a robust appreciation for these important means of grace.

As these changes continued to expose previously unchallenged assumptions and differing preferences, we began to experience and struggle with “unmentionables.”  In my final post, I will share how unresolved conflict, issues of church discipline, and clarifications about gender roles all became important in our journey and further highlighted the ways in which being attractional had left us less governable and sustainable in the end.

GUEST POST: Josh Blunt

As a church planter in the early part of this century, I had been trained well at seminary to offer a workmanlike (here read, “including explicit indication that original languages had been thoroughly exegeted”) and pleasing (here read, “relatively short in length, delightfully delivered, and winsome in tone”) message each Sunday.  I had been educated in all the nuances and catchphrases that would help me avoid the hangups likely to be on the minds of listeners in my particular tradition.

Trips to conferences at seeker-focused churches confirmed these values and added the expectation that messages should include media, drama, accessible illustrations, and LOTS of trendy coffee.  I was encouraged to see proclamation as the nutrition unchurched people desperately needed but for which they hadn’t yet acquired a taste.  I was invited to envision preachers as skilled chefs who could artfully encapsulate bitter doses of doctrine in palatable spoonfuls of oration spiced with love and grace.

Much of this came across as good, logical advice – nobody wants to bore saints or seekers when talking about something as exquisite as the gospel.  The intent was to call proclaimers to be humble, excellent workers who would never besmirch the Good News by bad delivery.  The problem, though, lay in the basic, internal posture we were asked to adopt when bringing the Word to sinful, human listeners: deferential apology.  As in, “I’m sorry I have to ruin the moment now, but this IS church, and we DO have to mention sin, hell, and the cross of Jesus from time to time.  This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you…”

This was also true in worship, in evangelism, and in outreach.  Whenever the gospel was proclaimed publicly, we tended to focus on delivery and form, searching for the least common denominator of doctrinal complexity, moral polarity, and inflammatory absolutism.  The do-or-die scramble to build the congregation numerically made tickling ears an especially tempting objective for me.  While I believe the Lord helped me avoid blatant pandering, I know I was a timorous teacher at certain junctures, speaking the right things with uncomfortable reticence.

About 4-5 years in, something happened that changed my faith in unadorned preaching and evangelism.  There were finally enough true converts in our congregation (God had sovereignly used our clumsy proclamation to win believers) that I could track the sources of feedback I received.  The recently lost-and-found WERE frustrated with me – but for cutting messages short, trimming content, and watching the clock!  Those who had demanded curt, topical homilies were cradle-to-grave types.  Denominational veterans claimed to be shielding newbies from discomfort, but the newcomers were clamoring for biblical depth and blunt confrontation.

What was happening?  God was exposing a lie that had held us captive for years.  He was proving that his Word is fully sufficient, and that true converts thirst for it like a desert thirsts for rain.  Many who had grown up in the faith had hearts that were calloused toward the Truth.  Years of comfortable church had led them to hear the Word but excuse themselves from practicing it, steadily becoming self-deceived.  They projected this hard-heartedness onto newcomers, like the kids in the old Life Cereal commercials:  “Try teaching that to Mikey the Seeker – he HATES everything… Heyyyy…  Mikey LIKES it!”  Unfortunately, some never noticed or accepted that new believers were craving pure spiritual milk and even graduating to meat ahead of them.

So, halfway through our journey, we let go of our timidity and started to change things.  I steadily lengthened my messages from 30 minutes to 45 on average and intentionally addressed longer chunks of scripture.  We gained this time by ceasing our practice of allowing questions and comments (which sometimes devolved into rebuttals) after the message.  I adopted a more expository style, decreased the use of certain video gimmicks and technology, and planned fewer strictly topical series.  We increased the use of hymnody and began more public recitation of creeds, confessions, and the Lord’s Prayer.  Our evangelism methods focused more on long term service, deep relationship, and truth telling, rather than hit-and-run PR campaigns for our brand.  In other words, we began to treat God’s Word as our delight, his commands as anything but burdensome, and the Gospel as something of which we were completely unashamed.

I’d love to tell you it magically fixed everything.  It didn’t.  It DID give us a new and infinitely more biblically-defensible set of problems, and it DID initiate a protracted season of pruning and refinement that left a far more faithful and joy-filled remnant in the end.  You’ll hear more about how that played out in our life, relationships, and governance over my next two posts.

GUEST POST: Josh Blunt

I spent the better part of the last eleven years as a church planter in a small, protestant denomination known as the RCA.  I was trained and vetted at the height of the attractional church model’s heyday, when pastors flocked to conferences at Saddleback and Willow Creek for inspiration and when Rob Bell’s fledgling ministry at Mars Hill just seemed quirky and innocuous.  Those were days in which innovation was king and the postmodern landscape of the culture around us promised to flow with milk and honey if we could only crack the code and infiltrate it for Jesus.

It was also the dawn of my denomination’s foray into intentional church planting, a season in which young, idealistic, evangelical pastors emerging from seminaries were encouraged to bypass the quagmire of tradition, bureaucracy, and stasis inherent in existing churches.  We were enjoined to boldly go where no RCA pastors had gone before, claiming a new share in the Harvest for an increasingly obscure yet historically evangelical family of believers.

The RCA has always been a mixed denomination, boasting of its ability to balance both mainline and evangelical elements in one household.  Nevertheless, our denominational landscape at the time seemed divided into two camps:

1)  traditional methodology + progressive theology = mainline protestantism

2)  progressive methodology + traditional theology = evangelicalism

The assumption in church planting circles was that, at least in terms of denominational survival, equation #1 led to death and equation #2 was the path to life.  In this sense, planters genuinely believed that we and our new churches were going to be the great hope for the next generation of RCA believers.

Many within our little tribe insisted that church planting could restore our dwindling numbers, and even revitalize existing congregations who would parent new, daughter congregations.  This plan seemed explicitly biblical and patently apostolic to me then, and it still does now – healthy, biblical, new congregations and church networks DO reach new people and expand the Kingdom.  When I started out as a planter, however, most of us assumed that this growth potential would be largely connected to the new congregations’ ability to more nimbly and rapidly deploy progressive, attractional church methodology.  In other words, we would adapt to the emerging needs of unbelievers far more easily, having fewer sacred cows to kill along the way.

I can assure you that no one foisted this rationale on me explicitly or activistically.  All the appropriate reverence and spiritual language one would expect in churchmanship were judiciously injected along the way.  I heard no one openly advocating for a radical abandonment of the ordinary means of grace on which all believers have historically depended for sustenance (God’s Word, the sacraments, and prayer), nor did anyone imply that the true Church should no longer be marked by discipline, purity in proclamation, or right administration of the sacraments.  Rather, an excessive optimism about progressive methodology and focus on attractional church accoutrements steadily overshadowed our faith in such means.  This blind preference was instilled by the emphasis and tone of well-intentioned and hopeful people, not by any strategic rhetoric from jaded deconstructionists.

In the end, it really doesn’t matter how the idea got into my head or the heads of other planters of my era – what matters is how it affected us and the churches we planted, and how the Holy Spirit has challenged and exposed our assumptions along the way.  What I have learned, and what Kevin has graciously invited me to convey through a short series of posts here, is that the future of ministry in historical denominations can’t be reduced to equation #1 OR #2 above.  Whether a congregation is being freshly planted, or revitalized over time, I believe the math is something much more akin to this:

3)  ordinary, historic methodology + orthodox, gospel-focused theology + patient, painstaking contextualization = sustainable fruitfulness

Over my next posts, I will offer some of the things I observed over the course of my decade-long church planting journey.  I will explain the transformation my congregation and I underwent as our adherence to an attractional, progressive model of methodology inevitably worked against our traditional theology and tore irreparable rifts in the fabric of our fellowship.  I will describe the attempts we made to change horses midstream and how they helped.  I will also show how the previously lost and unchurched perceived each model, and how the pre-churched and re-churched among us did, as well.  These dynamics tended to revolve around three key areas, each of which will be a focus in my remaining posts:

-  Proclamation (Preaching of the Word, Worship, Evangelism)

-  Life Together (Prayer, Discipleship, Sacraments)

-  Unmentionables (Discipline, Conflict, Gender Roles, and Governance)

Three days ago in the summer of 1969, Apollo 11 became the first manned mission to land on the moon. One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.

Of course, it makes perfect sense that the whole thing could have been a hoax.

(Thanks to my witty readers for proposing this and several forthcoming funnies.)

Sadly the massacre in Aurora, Colorado was not the first of its kind. Last year I wrote on “The Tuscon Tragedy and the Gift of Moral Language.”  The upshot of the article from 18 months ago may have relevance now as pundits speculate about “what snapped” in the alleged killer:

We instinctively resort to passive speech, unable to bear the thought (let alone utter the words) that a wicked person has perpetrated a wicked crime. The human heart is desperately sinful and capable of despicable sins. Of course, no one commends the crime, but few are willing to condemn the criminal either. In such a world we are no longer moral beings with the propensity for great acts of righteousness and great acts of evil. We are instead, at least when we are bad, the mere product of our circumstances, our society, our upbringing, our biochemistry, or our hurts. The triumph of the therapeutic is nearly complete.

Read the whole thing.

Guest Blogger: Jason Helopoulos

The PCA erected a study committee to examine the Insider Movement in foreign missions and Bible translation. This movement has sought to use language that is less offensive and more culturally sensitive to particular people groups (particularly Muslim) when translating the Scriptures. The key issue has been the translation of words related to Christ’s Sonship. The PCA study committee reported the first half of their report at this year’s General Assembly. This is from the conclusion of the report:

“Indeed, to change or substitute non-familial or social familial terms with the common biological terms in Scripture is to move in a direction contrary to Scriptural intent. Therefore, if a translator seeks to find a more “culturally responsible” or “culturally sensitive” form because the word in the target language arguably contains primary or secondary nuances that differ from the original language (Greek), this aim does not warrant the translator’s selecting a less than explicit term for the Son of God. The biological sonship term may need to be explained, but it cannot be substituted without compromising the revelation of Christ’s person. Translation decisions that violate these parameters functionally eclipse the perspicuous verbal authority of Scripture regarding the Son of God. By truncating the identity of Christ in the minds of the reader, replacement terms can even distort the gospel.

No matter our motivation, there is no pure Gospel apart from the ontological and incarnational sonship of Jesus Christ. Some will protest:sonship and messiah-ship are functionally interchangeable. To be sure, the redemptive-historical theme of Scripture interweaves Christ’s kingly and messianic functions with his sonship status. But the Christological fabric becomes unraveled when we rip the messianic warp from the filial woof. We cannot speak of Christ as Messiah apart from understanding that regal and redemptive functioning in light of him being the Son of God. We also cannot speak of his exalted Sonship apart from his reign as King. Sonship and regal redemptive reign are mutually informative and indivisible; but though the ideas share referentiality, their meanings are not identical.So when the biblical authors employ language laden with such distinct qualities, we have no interpretive right to regard that language as negotiable.

And it is because Jesus is Son of God that we must speak of Christians as adopted sons and daughters of God. We must express Gospel truth in a way that honors the true familial expressions of Scripture, and avoids compromise by unintentional truncation or even well intended yet obstructive contextualization. We cannot speak of the true Gospel apart from the filial character of our union with Christ, for we are united to the Son of God and no one else. The filial and familial language of the Gospel then is not contextually optional; it is transcendently central. Paul’s warnings in Galatians 1 ought give us terrifying pause. Removing familial language eclipses the Christ of the Gospel and it distorts the Gospel of Christ. Ultimately an incognito Christ is a misrepresented Christ. A misrepresented Christ is a false gospel. A false gospel is the turf of the sons of darkness. . . . Some may be mercifully rescued; others will die in their sins. The stakes are that high.”

It’s later than usual, but still very much worth the wait. I’ll be on vacation for the next several weeks. Normally, my summer break is largely used as a study leave. This year is a bit different. I’ll still be taking several days to read and write (no arithmetic), but I won’t have time for a big project. That’s because my family is moving houses next week (from Lansing to East Lansing). We’ll be in the new house a grand total of one night before leaving the next morning for Colorado. While in Colorado, my wife and I will leave the kids behind and fly to beautiful Prince Edward Island for a conference masquerading as an anniversary trip. We’ll head back to Colorado, stay another week, and then return home to Michigan in the middle of August.

Should be busy and should be fun.

During the next few weeks I’ll blog some and mix in several guest bloggers. You’ll hear from Jason Helopoulos (and familiar guest) and other members of our church staff. Josh Blunt, a pastor friend of mine, will lead things off next week with a series of excellent posts about what he learned through the bumps and bruises of church planting.

You may also get a few extra doses of video humor.

It’s been remarkable to see the relativists head for the hills in light of the Penn State sex abuse scandal. The moral outrage has been loud and immense (and justified). I’ve heard no one appeal to diversity, multiculturalism, situational histories, or different ways of being. Every person I’ve talked to, every sports talk commentator I’ve heard, every article I’ve read—they’ve all said the same thing: the abuse was wrong, the cover-up was wrong, the priorities of the school were wrong. Shame on everyone.

Which has me wondering why some sins are so obviously scandalous in our culture and others are not. The difference, as best as I can figure it, has to do with victimization. In general, Americans (like most people I imagine) don’t want innocent people to be hurt through no fault of their own. The equation is simple: if your actions make someone else suffer, they are wrong. It’s easy to see this logic at work in the Jerry Sandusky case. A grown man molests underage boys for his own perverse pleasure and to their great detriment. He wins; they lose. Big time. The moral calculus is clear. And in this case, spot on.

But this line of moral reasoning has its limits. Actions can be wrong whether they visibly hurt someone or not. And actions that provoke suffering or discomfort or disappointment in others (be it emotional or physical) are not always evil. Think of spanking or speed limits or prohibiting harmful substances. Some victimless crimes are still crimes, and sometimes insisting on the right thing produces “victims.”

Our culture is deeply moral. All our fiercest debates–from abortion to homosexuality to budget cuts and taxes–are about morality. What is fair? What is just? What is right? The problem is that too many Americans only trade in one currency of conviction. It’s victimization or nothing at all. This is why the pro-life movement has (rightly) been able to make some headway. Abortion hurts the women who get them and manifestly hurts the children it strikes dead. We can easily show others (if not always persuade them) that abortion causes suffering. There is no higher moral high ground in America.

The same logic works powerfully against Christians when it comes to homosexuality. Since the physical ailments associated with homosexual behavior have been buried deep in the ocean of “don’t you dare go there” there is little accepted moral force left on our side. What could possibly be wrong with two consenting adults expressing their love in private ways mutually agreed upon? No one is hurt by homosexuality. How is your marriage ruined by two other people getting married? Those are the arguments that are almost unassailable given our cultural climate. What’s more, it’s easy to see how advocates of traditional marriage quickly fall on the wrong side of the prevailing moral calculus. We are the oppressors. We are the ones causing innocent people to suffer. We make ourselves happy at the expense of others. Christians are the Jerry Sanduskys of the world.

Think of almost any issue: if you can find a victim, you can make a case. If not, you’ll likely end up the victimizer. So Christians can get quick traction in society by opposing sex trafficking. The oppression is obvious; the sin is scandalous. But we get little traction in opposing premarital sex and great pushback in opposing homosexual behavior. Abortion can go either way because the baby is a victim but denying the woman her choice seems cruel too. Economic matters are also tricky. Cutting the budget may hurt the poor, but confiscatory taxation feels unfair.

The postmodern world knows only one form of moral reasoning: show me the victim. And Christians in this country have played into their hand over the last decades by constantly presenting themselves as oppressed, persecuted, and discriminated against. While all those charges may be true at times, we’ve played that hand so frequently that it’s too late to realize the deck is now stacked against us.

In light of this reality, two things must be done.

First, we must do more to show the long term consequences of seemingly innocent behavior. This is not a call to play the victim card but to do our homework. The sexual revolution of the 1960s seemed like a good idea at the time. But now we know that communities were made weaker, women have not been made happier, and children have been put at greater risk. Just because everyone seems happy with the sin right now doesn’t mean people won’t suffer in the long term. Just look at no-fault divorce.

Second, and more important, as Christians we need to explain the true nature of sin. While oppression is always sin, sin cannot be defined solely as oppression. Sin is lawlessness (I John 3:4). An action is morally praiseworthy or blameworthy based on God’s standard. This definition will not be accepted by many, for God has largely been removed from our culture’s definition of evil. But try we must. The culture war is not the point except to the degree that God is the point. And our God rests too inconsequentially upon our country and our churches. The world needs to see the true nature of sin as God-defiant. Only then will it know the true nature of our sin-defiant Savior.

I’ve long thought that a hundred years hence dentistry will be among our civilization’s more embarrassing moments. Nothing against the profession. Our teeth certainly are less mangled than they used to be. But I assume one day we will progress far enough as a race that scraping the inside of our mouths with metal picks and turbo-suction straws will eventually look like the barbarism it is. Medieval docs used a lot of leeches. We put drills in the back of our throats. Feels like there must be a better way.

After yesterday, I’m ready to put eye exams in the same category.

Again, lots of love for all the fine folks who keep me seeing year after year. Only the Lord knows where I’d be without the miracle of glasses. (Literally, I would be so lost somewhere only the Lord would know my whereabouts.) But for all the blessings eye doctors have bestowed on the watching world (a fuzzily watching though it be), it’s hard not to conclude that the eye appointment wasn’t crafted at some level of planning by one of the more sinister James Bond villains.

It starts with a line in front of a greeter who directs you to wait in another line where you can check in with a receptionist. Once checked in (at the real check in) you find a seat in the first of your three waiting areas. On the wall is a serious sign stating that no cell phones are allowed in the waiting area. After looking around for optometrists packing heat I conclude that enforcement of this particular statute is likely to be low. So I continue to check my email, hoping to enjoy a few more minutes of good vision before my pupils are the size of silver dollar pancakes.

In the first exam room I am asked a series of questions about my family history. These are more difficult than you might imagine. “Do you have a history of migraines.” Well, I dunno. My mom got headaches, but it wasn’t a bedtime story or anything. Not a part of our history per se. It’s not like we gathered round every Christmas to hear tall tales of the migraines of yesteryear. The DeYoungs have a penchant for living long and going gray at 30 but we haven’t passed down a lot of headache stories. I come prepared to tell my doctor if I smoke, drink, lick frogs, or sniff Sharpies, but I don’t have an oral history of cranial ailments.

Having failed this basic line of questioning, I had no other choice but to begin the first of 17,000 letter reading exercises. They all start with E. After that it’s anybody’s guess. All I know is that they don’t include a lot of easy letters. Not a lot of W’s or K’s or really wide H’s. What you can expect is a C that almost closes at the end and a D with very rounded corners. Pretty much every letter can be made to look like an O if you try. E’s and F’s are almost identical. So are Z’s and S’s. V’s and Us–hah, good luck. Don’t even try for the bottom row. You’ll only embarrass yourself

The second part of the exam is worse. This is where you get tested for rabies of the eye ball (or something like that). As I put my chin into the chin rest and my forehead against that metal strap I can’t decide if I should fear for my life or start whispering something about “Clarice.” As it turns out, I only had to spot a hot air balloon raising in the distance. Very calming. Like a lollipop before the guillotine. Because the next thing I hear is something about two sets of eye drops, the first of which are numbing drops. Hey, woah, hold on a minute. If the first set is to numb my eyes what are your doing with the second set? Setting them on fire? And if dropping foreign liquids from the sky weren’t enough, then they take some doohickey that pulses out and pushes against your eye ball. It’s too close to see what the thing looks like, but I imagine it’s similar to a rock em’ sock em’ robot. With an M.D. Anyway, the lady says laconically, “Try to keep your eyes open. It’s a lot harder when you keep closing your eyes.” Yeah, I bet it’s a lot harder. A lot harder to poke me in the eye! I don’t tug on Superman’s cape. I don’t spit into the wind. I don’t pull the mask off the ole Lone Ranger. And I don’t keep my eyes open when people stick things in them.

Well by now I’m on to my third waiting room anticipating seeing the real doctor for the first time. As I think wistfully about the dentist, I can tell the Secret Drops of Nimh are taking effect. I can’t see straight and I’m not sure I ever will again. I pound out every text as if it were my last. Who knows what those second drops are doing? And heaven forbid if the numbing drops wear off. All I know is that my pupils are dilating and every flicker of florescent shines like a thousand burning suns. I see old men called into the doctor’s room. I don’t see them return. But then again, I’m having a hard time seeing anything.

As I enter the doctor’s office she cheerfully asks me how I am doing. I tell her “okay.” Just okay, she says. “Well, I am having my eyes jammed out of their sockets” I think to myself. She really is a nice woman and a good doctor. But I can’t take any more eye charts or any more “Number One…or Number Two” tests. They all look the same. Number One is kind of meh and Number Two is pretty much the same meh. There’s a lot of pressure with this part of the exam. It comes at the end when they are trying to figure out your prescription. A wrong answer could doom you to partial blindness for the next year. You’ll be sitting befuddled at a stop sign thinking it says “Stoo” because you chose Number One instead of Number Two. For the first time I can recall, my doctor actually told me when I did well. She’d be silent as I picked three Number Ones in a row and then let out a “Good” when I finally tried Number Two. For all I know the ophthalmologists get together after work, put back a few shots of saline, and swap stories about all the yahoos who think Number One is actually clearer than Number Two. They must chortle themselves silly knowing that Number Three is just Number One recycled.

I try to pick out a new pair of glasses so I can have something to show for the morning gauntlet. But apparently my lens are going to be as thick as scones. That limits my options. As does the realization that I, as the woman at the desk puts it, have “narrow pupils,” which is the nice way of saying, “Your head is long and skinny and your eyes are too close together.” In the end, I can’t bring myself to spend a week’s salary on glasses that will make me look like one of the Traveling Wilburys. So I settle for paying my bill and getting a free RoboCop visor-shield to protect my dilated pupils from melting like a Gremlin in the sunlight. It’s all a small price to pay, I suppose, for having 20/20 vision the rest of year. A new pair of glasses sure beats a poke in the eye. I’m just waiting for the technological breakthrough that will allow for one without the other.