pants to wear to church. I didn’t have new shoes, or a tie, or even new underwear. 

It had always been a tradition for us to have new clothes at Easter, and I remember thinking how bad it was that I didn’t have something new.  It was one of those lean years when Michelle and I were first married, and I admit to pouting a little about it.

Kinda dumb. Kind of shallow.  Rather vain of me.  I was almost 30 years old.

We did the same things when our kids were little: tried to pick up something new for Easter.  But it didn’t always work out and there were times that I would get mad about it. Still, my kids looked fine and had nice things to wear.  

Ungrateful, I was.

A heck of a lot of importance is placed on looking right and wearing the right things. I’ve never quite figured it out, but it’s there for many people.  It most likely has to do with pride. It for sure has something to do with status and society. 

 It is 100 percent tied to acceptance, which all of us desire whether we admit it or not.

I never really knew that there is this thing with women where they look one another up and down.  I didn’t know about it until the women in my life mentioned it. Now I notice it, simply because I see it so often and I actually find it a little humorous that some of these fancy-schmancy ladies would make themselves look so foolish by gawking at a person the way they do.

I’ve told you some of these stories before, but there are some fine, Christian women who also masquerade as the clothes police. Often, on Sunday mornings! 

They are the ones who check you out head to toe.  Maybe they are admiring you. Who knows? I was always taught it was impolite to stare and so I always wondered if ladies who scrutinized your clothing from top to bottom were breaking some etiquette rule.

Then there are the people who like to use phrases like “If people don’t like the way I look, they can turn their heads.” Yet those same people are the very ones who stress and fuss about what they are going to wear, and furthermore, they are the ones who also closely scrutinize what everyone else has on as well.

They talk a good game and profess (over and over) that they really don’t care what people think, but they aren’t fooling anyone.  They indeed care about themselves and everyone else also. They are the same people who watch every move and examine every thread you have on.

I heard a story not long ago about a group of women who went on a trip during homecoming season, and when they were at the place they were staying one particular evening, a few of them huddled around the table and pulled up the pictures of all the girls who were arriving at homecoming, maximizing the photos and proceeding to rake each teenage girl’s choice of dress over the coals. 

Grown women. Commenting on what teenage girls were wearing and behaving as though it was OK to be doing that.  

For entertainment’s sake, I guess? 

Disgusting. But, it happens all the time. These are the type of women other ladies need to steer clear of.

What spurred this column topic was a memory I had of a meeting with a single parent a few years back. I remember how hard this parent worked, and how very important the success of her children were to her.  

At the time, one of her daughters was having issues with other kids and feeling accepted at school.  The mother kept telling her daughter that she would one day get “back on her feet” and be able to afford to have her nails and hair regularly done, as well as take her to “better stores” to buy clothes.

I remember thinking what a shame that was.  This mother thought that those were the factors that would gain acceptance for her kid.  This child was creative, fun and had so much going for her.  

It made me really have a sickening feeling about our society.

I’m sitting here being so judgmental and preachy, but I’m going to admit to you that having things just right is also extremely important to me. I don’t like that side of me, really.  But I have fussed right along with the best of them, and I’ve also been afraid that something my kids were wearing would embarrass the family.  

Even though I’m also a guy who smells things to make sure it’s clean enough to wear, I am in a profession where one needs to look relatively respectable.  

So, it’s often a little stressful.

Most people care about how they look. Women and men.

This kind of stuff is ingrained in many of us.

So my negative feelings and really, anger, about people at church or people in general looking down their noses at others, really stems from my own disgust with myself, I suppose.

I don’t like feeling the way I do.

We get to a certain age and we don’t feel that our flabby necks or stomachs look good enough to wear certain shirts or no shirt at all – or even shirts tucked in our expanding waistline. We stress over lack of hair, or hair growing in the wrong places, and we walk around acting as though we don’t care.  

Yet, we really do.

And that’s too bad.