Hey, Serial for You

Longtime readers of my series of tubeslog probably know the lyrics to more than one Monty Python song but may also know that my regard for email forwards and classics of Christian coffee mug or poster devotion is low.

I don't know where the following falls in relation to those. It is the type of thing that was passed around from Christian to Christian, from one community to another through networks of connection, but its content seems more edifying than a picture of MY PRESIDENT praying or a story about JPL scientists needing to account for a lost day to get a satellite into the proper orbit that you will pass on to ten other people if you love Jesus. It's relation to facts is just as tenuous but it may still ring true. You will decide I suppose.

Anyway, it's an old text that a student shared with me last year. It's from an Inter Varsity booklet titled The Salvation of Zachary Baumkleterrer. I've taken editorial license here, updating some of the language so it's less late-sixties, and have broken it up to post it in chapters of sorts. I'll post it in parts over the next few days. Of course, an eager reader could find it elsewhere on their own- If you do, don't ruin it for the rest of us.

Here it is:
The Salvation of Zachary Baumkleterrer
by George Mavrodes

Maybe Zack should have said more about what he had decided to do, right at the beginning, and especially to the people at the office. Sometimes he thought so himself. But he was really a shy sort of person, not much at ease in talking about himself. So he said nothing about it (except when he prayed, of course) until people started asking him. I guess the first thing they noticed was that he stopped bringing his lunch, buying soup and coffee in the cafeteria, and eating with the bunch at the corner table. But no one thought much of it, because some of the people often went out for lunch. And when they realized he wasn't eating lunch at all, some of them thought that he was just trying to lose a little weight. But it was odd, because he didn't seem to be what you could call fat at all. And it soon became clear that he was getting really thin, and his face looked a little pinched.
About the same time Louise Trimble, who handled the south-western accounts, noticed something else. On a woman she would have noticed right away, in three or four days at most, probably in two. But it's harder with a man, and especially with Zack, who always wore rather conservative, unobtrusive clothes. But one Monday, Louise had a funny feeling about how Zack looked. She looked at him carefully, and she looked at him carefully again on Tuesday and Wednesday. By Friday she was quite sure of it. Zack had worn exactly the same trousers, jacket, shirt, and tie all week. It wasn't as if they weren't clean - they were, but still it was odd, wasn't it? For she distinctly remembered that Zack used to wear a reasonable variety of clothes. She mentioned it to a couple of the other women, and they said Yes, now that she mentioned it, they thought he had worn the same clothes all week, and all of last week too, they guessed, and maybe the week before that. But he hadn't always done it. And later on one of the women mentioned it to her boyfriend in the accounting section. And so a thin trickle of talk started going through the corridors on the sixth floor, talk about Zachary Baumkletterer.
It's a little awkward to ask someone why he wears the same clothes all the time. Kids might do it, but grownups are maybe more polite. I guess it's easier to remark casually that you look a little thin, maybe you've been losing a little weight, have you? Anyway, that's how Tom Houston finally broached the subject to Zack, in the sixth floor men's room. And Zack said yes, he had lost some weight. As he said it he tightened up a little, because he really didn't like to talk about himself. But there wasn't anything in the whole affair that he was ashamed of either, and he thought he'd probably have to explain it sooner or later anyway. So, since he got along pretty well with Tom, he added, "It's because of the famine." That obviously made it as clear to Tom as if Zack had said it was because of the theory of relativity. So he went on to explain that there was a shortage of food in many parts of the world, a real famine, and that people were starving, actually starving to death in Bangladesh, in the Sahel of Africa, and in some other places. And Tom broke in to say that he knew all that, he could read the newspapers and the magazines, but there wasn't a famine here, for Pete's sake, was there? (He really did say for Pete's sake, he knew that Zack was a real religious nut, so he sort of toned down his language when he was around Zack.) And Zack said No, there wasn't a famine here (though he had heard that some old people and some black people were pretty hard up.) But there was a famine in other places, and the people in those places were people just as much as anyone around here, and so he was sending money for the relief of the famine abroad instead of spending that money on himself. And they went on and talked about it a little more until the Assistant Manager of Commercial Accounts came into the men's room, and then they broke it off and went back to their desks. But by that time Tom had a pretty good idea that the whole thing was connected with Zack's being a Christian, and he never had understood that too well. He added his new information to the trickle of talk, though, and the trickle swelled up quite a bit and seeped down to the fifth floor and the fourth floor too.