Why can't I just be myself?

by Justin Dillehay

Some of the dumbest things I ever did in life, I did because people around me were doing it. Skoal dipping, for example.

I still remember my first dip. My best friend had gotten into it, and I wanted to be like him. I wanted to identify with the kind of redneck culture my friends were into, so I reasoned in good Foxworthy fashion, "If I can dip Skoal without getting sick, I might be a redneck."

Judging by my subsequent vomiting, I must not have had it in me yet.

Then there was the phase in junior high when I wanted to identify as a cowboy. I started wearing Wrangler jeans (where else could I have kept the Skoal?), Ropers (those are a brand of lace-up cowboy boots), and a large belt-buckle (with a Rebel flag on it, of course). I topped it off by investing in a Resistol hat and matching bolo. The fact that I didn't live on a ranch, couldn't use a lasso, and had scarcely ever ridden a horse didn't seem to phase me. What mattered was that my friends dressed that way, and those were the people I wanted to imitate.

What all this nonsense must have looked like to my parents I can only imagine.

As far as I can tell, I haven't suffered any permanent damage from my adolescent foolishness. Indeed, it all seems rather silly to me now. But surely we all know how common this sort of behavior is. I was patterning myself after those I wished to be like.

I was imitating my heroes.

But Why Not Just Be Yourself?

Heroes are people we look up to. People we want to be like. This seems natural enough. And yet, many people's counsel for Justin the aspiring cowboy would have been: "Don't try to imitate others. Just be yourself."

Professor Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, observed this "Be yourself" doctrine over many years with his students, and how it competed with the notion of having heroes.

Having heard over a period of years the same kinds of responses to my question about favorite books [i.e. dead silence], I began to ask students who their heroes are. Again, there is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes? One should be oneself and not form oneself in an alien mold...

What Bloom also noticed, however, was that these same students constantly imitated other people, even as they insisted on "being themselves." Oddly enough, their "selves" tended to look a lot like other "selves" around them. In other words, they were deceiving themselves. And they were deceiving themselves because having heroes is unavoidable. Everyone imitates someone. Bloom continues:

[But] from what source within themselves would they draw the goals they think they set for themselves? Liberation from the heroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current 'role models.'

In other words, you will have heroes--the only question is, who will they be? If they're not great men and women, they will tend to be your idiot peers or people you see on TV.

Because Imitation is Unavoidable

God has designed the world in such a way that we are all becoming more and more like someone. Christian theologian Jason Hood fleshes this out:

...Imitation is simply inescapable. From birth to adulthood, imitation drives our behavior and beliefs. Peer pressure, the herd mentality, word of mouth, and other social factors and processes create fresh plausibility structures that facilitate experimentation with drugs, religion, facial hair, sushi, and new television programs. We rarely adopt a child, try a new diet, or engage in fasting and prayer unless exemplars model these actions and the mindsets that make the actions possible. We keep up with the Joneses, sometimes with reckless abandon, sometimes almost subconsciously duplicating their patterns of speech, consumption, dress, and recreation. We don't often use the word imitation to describe this phenomenon, perhaps in part because we love to think of ourselves as unique and independent actors. But we are all imitators, shaped in a thousand ways by what we see and hear around us.
-Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recovering a Biblical Pattern 

In other words, we're all conformists in some sense.

But not necessarily in the same sense. There are wise conformists and foolish ones. Wise conformists imitate their heroes on purpose, with their eyes open to what they're doing. Foolish conformists ("conformists" in the usual sense of the word) are typically blind to what they're doing, slavishly copying the latest fashions in everything, all the while claiming that they're just "being themselves."

As the demon Screwtape remarked, lamenting the bland taste of the damned souls he and his fellow demons had been feasting on,

They all tasted to me like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or to make themselves feel modern or emancipated, or to reassure themselves about their...normalcy.                                                 -C.S. Lewis, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"

Unthinking conformism can land us in the wrong beds, the wrong clothes, the wrong habits, the wrong religions, and eventually the wrong eternal destiny. It's that serious. If we want a better outcome, we're going to have to be more conscious, more deliberate, and more choosy about our heroes.

Choosing Your Heroes

The question is not "Will I have heroes?" but "Which heroes will I choose?" Not "Will I be conformed to someone's image?" but rather, "Whose image will I be conformed to?" And on that question, Scripture offers us basically two options: 1) Adam and the sinners 2) Christ and the saints.

Conforming to Adam and his offspring is easy. Since it's who we are by nature, it takes no effort at all. Indeed, apart from divine intervention, every last one of us heeds the voice of Adam's followers in its (superficially) competing forms (Isa. 53:6). And since the gate is wide and the way is broad and many people go into it, we'll never lack positive reinforcement on our journey (Matt. 7:13). We'll find plenty of people to reassure us that we're on the right side of history as we become more and more conformed to this world.

Being conformed to Christ is not easy, however. In fact, it's impossible, unless a person is born again (John 3:3, 5). But even for those who are born again, it's still difficult--so difficult that it can feel like taking up a cross. You'll have to swim against the current of this present evil age. The gate is narrow and way is hard. But at the end of the journey you end you end up alive, not damned (Matt. 7:14). In the end, you end up conformed to the image of Christ.

This is the Christian life. We are non-conformists to the world (Rom. 12:2), but conformists nevertheless. Conformists to Jesus Christ, our Savior and Hero (Rom. 8:29). He is our pattern. He has left us an example, that we might follow in his steps (1 Pet. 2:21). And he has also left us the imperfect but necessary example of multitudes of others who have followed in his steps.

These too are heroes. People like the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine and your sainted grandmother who can look you in the eye and honestly say, "I haven't fully arrived, but I'm on the right road. So imitate me as I imitate Christ" (Phil. 3:12-17 ).

So don't fool yourself into thinking you can just be yourself.

Choose your heroes wisely.

12-year-old stabbing wasn't caused by the internet: Slenderman, genocide, and our Western culture of death

By Tilly Dillehay

I was extremely distressed when I read this news story from last week about the two girls in Wisconsin who stabbed their friend.

If you were under a rock this week and didn’t hear about it, I’ll give it to you as briefly as I can because it’s truly awful. Two 12-year-old girls lured a friend into a public park after a sleepover and stabbed her 19 times because they had begun to believe stories they read online about a fake character named Slenderman. Authorities said the girls believed they would need to “physically kill someone” in order to “become proxies of Slender,” the Huffington Post reported.

And this, friends, is why I don’t like horror movies, certain kinds of creepy stories, and even, to some extent, haunted houses.

Not because I think that stories like these have some kind of power to make innocent little girls do things they don’t want to do. Certainly not because I think that every child who read stories like this is likely take it to such a wicked end.

I blame sin, and the culture of death.

Remember this quote, if you remember nothing else. One of the girls told authorities, “It was weird that I didn't feel remorse."

This is absolutely earth-shatteringly, gut-wrenchingly horrifying. “Weird,” she says. Weird, like when you find a five dollar bill in your pocket that you don’t remember putting there. Weird, like when your brother makes a certain face and you experience déjà vu.

“Weird,” like when your best school friend is lying on the ground and you have just put a knife into her arms and legs and back nineteen times, and then ordered her to stay there, hoping that she will die while you pretend to go for help, and you “don’t feel remorse.”

This is the picture of evil. Evil is a confusion of mind that sees reality as reality ISN’T. Evil sets up the desires (or, in this case, whims) of the self over the desires (or in this case, life) of another. Evil takes things of great importance and shoves them into a position of low importance, and takes things of low importance and elevates them beyond reason, beyond love, beyond the future, beyond reality.

These little girls experienced and participated in wickedness out there in the woods. But they also participated in it in the months leading up to this incident, as they were reading these stories, latching onto them, hoarding them up in their hearts, and making their plans. They encountered this particular brand of wickedness as they were wandering through a cool, scary webpage that some college students made in their free time. That wickedness took root in their hearts and flowered in the rich soil of sin already waiting there.

No, it’s not the nonsense of the horror film or the haunted house that I blame here. But I must say this much: if we think that these things are harmless, we are vastly underestimating the power of evil.

Because evil is not content to live in urban legends on the internet. It’s not content to hover in the realm of games and costume blood and stories around a camp fire. When we talk about, dwell on, and feed these stories and the culture of death that they live in, we are talking about, dwelling on, and feeding a picture of something real.

Evil is a real thing. Surely we know this. Surely we haven’t dulled our sense of life and truth and honor and reality to the extent that we disbelieve the existence of the things that live in the shadows. Surely we haven’t dulled our self-awareness to the point that we really deny the things that lurk in the shadows of our own hearts.

I say that we ‘surely’ haven’t forgotten these things, but I’m far from confident that this is the case. Our culture laughs at darkness. We laugh at it and celebrate it by turns. It’s as if so many years of experiencing common-grace light—the byproduct of a culture built on a foundation of life and productivity rather than death—have made us doubtful that darkness could ever come.

Have we forgotten what things come out of a culture of death? Have we forgotten the KKK? Have we forgotten the WWII Holocaust? Have we forgotten Rwandan genocide, Polish genocide, Aboriginal genocide, Bosnian genocide, or the ongoing genocide of millions of American infants every year? (I could go further back into history, but the 20^th century really provides us all the examples we'd ever need.)

Perhaps this seems like a left-field pitch, to bring up genocide in a discussion about horror stories and a backwoods stabbing. But I bring them up to illustrate something else about death culture, something we all seem so determined to forget: it slips in the back door. It comes up through the ranks. It comes from behind, disguised as entertainment, as a political stance, as reproductive freedom, as ‘finally getting our economy back on its feet’. Nobody who perpetrates a genocide is born with dreams of perpetrating genocide.

Sin is the problem here. The truly terrifying thing to contemplate is the fact that at any moment, our own hearts may produce this kind of wickedness and death.



These girls didn’t go online, I imagine, ready to kill somebody. There was a period of time during which their minds underwent a change... through stages of fascination, obsession, discussion, encouragement, and fantasy... to the point that when they woke up on the morning of May 31, killing made sense.

We cannot, must not fail to draw some kind of connection between this culture of death that we’ve created and are creating—a culture that hates and devalues life—and the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in the Wisconsin woods by her two sleepover buddies.

If we do, we’re kidding ourselves.

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A Time to Quit Searching

by Justin Dillehay

"It's about the journey, not the destination."

This statement is one of the hallmarks of a certain type of religious person (though they would likely prefer to be called "spiritual"). This person is always searching, always asking, always roaming. If he hears you claim that you've found the truth--that you actually have the right answer--he will regard you as intolerant, closed-minded, and arrogant.

You can find an excellent depiction of this never-ending searcher in chapter 5 of C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. In this imaginative novel, people in heaven take a bus trip to hell in order to persuade their damned ghostly friends to repent and return with them to heaven. In the end, almost none of the ghosts choose to leave, but instead persist in the sins that brought them there. Listening to their self-justifications is both fascinating and disturbing.

Lewis casts our never-ending searcher in the form of an apostate Episcopal minister, whose friend "Dick" tries to show him the error of his ways. When Dick invites him to return with him to heaven, the ghost agrees to come, if--and only if--heaven is a place where he can continue his spiritual journey with an open mind. Only if heaven is a place of "free inquiry."

"No," Dick responds. "I can promise you none of those things...For I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God."

The ghost objects: "Ah, but we must all interpret those beautiful words in our own way! For me there is no such thing as a final answer...I am not aware of a thirst for some ready-made truth which puts an end to intellectual activity."

Seeing hope begin to slip away, Dick reasons with him. "Listen...Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them...[But now] you have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage."

Lewis captures something profoundly biblical in this story. This is the type of person whom the Apostle Paul castigates as "always learning, and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim. 3:7). Always asking questions, but never really wanting definite answers. Always comparing alternatives, but never willing to choose between them. Always deconstructing other people's views, but rarely questioning his own mixed motives. Always searching for truth, but somehow resistant to finding it.

It seems rather odd, doesn't it? The idea of searching for truth but not wanting to find it lest our search be over? You'd think that was the point of the search--to find what we were searching for!

So why would anyone do this?

Answer: because we love searching more than we love truth.

Truth requires us to submit; to stand under it and conform ourselves to it. Truth, we suspect, would require us to acknowledge a reality outside of ourselves that doesn't depend on what we think and won't simply be what we want it to be. But searching, at least the kind of searching that we prefer, allows us to chart our own course and act as our own guide, while also giving us the illusion of being more humble than the person who claims to have found the truth.

I say "the kind of searching we prefer," because there is another kind of searching that God invites us to. The searching of a creature seeking to know his Creator; the searching of a servant seeking to obey her Master's will. Those who seek like that will find.

But that's the problem. Apart from the work of the Spirit, there is none who seeks like that, not even one (Rom. 3:11). Apart from Christ, we're fools. We don't want the Triune God walking with us on our journey, because he has an annoying tendency to steer us away from paths that seem right to us (Prov. 4:12) and toward paths that will make us wildly unpopular with the very people we want to please (John 5:39-44). So we prefer to walk alone. Or else to walk with peers who won't "judge" us for the directions we choose to take.

We should ask ourselves the obvious question: "If I resist the very idea of finding truth and ending my search, am I really searching for it? Or am I actually evading it?"

God calls us to a different kind of searching. He calls us to search for truth out of love for truth. And at the end of the day, truth is a person (John 14: 6). To know Jesus is to know the truth, and he delights to be found by those who search for him. Indeed, when you find him, you realize that it was he who was seeking you all along.

When you find the truth as it is in Jesus, you find that it isn't stagnant. Because he who is truth is also life (John 14:6). Rather than enslaving you, knowing this truth sets you free (John 8:31). Why? Because knowing this truth is what your search was designed for. It's what your open mind (like an open trap) was meant to close on. To use Lewis's graphic analogy, if endless searching is like masturbating all your life, finding Jesus is like finally getting married. It's what your mind is for--a consummation devoutly to be wished.

And unlike the endless search, in which you are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth, finding Jesus enables you to have the truth yet always to be learning. Because you are finite and Jesus is infinite, there is always room to go deeper. As a Christian, you can say "I have found him whom my soul desires" while also saying "Oh that I might know him!" Christ is both within us as our wisdom (Col. 1:27; 2:3), and before us, beckoning us on to greater knowledge. As Paul put it, "I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own" (Phil. 3:12). It's an upward spiral into a truth we have already grasped (or better, a Truth whom we have already been grasped by), rather than a downward spiral away from a truth we are seeking to evade.

So let us search well, but search rightly, remembering the goal of our search.

If I may appropriate the words of the Preacher for my own use:

"There is a time to search, and a time to quit searching" (Eccl. 3:6, NLT).

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Further reading: The End of our Exploring, by Matthew Lee Anderson. 

Justified in Christ: How are Christians like Hawaii?

By Justin

On July 4, Hawaii will celebrate its Independence Day. That is, Hawaii will celebrate the fact that on July 4, 1776, the united American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and became the United States. The Fourth of July is Hawaii's Independence Day. We all know this, right?

And yet it's kind of strange when you think about it. After all, Hawaii didn’t send any delegates to Philadelphia in 1776. Not one Hawaiian signature can be found on the Declaration of Independence, and not one drop of Hawaiian blood was shed to free us from Great Britain.

If all that is so, then why does July 4 have anything to do with Hawaii? Answer: because in 1959 Hawaii joined the Union. She entered into union with the United States, such that our history became her history. When we fought, she fought. When we triumphed, she triumphed. Because of her union with the U.S., our privileges of citizenship have now become her privileges of citizenship. Our army has become her army, and our flag her flag. And on the flipside, her debts became our debts. This is what union with America is all about about.

Something similar is going on with what the Bible calls "justification."

As Christians, we celebrate the fact that we have died to sin and have been raised to righteousness. We glory in the fact that God has forgiven us of all our transgressions and declared us to be completely righteous. As far as God is concerned, it's as though we had never sinned and had always obeyed. There is no condemnation. None. "He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities" (Psalm 103:10).

And yet it's kind of strange when you think about it. After all, we deserve God's condemnation. We actually have sinned--often!--and we haven't always obeyed. Given God's righteous character and hatred of sin, forgiving our sins seems totally unfair, even reprehensible. As the Proverb says, "He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, are both alike an abomination to the Lord" (Prov. 17:15).

If all this is so, then how can justification by God have anything to do with us? Answer: because like Hawaii, we, too have entered a union. Not a union with America, but a union with Jesus Christ, such that his history becomes our history. When he obeyed, we obeyed. When he died and was raised, we died and were raised. Because of our union with Christ, Christ's privileges of Sonship have now become our privileges of sonship. His righteousness has become our righteousness, and his Holy Spirit our Holy Spirit. And on the flipside, our sin became his sin, and he carried it in his body on the tree. This is what union with Christ is all about.

And this is how we are justified--by being in Christ through faith. "There is now no condemnation"--for whom?--"for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8:1).

Now that's a union worth celebrating. And you don't even have to wait for the Fourth of July (2 Cor. 6:2).

When Did It Become Wrong for Christians to Obey Jesus?

The issue contained in the title of this post is known as "antinomianism." See my short review of Mark Jones's book Antinomianism: Reformed Theology's Unwelcome Guest here: http://www.9marks.org/books/book-review-antinomianism-mark-jones

The Sister Books: children's stories for girls I love

By Tilly Dillehay

This one is a very personal project. A few weeks ago, I had ideas for a handful of children's stories, each of which featured one of my four sisters.

Probably got a little carried away. I borrowed a book of old family photos and did illustrations of each girl, printed them up, bound them in sort of a homemade way, and presented them to the girls this past weekend.

We had a sleepover planned with all five girls + Mama, and it worked just so sweetly that I was able to give them all their books at the same time. Now that the recipients have seen them, I thought I might share them here on the blog. You may not enjoy them quite as much as a family member would, but then again... you might.

You know something? I would recommend this kind of an exercise for anybody. Nothing stirs up natural, warm, sisterly affection like turning your heart and mind towards a sibling to remember them when they were young.

And my heart is just extremely full of natural, warm affection for my sisters right now. That's all I can say about that without gushing. I love my sisters! Look at these photos below and you'll see why...

Emma

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Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Emma. Emma had very soft blonde hair and very blue eyes, and a little blue birthmark next to her mouth. She had round cheeks and bangs on her forehead.

Emma liked dogs very much. She liked that they were loyal, and kind, and very very smart. One day, when Emma was still very small, she got confused and began to think that she was a dog. Nobody knew how she got confused (because she was actually a little girl); they just knew that it had happened.

From then on, Emma acted just like a dog.

She ran around on her hands and feet, just like a dog with his paws. Because she was going around on hands and feet instead of hands and knees (like most children do when they pretend to be animals), she could get around very fast.

When her family was eating their dinner, sometimes she would come galloping through the room, and she would get clean through and out the door in just a few seconds. It was very amazing.

She would bark like a dog, too. When her mother asked her to go upstairs and get in the bath, Emma would just whimper like a dog and bark a few times. This signified 'no', but her mother didn't understand it, so Emma had to have her bath anyway. Emma shook her head like a beagle and made very sad eyes as she was taken upstairs.

She would also sleep like a dog. She curled up into a little half-moon shape, in corners and on couches and in her bed, and sort of burrowed into the pillow.

Her family tried over and over again to tell her that she was a little girl and not a dog, but she would have none of it.

Little by little, when Emma was a little bit older, she stopped being a dog. But nobody noticed.

One day when she was even older still—almost a grown up—Emma was getting ready for school one day. She came downstairs for breakfast where her family was, and she had brushed her hair back from her face. She didn't look like a dog at all. In fact, she looked like a blonde and pretty young lady.

"Hey," said one of her brothers suddenly. "Emma doesn't act like a dog anymore!"

And they all looked at her. That was when they noticed something.

Emma was loyal, as loyal as a dog. Emma was kind, as kind as a dog. And Emma was smart... much smarter than the very smartest dog you ever met. Smarter than most people.

"Well," they said. "Maybe she just kept the good parts."

And it seemed certain that she had.



Emma is now 17 years old. She will graduate from high school next year.

Phoebe

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Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Phoebe. Phoebe was a very small girl, with little tiny bones and little tiny feet and little tiny brown curls all over her head. The only thing about her that wasn't tiny was her eyes.

Her eyes were very big hazel ones. Strangely, even though they were very big, they couldn't see very well. You would think that big eyes would be very good at seeing, but that is not always the case.

One of her eyes was lazy, too. This doesn't mean that her eye liked to hang around on a hammock and drink out of a straw and leave dishes piling up in the sink. It means that no matter what little Phoebe was looking at, one of her eyes inched... drifted... and twisted inwards towards her nose.

So even if one of her eyes was pointing at a puppy, or a book, or her mother, the other one was always pointed at her own nose.

Phoebe's Papa and Mama didn't know what to do to help Phoebe see. They bought her some round little glasses, with a rubber frame to stay on better, and big, fat lenses.

She threw them in the well.

They made her do exercises, where she had to wear a pirate's eye patch and look very hard at things that were moving around.

They took her to the doctor, who told them that maybe a surgery would help Phoebe's eye to stop pointing at her nose.

When Phoebe got a little bit older, she started to wear her glasses and not throw them down the well. She did the eye exercises, because she didn't want the doctor to get her and take her in to surgery.

But still, she didn't have very good eyes. Everybody knew it.

One day, when she was even older still—almost a grown up—she sat down in her room and picked up a guitar that she found there. She hummed a little tune. She thrummed a few of the strings. Then, she wrote a song. She put words to it.

"Now what's the use of preaching to your brother
Acting just like you're his mother
Not so nice, it's not so nice
When you don't take your own advice
Not so nice at all
Not so nice..." the words said.

And when she sang the song, everybody found out something for the first time.

Phoebe, who had such very big and very bad eyes, could actually see things that no one else could see at all.





Phoebe is now 21 years old. She is married to Danny Deffenbaugh, and is a musician at The Vespers.

Callie

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Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Callie. Callie was a very unfortunate girl, with whom anybody could sympathize. She'd been born into the Cryar family. The Cryar family was very strange—everybody in it liked to cry.

Papa Cryar liked to cry.
Mama Cryar liked to cry.
Callie's four sisters liked to cry.
And Callie's two brothers even liked to cry—when no one was looking.

But not Callie. Nobody had seen her cry since she was a little bitty baby (and even that time can't be proven, based on spurious evidence).

Callie thought it was silly for people to cry like that. So she crossed her little arms and tossed her pretty straight brown hair and refused to cry ever again. "No, no, no," she said.

She didn't cry when her little dog Tippy-toe was lost forever.

And she didn't cry when she fell off of her bike and made a big hole in her leg, the size of a baseball.

And she didn't cry when boys made fun of her at school.

One day, when Callie was getting older—almost a grown up—she met a boy named Reed. Reed was very nice to her. He said nice things to her, and he bought her food, and he tried to hold her hand.

"No, no, no," Callie said. She crossed her arms and tossed her pretty straight brown hair. So finally, after he was nice for a while longer, Reed went away.

Callie sat down in her bedroom and thought about it for a while. Her chin began to wobble. Something wet started coming into her eyes.

"I feel..." she said.

"I feel..."

"I feel... "

"...like I want to CRY!"

And that is what she did.

When it was over, she dried her eyes. "Well," she said. "That wasn't so bad after all."

And when Reed saw that Callie had cried, he knew that it was all right to be nice to her again. So he was.




Callie is now 23 years old. She is married to Reed Pittman, and is a musician at The Vespers.

Sophie

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Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Sophie. Sophie had curly hair and the biggest lips of anyone in her neighborhood.

Sophie was a good talker, and sort of bossy.

She bossed her little sisters.

She bossed the dog and the cat.

She bossed the children next door, even if they weren't in her yard.

And when she was done bossing, she would go inside and put a tape in the tape player. (Tapes are like an iPod that only hold 10 songs. That was all they had when Sophie was a little girl.)

She would look around to make sure no one was nearby, and then she would listen to the words that the lady on the tape was singing, and she would sing with them.

She would make her voice sound just like the lady on the tape. Even though she was just a little girl, she could do that. It was very amazing. But no one knew that about Sophie. They just knew that she was bossy.

When she got a little bit older—almost a grown up—she bossed the people at her job.

She bossed her own self... although she never would listen to it.

She even tried to boss her husband... although he never would listen to it, either.

Then one day, she found out that she wasn't the boss. There was a very very big big Boss that she didn't know about, until he picked her up by the shoulders and kissed her on the forehead.

As soon as he did that, a little smile appeared on the corner of her great big lips. It spread wider, and wider, and wider. Suddenly, she leapt up and gave a great big shout.

"I'm not the boss of you!!!" she said.

And the great big Boss said, "No, you're not."

And Sophie was very happy. She was so happy, that she started to sing. She sang and sang and sang. She taught other people how to sing, too.

And the big Boss liked to hear her sing. "I Am the boss of you," said the big Boss. "And you should keep singing."

So that's exactly what she did.



Sophie is now 28 years old. She is married to Jordan Shear, and is a vocal coach at Sophie Shear Vocal Studios.

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Comic Relief: Brian Regan on an Airplane

One of my favorite comedians, and one of my favorite pieces.