Scandalous

I got caught shoplifting when I was 18 years old.

I know, I know.  REALLY late-bloomer.  The security guard’s cold hand clenched my left wrist as I attempted to leave the store without paying for the pair of jeans that hid in my bag.  The crime took place in a Hudson’s department store in 1980 in a middle-class suburb of Detroit and my exposure to crime up to this point had been, oh, nil.  Actually, I was acting on the pressure of a certain girl-not-friend who befriended me after high school, more than out of my own motivation.  Her dad was a Cadillac executive and I learned that she desperately needed friends and attention, which she habitually got by pulling daring and rebellious stunts like shoplifting and smoking.  Up to this point in my life, I was neither daring nor rebellious.   Like I said, Late Bloomer.

A good counselor could throw together a viable list of excuses for this random act of thievery:  I was on my own, struggling financially, living through my parents’ divorce.

All true, but there was only one real reason I flopped into this silly situation: I was undefined.   I had not yet made key decisions about my own character, convictions and beliefs.  I hardly knew what it even meant to have any of those things.

When the security guard’s freakishly gigantic hand grabbed my wrist, I immediately snapped out of the Impressing Friend Zone and back into my insecure, doe-eyed, innocent zone.  For the next two months, I would meander secretly through a petrifying court appearance and six weeks of one-on-one, half-hour counseling sessions with a kind woman who knew I was no dangerous, budding criminal.

Through it all, I told no one.

Somewhere along the way, I also had to move back home from my apartment on the lake because the owners wanted their rent money on time. (drat.)  Since we didn’t have phones that lived in pockets, the weekly call to confirm my counseling appointment would blast through the menacing phone hanging on the wall in the kitchen.  It was only a matter of time before someone else in the house would get to the phone before me.

When the news finally came spilling out all over the white Formica, and my tapestry of crime was revealed, I was so utterly relieved to end the dark secrecy that I don’t remember being scared.  I only remember my eldest sister’s reaction.  Alice shocked me with her love.

“I’m so awfully sad that you have gone through this whole experience all alone!”

Of all the responses I anticipated, this one remains one of the living examples of how I want to love others.  Thirty years of living since this event, I now tell this story to get laughs (mostly) and it lives inside of me like it was yesterday.

Are we shocked when someone we know (or love) confesses something difficult? Do we see the pain that caused the transgression or do we condemn in disgust? Do we only see the foolish behavior or do we look into our own hearts and know that being lost and in pain are diseases for which we each hold a cure?

It’s so stinking fabulous to be honest to the core, so that nothing we hear will trigger a condemning thought, because we each get grace we don’t deserve, right?