Hi everyone! Did I tell you that I had to cut 20,000ish words from my book? I guess I had a lot to say…well, or just friendly! I decided to share one of those cut chapters as a bonus if you pre-ordered the book. And, now I’m sharing it with you in the Substack FNE community too. This chapter is like one big ole' ‘Thank You!’, so it fits right in to share it with you. I hope you enjoy it! Also, it’s a little flavor of what the rest of the book sounds like with my writing style, stories, and overall flow. Here’s the rest of the book if you want to order. Ok, here we go…
Standing Up
You can’t play the xylophone sitting down.
-Mr. O, my high school band teacher, circa 1990-something.
You can’t play the xylophone sitting down.
Trust me, I tried.
In my junior high band, we were each asked to pick an instrument to play. Most of my gal friends chose the cute flute or piccolo. I chose the oboe because I guess it seemed scrappy and weird to me, and my playing of it sounded the same. So, I moved to the clarinet with the same result. Third times the charm and I finally landed on the percussion section, specifically choosing to play the marimba. At this point in the story, I need to tell you about my main band teacher, Mr. O. If you’ve seen Mr. Holland’s Opus, the band teacher and main character, Mr. Holland, was a wonderfully inspirational figure in his student’s lives. That’s who Mr. O was to me and many others I’m sure, and to this day we remain friends.
Since I switched to the marimba in the middle of the school year, I needed to learn how to play it quickly with lots of practice. This meant that I would spend a few weeks in a tiny room during the regular band rehearsal time by myself learning the marimba interspersed with quick lessons\ from Mr. O. I remember that tiny room, almost like a closet in the band hall, with a giant marimba and me figuring out what in the world I was doing. Slowly, I learned how to read the music and what mallets to use. Mr. O even arranged to have an extra marimba moved to my house to practice on. You’re welcome, Mom and Dad, for having to hear that practice.
Then he decided it was time for me to move to the band room to start rehearsing with everyone else, including the cute flautists and competent oboe players. And, I was terrified. I hadn’t played in front of anyone except my family and Mr. O, so I thought playing in front of my peers was the worst idea ever. The next day I walked into band rehearsal and there sitting in the back in the middle of the percussion section was my marimba. Walking past the other percussionists, who I thought were so much cooler than me and were mostly older boys, I noticed a chair behind them and pulled it over behind my marimba.
Then, I sat down.
Mr. O called everyone to attention by tapping his baton on his music stand a few times, waved the magic wand telling us the music was about to start, and brought down the baton while the band started playing the first song, including me on the marimba. Only, I was still sitting down. I’m sure it looked comically like a toddler approaching the kitchen counter where you can only see their little hands come over the top. Only this time the hands were my mallets.
To my horror, Mr. O stopped the music. “No, no, no. You can’t play the xylophone sitting down.”, and I realized he was talking to me. I was working very hard to not be seen or heard by sitting down, and not only was I called out, I was asked to stand so everyone could see me. In the years to follow, Mr. O and I would travel with other students to regional and state band competitions, and I would do quite well making it to the state level as a marimba player some years. But, at the time I just wanted to go back into the tiny room by myself. I didn’t know it at the time, but Mr. O was teaching me a lot about community and confidence.
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During the pandemic, I lost my community and many life-long and dear friendships. I had always been pretty good at keeping faith and science separate, which honestly wasn’t too hard since these don’t intersect too often. Pastor’s wives are typically not PhD scientists, and scientists are usually not an evangelical pastor’s wife. Then the Friendly Neighbor Epidemiologist (FNE) site took off in 2020 and all the sudden I felt very exposed, like all of my colors I was keeping tucked away were now out on display. To my faith friends, they now knew exactly what I thought about poverty, politics, and privilege. To my science colleagues, they now knew how much my faith motivated my work. It felt like my full wardrobe of who I really was was now out in the streets instead of nicely tucked away, where it was more comfortable, like in the tiny band room. I remember being worried that I wouldn’t have many friends or community left after the pandemic was over, because of what I was saying. I also remember thinking it was about to be very lonely. To an extent, that did happen and there was a time where I lost more than gained. The loss of friendships, of a faith community, of lifelong traditions and foundations, of my health I’ll tell you more about in the book felt like the string I was hanging onto was unraveling before finally breaking completely. Only this time the ground gave way too when my health gave out for the next 15 months. Many of you have experienced those losses too, and I want you to know I understand the deep pain that caused and continues to cause.
And, also (you’ll hear that phrase a lot in the book)…I also want to tell you what I found on the other side of that pain.
Over time, I found a new community of like-minded people I didn’t even know existed. Turns out, there’s a lot of people who saw the Gospel through the lens of the good Samaritan story too, who were deeply invested in equity work rather than getting frustrated at the word ‘equity’, who were truth seekers and truth tellers. I just hadn’t been surrounded by a lot of them. Nowadays, we have found a beautiful new community of friends and church full of these people.
But, I wanted to write this chapter because I also found you, the FNE community.
The first few months of the FNE community were a whirlwind of responding to the quickly changing pandemic, and then being met with comments of vitriol and fear where I found myself saying quite often, “what is happening?”. During this time, I was very much reactive to the pandemic and response of the nay-sayers in quick fire fashion. Then something happened around months 9 to 12. I noticed more and more people at the FNE site were speaking up in solidarity with their neighbors too. When someone posted a racist or hate-speech remark, scores of people said “no” to that where a few months prior, the comment would have just taken us aback. When someone posted that their family member had just died from COVID-19 and horrid remarks were written in response, you, the FNE community, jumped in with support and love like a momma hen does around her chicks. Then you fought back with the compassionate truth statements of “I’m so sorry” and continued to wear a mask.
I also saw you respond deeply when I wrote about global health inequities or systemic racism or poverty in your own communities. So, I saw you say enough was enough with growing courage at the same I was growing in courage too. And, many of you were just like me. Suburban, regular people where it likely cost you to speak up too. I saw that and heard that from you. The others of you were a gorgeous new community who had been living as neighbors already, and I will always be grateful for being welcomed into the safety of that.
I could fill an entire book of comments and messages from that new, safe community during that time. But, let me share just a few with you. I remember speaking to a very large group of pastors from all sorts of denominations and faiths on how to re-open churches with caution and wisdom after the first winter surge of 2020. During the question-and-answer time, most questions were about communion or singing and I was happy to give my data-informed guidance as an epidemiologist. There were a few questions, however, that were twinged with telling me I was wrong and how I could fix my errors. In other words, it was mansplaining and I knew it at the time, I just tried to redirect the conversation in my answer back to the facts that we did indeed still need to mask. A few weeks later I received an email from a man who attended. He said, “You also were remarkably gracious to the long-winded males and kept on track in spite of them. On behalf of males everywhere I apologize for their mansplaining.”
Another time, a man sent me an email about the article in TIME magazine I was in. He wrote, “Dr. Smith: I read an old Time Magazine article about you, and you stated that you had men telling you that “you need to be put in your place.” I agree—your place being front and center, on a dais where people are encouraged, if not forced, to listen to you. If I had a PhD I’d happily join you, so I just wanted to thank you for all you do. Yes to some simple minds you are disruptive. And for God’s sake, please stay that way.” These messages and emails made me laugh so hard at the time, still do in the best of ways, especially since I, along with my other female epidemiologists speaking up at the time, were receiving such hate mail with horrible misogyny or threats weekly. The message, “you need to be put in your place”, the man was referring to was a comment I received along with a picture of a gun.
In one of the funnier comments, a sweet older woman introduced me as a “married to a pastor, female doctor, Christian scientist”. I was indeed all of these, but I needed to clarify later to people that my credentials included having a PhD in addition to my role as a pastor’s wife, I wasn’t an OB/gyn MD, and I was part of the Christian faith, not part of the Christian Science following. Another man, who was a Christian faith leader, said he sent my posts around to his fellow Christian friends, also living in the South, with the caveat, “She loves Jesus. But she’s different than many of our Jesus-loving friends in that she passed science class.”
Another time, an older gentleman kept sending me comments that I needed to write all of this in a book, along with constant encouragement. His profile picture was him sitting with his feet up on a large desk with tons of bookshelves behind him, so I knew he was a fellow book-person like myself and we were meant to friends. To this day, he comments on most of my posts and I try to get back to all of them. Mr. Knick, this chapter is for you.
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I’ve never met most of you and if you know me in real life, you know that I would love to remedy that last sentence by having one huge party in my backyard with endless nachos. I would give you all flowers and too many hugs and I have a feeling the evening would be full of laughter and some tears. Because I can’t do that in real life though, I wanted to write this bonus chapter for you and to you as one huge ‘thank you’, almost like a lovely exhale at the end of a long journey. It is because of you I am writing this book in the first place.
I heard you say alongside me, ‘What do we do next?” as many of you, myself included, were left with remnants of friends who believed the capitol riot was sanctioned by God, which it certainly wasn’t, or that the vaccine was somehow a mark of the beast, when it’s actually a mark of the ‘best’. See what I did there? In other words, many of you, like myself, were left in the rubble of something that once was, but now was a place we didn’t want to be. Or we didn’t understand or couldn’t quite make sense of. Almost like surveying the damage after a tornado blows through a town. In real time, I watched you, I watched us, collectively get stronger and center around the margins, around our neighbors, more and more in solidarity. I watched us get louder. You still do. We still do. And, we’re getting stronger. Maybe going through a storm does that to a person and to a people.
This book is not one about the pandemic, mainly because it’s still too tender and in many ways we are figuring out how to live again in the here and now rather than the past. And, if I’m being really honest, I just don’t want to talk about it for 200 plus pages. This book is my humble response to the “What do we do next?” question. How do we live as neighbors in a world set up to do quite the opposite? How do we center our lives around the margins so that it reflects the good Samaritan story in both heart and deed? And, how do we find the courage to do it?
If you’re asking yourself what’s next, this book is for you. I’ve already told you you’ll hear the phrase ‘And, also’ a lot in the book (that’s the heart and deed part). You’ll hear about my love of nachos, Beyonce, and Anne of Green Gables through my personal stories, so I hope the pages make you laugh a lot too.
The book also starts and ends with a table, and I don’t want you to miss it. If you find yourself at tables of scarcity, power, or privilege, with just enough room for some, I think this book will resonate with you. The ‘What’s next?’ focus is recognizing that we could either shake those tables awake or go build new ones. And, we’ll need courage and community to do both. Let’s shake and build together. And, also remember that Jesus flipped tables that didn’t resemble Heaven and offered an example of one of solidarity through bread and wine.
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We made it through the last few years together, didn’t we, even with the losses? And, we are still making it together. But instead this time we are making a new world of compassion, of centering on margins, of neighboring, aren’t we? You and my in-real-life new community are my fellow band members. You, along with our fellow like-minded people around the world, are doing the hard work of practicing our new songs of solidarity to make a symphony of neighboring.
Only this time, we are all standing up, including myself, to our full height. This is a book about standing up to do just that.
To you, I’m so grateful for helping me stand up to mine. Just like Mr. O.
Thank you.
Here’s me playing the xylophone during marching band, circa 1998. Standing up.
Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving, neighbors!
-Emily
If you liked this chapter - Here’s the rest of the book if you want to order. I would be tickled pink and so honored for you to read it!
Sank you! I shared your book with my mom, who is junior warden at her Episcopal church that is in the search for a new rector. She read the first couple of chapters and gave it back. She then told the entire search committee and vestry that they needed to buy them and read it. You captured the essence of what community means to us and to what we want the Church to be. As a fellow former band kid from Texas, I feel you.
Even tho I haven't had chance to read your book yet, I do have it and plan to! I appreciate your embrace of both faith and science and wish that more churches would do this.