7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess

by Jen Hatmaker

  Anytime I’m not required to get out of the car, I’ll choose to drive barefoot rather than put forth the effort to dress my feet. If I can’t slip on flip-flops like usual, then I guess I’ll slip on nothing. This habit is not thwarted by rain or freezing temperatures apparently. Zipping through the bank? Picking a kid up from school? Dropping someone at practice? Naked feet.

  My friend told me, “You know driving shoeless is illegal.” Okay, really? Listen, I can’t follow every law. I’m not a Pharisee.

  No shoes? No problem. At least not for me.

  Day 6

  So today was my first speaking engagement during clothes month. I was set up for success. It was a one-day, semi-local event, eliminating the need for two days worth of clothes. Not only that, but it was at a retreat center in the piney woods with ziplining and horseback riding and such, so I assumed the dress code was casual.

  I wore my jeans, boots, and long-sleeved black shirt under my black Haiti tee. I couldn’t accessorize with a scarf or jewelry or any of my usual tricks to make Target clothes passable as event wear. As I walked up to the lodge where the women were eating breakfast, I checked the wardrobe vibe, worried I was grossly underdressed and needed to start explaining myself. (I have never worn a T-shirt to an event, even a camp facility like this.)

  I saw a sea of black T-shirts with white scrolly writing on the front. Just like mine. The graphics were nearly identical. It was the retreat shirt every registered woman received. On a quick glance, my event planner thought I’d snagged my retreat shirt early somehow. Ninety percent of us were wearing the exact same outfit. I was slightly fancier because of my cowboy boots; everyone else was in tennis shoes.

  It was awesome.

  We were a crowd of women in ponytails and old jeans, not trying to impress one another or paste on a Christian face. It was the feminine group dynamic at its simplest, and it appealed to the truest part of me that loves authenticity. I wish women could regularly enjoy this freedom together, liberated from competition and comparison. There is something so marvelous about women comfortable in their own skin.

  As we worshipped and studied the Word and enjoyed good weather and even better company, God reminded me that gathering the saints is powerful not because we look our finest or make a big production of the details but because we unite to seek Jesus. That’s the magic. I suspect God is more glorified in a humble room of earnest worshippers than a massive production designed to sound “relevant” to the listeners but no longer relevant to God. When the worship of God turns into a “worship experience,” we have derailed as the body of Christ.

  Scripture describes the people who drew Jesus’ eye: the poor widow, lepers, the lost and hungry, adulterers, the outcast, the sick and dying. The already dead. Finery and opulence never impressed Jesus; quite the opposite. He lambasted religious leaders for their fancy robes, strutting around as if their ceremonial dress had any bearing on the condition of their hearts.

  There is something noble about an assembly of believers in simple clothes, where the lobby isn’t filled with people saying, “You look pretty” to one another. Maybe looking pretty isn’t the catalyst for the Spirit’s movement. Perhaps an obsessive occupation with dresses and hair and shoes detracts us from the point of the gathering: a fixation on Jesus. When the jars of clay remember they are jars of clay, the treasure within gets all the glory, which seems somehow more fitting.

  Day 9

  Council Member Becky patronized The Austin Women’s Clothing Swap, benefitting Women for Women International, SafePlace (domestic violence intervention), The Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, and of course, participating women who get free stuff. The concept: Contribute gently used clothes and accessories, and rummage through everyone else’s junk and take what you want. It’s a brilliant way to unload clothes you hate or that don’t fit, get new-to-you things that don’t require a rubberband around the button (if you don’t know this trick, then you’re too skinny to be my friend), and not feel like a wasteful glutton. All unclaimed items plus a $5 donation from each person go to the nonprofits. This was Becky’s assessment:

  The idea really is genius . . . in theory. Clean out your junk, shop through other people’s junk. It would have been great if I had no time constraints or went when it opened. As it was, it left me wondering if maybe I really have OCD.

  The Web site listed two drop-off sites, but as is often the case with well-meaning philanthropists, there was misinformation at both sites. So there I was, hauling my three bags of carefully selected castoffs, the ones that made the cut from the scrap pile and the Goodwill pile. This was the good stuff. Not everyone was so selective I found out.

  I hauled my bags to the “sorting zone,” which is code for a beehive of women trying to find treasures before they hit the racks. I asked if there was any order to this, which almost brought the bedraggled volunteer to tears: “There was,” she kept saying. “There WAS.” God love her.

  Here are some things you can always expect to find in a gaggle of women:

  • An eighteen-month-old kid, strapped via sling to his mama, enjoying a little snack from her exposed boob.

  • A totally chic outfit that appears to have started from a bath rug.

  • Total cooperation: I can’t even begin to count how many times I heard, “Wanna trade?” as we did the dance in the ten inches of space between racks.

  • Stranger commentary: “That pink looks great on you!” or “You should rethink the high-waisted jeans.” I love that we feel morally obligated to keep a perfect stranger from lookin’ a fool.

  Not only can you see why I love Becky, but her experience got me thinking: Why don’t we do this among friends and neighbors? You know that scarf you hate because the color makes it appear your liver is failing? It looks awesome on me. These pants that fit until I discovered how to mix the buffalo sauce and blue cheese sauce at Chick-fil-A? They’re the bomb on you. What is tired for you might be the piece I adore. My trash could be your treasure.

  Unlike my sons who retire jeans with both knees blown out and bottom hem shredded, most women cast off clothes we’re just tired of or outgrew. They’re usually in great condition or could be reclaimed with one good dry cleaning. I have brand-new-looking clothes in my closet I haven’t worn for three years. I say they’re “old,” but since they endured maybe a dozen wearings, let’s call a spade a spade—they’re practically still new.

  Without spending a dime, we could freshen up our wardrobes and not feed the consumer machine more than it has already been fed. Clothes and accessories could be reincarnated into their second lives. Whatever isn’t claimed can go to women’s shelters and nonprofits.

  I mean, seriously, do we really need more new clothes? When do we put the brakes on this runaway train? When I consider our resources, buying more clothes to add to the 327 I already own is positively stupid. That’s just gross. My closet could easily clothe ten women with plenty of margin. Frankly, having thirty items sounds downright gluttonous to me, as I sit here in the same outfit I’ve worn three days straight.

  You could host your own Clothing Swap with friends and neighbors and coworkers. Bring snacks, chill the drinks, put on the music, make a girls’ night out of it. The more the merrier. Set up different stations: pants, purses, shoes, jewelry, shirts, accessories. Laugh and pretend you’re kidding when you tell another woman if she touches that shirt, you’ll cut her.

  It’s the smallest idea, but it suspends fashion spending that should bother us far more than it does. It’s a start. Maybe once we slow the cash hemorrhaging, some buried issues could surface, interrupting our default settings and raising questions we’ve never asked.

  And hey, at least someone would haul off the twenty items you’ve been waiting seven years to fit back into. Time to give up the dream, pretties.

  Days 12-13

  Pick the worst place im
aginable to show up underdressed as a “professional Christian speaker,” anchoring a two-day event for a bunch of women. Let me help you: Atlanta, Georgia—a city where little girls in $50 smocked dresses romp around on filthy playgrounds. Where every freshly birthed Southern baby gets two names and women wear pastel pantsuits to lunch. These ladies instinctively understand closed-toed shoes and slips and no-white-after-Labor-Day-unless-it-is-winter-white. It’s places like Atlanta where Brandon’s observation becomes starkly apparent: “It’s so weird that God called you to women’s ministry because you don’t even speak the language of your own tribe.”

  Indeed.

  In the south you dress right. Their customs run deeeeeeeep, and you don’t mess with them. The house where I stayed for this event sported paintings of Confederate battles in every room. I didn’t reference that pesky Yankee victory, old news to the tune of 145 years. Anyhow, if I were in laid-back California or no-nonsense Wisconsin, it would be a different story. But I was headed to a region where I once overheard this dialogue:

  “So, are you a Christian?”

  “No, I’m Southern Baptist.”

  Okay then.

  I still hadn’t decided if I should wear my nice shirt on Friday to make a good initial impression or wear it on Saturday to make a lasting impression. (The fact that I was worried about my impression at all should tell you this month hasn’t sunk in yet.)

  In the end I wore my Haiti T-shirt on Friday night, and although I told The Council I wasn’t going to explain myself, my first sentence was a description of 7 with a What-was-I-supposed-to-do? reference to my outfit. I couldn’t help it. Okay, I could help it, but I had a social compulsion to defend myself, utterly vain and reminiscent of middle school.

  Blame it on the Deep South.

  Blame it on my need for approval.

  I blamed it on “respect for my audience,” but that may or may not be genuine.

  I couldn’t gauge their response. There was some polite nodding but definitely nothing to really put me at ease. Then I remembered that wearing seven items of clothes for a month on purpose sounds super weird.

  But just as quickly as the insecurity wave crested, it receded, because we opened up God’s Word and let it speak. The clothes and the project and making an impression just went away because we immersed in Isaiah 58. What I’m wearing and what you think of it pales next to loosening the chains of injustice and setting the prisoner free. It’s like a shadow of trying to remember what you were talking about before the planes hit the twin towers; it just didn’t matter.

  Interestingly, in Isaiah 58, God is describing the kind of fast He actually requires. Not unlike 7, they were abstaining. They were reducing. They were going without. The Israelites were certainly uncomfortable, unmoored a bit. And yet . . .

  “Why are we fasting and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves and you have not noticed?” (Isa. 58:3)

  Don’t you see our good behavior? Don’t you notice all we’re forfeiting? Their spiritual house seemed in order, stamped and certified by self-denial and physical sacrifice. I mean, if we can’t even feel smug about our abstinence, what is the point? It was all there: the hunger, the heads bowed low, the sackcloth, the ashes. All the external signs of piety were in place (like pointing out my reduced wardrobe to a room full of women).

  “Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?” asked God. (Isa. 58:5)

  Ouch.

  Oh how we love our religious yokes, not for what they communicate about God, but what they say about us. This is the kind of people we are. We say “no” when everyone else says “yes.” We don’t do that. We don’t watch that. We don’t vote that way. We don’t go there. We don’t include them.

  But God’s idea of a fast is less about what we’re against and more about what we are for.

  “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (Isa. 58: 6–7)

  When we hear “fast,” we put on a yoke of self-denial. When God said “fast,” He meant to take off the yoke of oppression. The Isaiah 58 fast is not about the mechanics of abstinence; it is a fast from self-obsession, greed, apathy, and elitism. When it becomes more about me than the marginalized I’ve been charged to serve, I become the confused voice in this passage: “Why have I fasted and you have not seen it?”

  I don’t want 7 to become a modern yoke because that’ll only result in useless self-obsession (and that from a girl who wrote an entire book about myself already). While fasting from futile things, I don’t want to fixate on them, missing the forest for the trees. The compulsion to defend my clothes to a roomful of women reveals a heart that isn’t there yet.

  In the yoke-on/yoke-off equation, I’m still on the wrong side.

  I hope one day clothes and appearance and everyone else’s assessment doesn’t even occur to me. I would like to be so focused on the valuable that what I am wearing doesn’t even warrant mental space. Not the fussy, concerned, indulgent obsession with clothes; not the conspicuous, public, distracting reduction where I am now . . . but the zero balance of priority is where I hope to land.

  This was my second event in my "fancy shirt." In hindsight, I cannot recall one good reason why I chose this shirt. I wore it two times all month. And it looks like a muu-muu.

  Day 15

  Conversation with Tray, Council Member Jenny’s husband:

  Tray:Hey, 7!

  Jen:Hey.

  Tray:Nice shirt.

  Jen:Shut up.

  I never want to see this shirt again.

  Look familiar?

  Signing books at my first event in my Haiti shirt. I forget what the deal was with those t-shirts hanging behind me, but it retrospect it seems like God sending me good juju (a theological term).

  So this is what I wore almost EVERY SINGLE DAY this month. No one on earth did a better job of repping Haiti for those four weeks than me.

  Day 16

  I wanted to say this earlier, but I gave it two weeks to see if it held. Sometimes you draw premature conclusions about something. You pledge your dying allegiance and make puffy-paint posters and get a tattoo declaring your loyalty, only to discover the meaning of the term “honeymoon phase” three weeks later. By then you’ve broadcast your opinion and made a fool of yourself, and you’re either stuck in the bed you’ve made or eating a lot of crow.

  But since my parents got engaged after two weeks of dating, I figure sixteen days is enough time to make a call with profoundly less consequences than sixty future years of monogamy. Here it is: I’m loving this month.

  It’s awesome. Month Two, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways: I love the zero wardrobe planning that graces every morning. I love the teeny tiny pile of laundry in our basket (Brandon is down to seven items, too, bless him). I love wearing jeans and a T-shirt every day. I love the simplicity and ease of it all.

  Much junk took shelter under the “too many choices” umbrella: wasted time and energy, more pointless work, self-obsession, the ironic “the more I have, the more I want” cycle. It’s helped that Brandon and The Council are participating since I see these people daily and no explanation is ever required, but still. I’m pretty down with seven clothes.

  I obviously don’t value clothes like food since Month One was ten billion times harder. To discover what matters to you, take it away and see where the chips actually fall. Before 7 started, I predicted Month Two would be one of my hardest. I was way off. I’m usually fairly self-aware, but I really miscalculated. I guess that’s good news. While my closet reveals that I am still clearly caught in the machine, it’s grip is looser than I imagined. I m
ight untangle without severing a limb.

  Then again, maybe it should bother me a tad to wear the same outfit four days in a row without washing it. I don’t know. I don’t know what balance is here. I’m not sure what appropriate attention looks like.

  I will confess: I was working at a coffee shop yesterday and kept smelling mildew. I looked behind me for the offender and even leaned down and smelled my laptop (my kids spilled milk on it once, so a curdled computer is within the realm of possibility). Finally, I raised my leg up and smelled my knee; it was my jeans. Not only have I worn them every day this month, but also the last few days without a dunk in the washing machine.

  So that’s disgusting. I don’t want to become a stinky girl with mildew jeans. I’ll have to get dreadlocks. Maybe I should aim for “mildly concerned” instead of zero.

  Day 19

  Part of this month’s restrictions is the no-jewelry clause. I’m a jewelry minimalist, but I normally wear earrings every day. My face looks disproportionate without earrings framing it. My head is abnormally large, and big hoops counterbalance my hydrocephalus. It’s like wearing vertical stripes; earrings provide smoke and mirrors for my cranial mass.

  Outside of that I have a tackle box full of cheap jewelry, mostly supplied by Target. I have a couple of long, funky necklaces I enjoy, some chunky rings, a few big bracelets to cover my wrist tattoo when I’m speaking at First (fill-in-the-denomination) Church, USA. I have a few black and silver pieces from my Brighton knockoff days and some seriously flamboyant earrings. Nothing spectacular, but a month without it has left me feeling quite unadorned. And very big headed—physiologically, not egotistically.