The Art of Nitpicking

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     I had never really thought of Anderson, Indiana as being a "lousy" city. I've preached there a great many times in days of yore and enjoyed the association with brethren whom I found it easy to love. That's why I was surprised when I read in Time that the entire school system had to be closed down for three days to combat a city wide epidemic of infestation by Pediculus capitis, which, in case you did not know it, is the head louse.

     When I was a little kid in school they didn't shut up shop because of lice. If they had the schools would have stayed closed like they do now for a teacher strike. The teacher would send a note home, and if you had parents who could read, they would get you in by the big kitchen table which was covered with the red-checked oilcloth and go after the lice and nits with a fine tooth comb. Nits are the eggs, laid on hair follicles, and when the comb had scraped your scalp raw and dredged up a supply of them they were held over the lamp chimney

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where they would snap, crackle and pop like modern breakfast cereal.

     I get a kick out of the story about the teacher who sent a note home by a tousle-headed little roughneck, "Will you please have Johnny examined for adenoids?" The next day Johnny brought a pencilled note from his indignant mother to the teacher, "I wish you'd pay attention to your own business. I've combed Johnny's head three times with a fine tooth comb, and nary an adenoid did I find."

     I thought lice had gone out of style, if they ever were in it, like an asafoetida bag tied around your neck to ward off cold. It worked because no one could stand getting close enough to you that a germ could jump on you. But if lice are about a thing of the past, and they certainly must be rare to be reported in Time, the word derived from searching for their eggs is still with us. Everyone has heard of nitpickers.

     In the religious realm I have been around some of them almost my whole life. They are good people but they major in minors, throw tantrums about trifles and fragment the saints over fly-specks. They get nits mixed up with the gospel and go out to proclaim the latter while they are actually conducting a neighborhood research in the former. While the world around is grappling with prodigious problems we tend to become unstrung and pursue gnats with a gun loaded for elephants. We are inclined to think that heaven is all agog about our issues with the angels suspending world operations to line up on the ramparts of glory and watch with fear and trembling for the outcome of one of our arguments in Texas. It could be that they do not glance at one of our little tempests in a Texas teapot. They are accustomed to them!

     Jonathan Swift, who was one of the sharpest satirists ever to point his pen at the foibles of the foolish, writes in Gulliver's Travels about a country which was rent asunder by a terrific debate over the question of whether an egg should be broken at the big or little end. The "Big Enders" belabored the "Little Enders" and vice versa, until parties were formed that bred hate and hostility which endured long after most of the people forgot how the fracas started. We have Eggheads like that with us until this day.

     Nitpicking will destroy a home or a congregation. I had an aunt who never saw anything good in her family and never missed seeing anything bad. She was a first-class, Grade-A nagger, and she never let up. She not only made mountains out of molehills, but she made mammoths out of the moles. My uncle took to drink and the kids took out for the city. Even my uncle's death did not cure her. She nagged at him posthumously and in absentia for leaving her alone. She thought he had died on purpose. I think she really missed him, but he would not have returned from wherever he was if they had given him a furlough.

     In her later years she decided she wanted to arrange in advance for a funeral plan and pay for it while she was still here. She went to the mortician and he showed her twenty different caskets. She found something wrong with everyone of them and said she would not be caught dead in them. The one she liked most did not have the right kind of handles on it. I volunteered the opinion that this was of greater concern to the pallbearers than to the occupant, seeing they had to bear the burden of the day. But she did not buy my statement. She did not buy the casket either. When I was young I used to wonder if naggers lived longer than other people. I have reached the conclusion that they do not, although I have no statistics. It just seems longer.

     I remember an old brother in North Missouri who objected to everything the brethren wanted to do. He thwarted every plan to advance the cause. Finally they got fed up, wrote out charges, and notified him they were going to with-

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draw from him on a certain night. He showed up for the event in his Sunday suit, big as life and twice as natural. He listened to all of the accusations with pride, and heard the grounds for the proposed action. But when one of the elders cited a scripture to justify their course, the accused arose to his feet and said, "I object! You've got the wrong scripture. I don't blame you for putting me out, but I want it to be scriptural. Now here's the scripture you should have used on me." He then proceeded to give them book, chapter and verse, as our radio preachers always say.

     Nitpickers always pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin. They give the Lord one stalk of spearmint out of every ten. But they do not have enough time left to attend to such weighty matters as justice, mercy and faith. These are not nits. Those who engage in a search for minutiae have their eyes adjusted to see the little things. They can spot a speck of dust in a brother's eye a half mile away and miss a building beam sticking out of their own. They can fall over a cow on the way to pick up an acorn.

     The Jews who were enroute to murder Jesus would not go into the Judgment Hall lest they become unclean and not be able to eat the Passover. You did not dare miss that even if you killed a man on the way to it. Most of you have heard of the man years ago who stole a horse on Saturday evening. Monday morning the sheriff went to pick him up just as he was getting ready to ride out of the country. The astonished officer of the law said, "Why didn't you leave before now?" The man was incensed. "You don't think I'd travel on Sunday and despise the Lord's Day, do you? What do you take me for?"

     A few years ago one of the brethren who lived in Texas would not permit mixed bathing of young people from the congregation in his private swimming pool. Later he was indicted and did a stretch in a federal penitentiary for promoting a fraudulent scheme which was a pretty clever confidence game. I knew a brother who used to inveigh against movies every time he got in the pulpit, but all of the time it turned out he was going to burlesque and "girlie" shows. Such inconsistency never really seems inconsistent to nitpickers. The legalistic mind has ways of justifying neglect of justice and mercy while making a great hullabaloo about things which may or may not be nearly so important.

     Perhaps it is a part of the human predicament that we look through the wrong end of the binoculars at our own actions and use a magnifying glass to inspect those of our brethren. No doubt nitpickers are like the poor and we shall always have them with us. But it seems a crying shame that those who know "the power of Jesus' name" should get so embroiled in fighting over insignificant matters they will let the world go to hell while they clobber each other. It is a "lousy" way to spend the time which God has told us to redeem, seeing that the days are evil. I hope you don't think this article is nitpicking!