My dad used to say, “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll follow my rules.”  He didn’t invent that saying, but he was sincere when he said it, and I believed him.  All through my teen years I was determined to get out from under his roof, just so I could live by my own rules.  Not that his rules were all that bad.  He was gone a lot, and so his number one rule was that we were supposed to obey our mother, or babysitter, or teacher.  Come to the dinner table when called.  Help with chores around the house. Don’t screw up at school. Don’t curse.  Don’t whack your brothers.  If he gave an order, obey-- immediately.  (He had been in the army for a few years and thought it was a good way to run a household.)   

Back in the day he didn’t have to come up with any rules about money (we had neither cash nor credit,) cell phones (they didn’t exist,) or screen time (computers then were bigger than our house and our TV, a used black and white, was usually out of order.) 

My mom had a few rules.  Be good in church.  Don’t waste food.  Don’t overeat, which meant, don’t cook like Grandma Smith and don’t make food too tempting.  Don’t get angry. Stay away from her piano.  Stuff like that.  

My brothers and I were country hicks who lived in a parsonage, ten miles from town. There were no restrictive rules about where we could ride our bicycles, who we could play with, or what creative games we could invent.  Unless my parents had specific cause for worry, they didn’t bother making up a rule.

Despite my parents’ leniency when it came to rules, I still couldn’t wait to leave home and enter a world where I could be king of my own castle.  Somehow, I had in my mind that a dorm room was the place for that.  

Wrong.  When I started college at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, my “dorm room” was actually a campus apartment I shared with three other guys.  It turns out that all four of us had escaped home so we could live by our own rules.  We shared bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room.  We each did our own cooking.  Without some “dad” around to lay down the household law, we lived with a cacophony of rules.  We had four sets of rules for bedtime, cleaning the kitchen, entertaining outside friends, living room sex, smoking, using the bathroom, noise, music, and garbage. I was the only one who had a rule about going to church every Sunday. By the end of our first week we all hated each other.  Different rules will do that.

Of course, none of these rules were ever written down, either by my dad or my college roommates.  The biggest dog in the kennel always gets to make the rules.  Everyone else has to scramble and guess and try to stay out of trouble.  You can have some rules of your own, as long as you don’t cross some boss higher up on the pecking order.  

By the end of my first semester in college, I was still looking for my own castle.  I put a “want ad” in the church newsletter (Wood River Evangelical United Methodist Church) where my grandparents attended.  Their church was only ten minutes from the SIUE campus.  I wanted to know if anyone had a room to rent.

Clarence Harmer answered my ad.  He was 80, a widower, and a retired letter carrier for the post office. His wife had died the year before, and he was finding it almost unbearable to be alone.  I could rent his spare bedroom for the same price I was paying for my university apartment-dorm:  $9 a week.  We would share the bathroom, kitchen, and living room in his small house on Central Avenue.  My quest to be king of my own castle was about to take another detour.  Mr. Harmer was in charge of this manor.  

Mr. Harmer turned out to be as charming and quaint as my previous roommates were uncouth and boorish.  While all conversation had ground to a halt in my college apartment, silence was against the rule in his house.  Chitchat interrupted everything except time spent in the bathroom.  He didn’t care whether he talked or you did, as long as there was conversation.  It was while living with him that I fell in love with a rule of silence, until at least noon every day.  But it was Mr. Harmer’s house, and he made up the rulebook.  With lodging only costing me $9 a week, I couldn’t be picky.   

I did appreciate a number of his rules.  He was clean, quiet at night, a church-goer, a man who aimed to please.  He valued story-telling, his own memories, family, and responsibility.  He paid close attention to people around him, and was always kind and generous.  

He also had a personal rule to know everyone’s address, if you lived on his mail route.  If you lived out of town, he had your zip code memorized.  I can’t image how hollow the country felt to him before zip codes were invented. (1963)  

Just when I moved in with Mr. Harmer, I got my first pastoral job, 2 ½ hours away, in Olney, Illinois.  That meant I lived with Harmer during the school week and roomed with the Kauffmans  in Olney during the weekends.  The house rules changed each place I stayed:  mealtimes and menus, privacy, TV, hospitality, off-limit topics, which soap was in the bathroom, bedtimes, what was funny and what was not…  

When school was out for the summer, the church in Olney rented me a little house on Baltimore Street for three months. I would be by myself. Finally, I would be master of the house, maker of all rules, top dog!  That house was located between a chicken-plucking plant and a vinegar factory.  And since I was not master of the wind, I never knew what scent would fill my little abode from day to day. 

It was a little pink house and came furnished with couch, bed, table, and chairs.  I have very few personal rules concerning color and my only rule concerning furniture is that it be comfortable.  I’d been in the house about a month when I woke up one night about 3 a.m. and felt something crawling all over me.  It turned out that fleas had laid their eggs inside my furnished mattress. They hatched that night.  I have a rule about not being awakened in the middle of the night, and so I got up, sprayed my mattress with bug spray, and went back to sleep until morning.  Even when you are king of the hill, there’s always something around to throw you off.  That night it was fleas.

It was on Baltimore Avenue in Olney, Illinois, that I first realized that there is no place on earth where I could be in charge of all the rules.  This was reinforced by my first real girlfriend.  She appeared in my life at that time.  

Every social organization has its rules, whether it be a family, a friendship, a courtship, a small club, a church, a corporation, or a nation.  The more people involved, or the more intense the relationship, the more complicated and trickier the rules.  Nothing is knottier than a romance. First, you fall in love, which means you think the two of you share all the same rules. You are under the illusion that you have finally met someone who thinks exactly like you do—about the important stuff anyway.  Falling in love is always a phase, the phase of illusion, of believing that the world smells exactly the same to the two of you.  No one has ever agreed with you more.

People can also fall in love with a church, a workplace, a friend…  It is the phase where we feel no stress over diverse rules.  We can’t see any difference.  But eventually “reality kicks in,” we say. We learn we’re not all playing by the same rules.  At first there are tiny differences:  your rules regarding fidelity and freedom are a little different from mine.  Your formula for communicating difficult matters varies from my formula.  The rules that prescribe your love language are baffling me.  Your moral codes are a little off from mine.  The deeper into life we get with one another, the more we discover incompatibility with each other’s rules.  

We have reached a fork in the road.  We either break up or we choose to love.  Either choice is hard.  If we choose to love, we must collaborate, surrender, or compromise our vast network of unwritten (and often unexamined) rules.  If we break up, we are likely to suffer the indignity of breaking up by the other person’s rules, not ours.  

And so before I was even halfway through college, I was learning to distinguish between my rules and the rules of those around me.  Of course, society and nature operate by whole other universes of rules that keep butting in, even if we finally do work out agreement on rules with another person.  

Rules are everywhere.  Almost none of them are actually written down.  Most are not even verbalized.  The majority are sub-conscious.  

When I was a kid, I knew that if I wanted to improve my life, I needed to find people and places where alternate rules applied:  Grandparents, friends’ houses, outdoors, Disneyworld…  Through the first half of my adult life, meandering about institutions, cultures, expanded family and friends, I often found myself overwhelmed and disoriented by the vast array of contradictory rules, often invisible and unconscious.   But I have always known intuitively that if I wanted life to get better, for myself, or the institutions and people I cared about, the rules had to be identified and changed.  

Now, in the second half of my life, I think more and more about changing the rules, rather than always trying to escape into a better place, institution, or relationship.  I think about the private rules that operate in my own mind, and how some of them need to be challenged and altered.  I think about rules that drive or inhibit my friendships, and how those friendships might become richer with a few rule changes.  And I especially think about the institutions that are part of my life.  Mostly the church.  

Talk about rules, written and unwritten!  We can’t change a story without changing the rules.  Oh, we do change things all the time in the church.  We add here and there, consolidate, downsize, and restructure. We tinker with policy and personnel changes.  We adopt new technologies.  We draft new mission statements. We polish our brand.  But all these are static reforms.  They do little to change the course of the overall story.  My conference and denomination have tried hundreds of static changes through my 5 decades of ministry.  But the direction of the story never changes. Static reform.

Dynamic reform, the kind of reform that changes the trajectory of the story (whether it be the story of an institution, a person, or a relationship) can only occur if we change the rules.  In future posts, in preparation for a new book I’m working on, I’ll write more about the kinds of rules that churches, individuals, and relationships must change if the story is to change.

The good life is one where we are agents in bettering our story. So, let’s plunge into the types of rules that can make a difference.