Taking His Lumpkins

Peter Lumpkins has had an interesting new year in blogdom. Being misinterpreted and misrepresented is part of the price we all have paid at some time for blogging—a manner in which all we bloggers wind up taking our lumps. Someone said that I received at least an indirect accusation of being a racist in the comment thread. Unfortunate, but the kind of vapid blog fodder that I try to ignore (try, I said). The more that blogging resembles The Young and the Restless, the less I like it. But I digress.

We do indeed have a God who works all things together for good. Even in this sad case, the good comes in the form of a recent blog post by Robin Foster. There I learned things about Peter Lumpkins that I did not know. Robin has offered them, I'm sure, as vindication of Peter. Peter needed no vindication in my eyes. The nature of his "cornbread and buttermilk" comment was evident to me the first time I read it: Derogatory in the spirit of a rhetorically charged argument, but not racial at all in its implications. Maybe you have to have grown up as I did to get it—some pagan vestige of my mind still suspects that bad fortune awaits me if I don't have my black-eyed peas and hog jowls on New Year's Day (don't knock it if you haven't tried it).

Anyway, although Robin's comment was superfluous to vindicate Peter in my eyes, it was effective to teach me a lot about Peter Lumpkins that I did not previously know. I found the story inspirational. It is the kind of tale that you would not have read in 1960. I hope that you like it, too.