"My mother repeated a warning she delighted in scaring her children with: you can sing a lie as fast as you can tell a lie.
My least favorite song to sing as a kid in a Baptist missionary church was I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.
Middle children self protect by preemptively doing everything necessary to stay off people’s radar. I would not sing in a way to get on her or God’s radar. So I took my mother’s advice, accepted her premise, looked at the words on the projector, and conceded: yeah, I can’t sing this shit."
