Tammy Faye in the Coffee Aisle

Years ago, I lived on Balboa Island in Southern California.

Yes, that Balboa Island.

The one made famous—or perhaps infamous—by Arrested Development, frozen bananas, absurd amounts of money, and people who mastered looking casually wealthy while walking their dogs.

I, however, was not casually wealthy.

I was a fairly successful salesman at the time, but I lived in a garage apartment roughly the length and width of a Mini Cooper. I’m barely exaggerating.

Balboa Island was the kind of place where a Mercedes or BMW could make you feel financially irresponsible for not having bought a better car. A Bentley would do. A Maserati was acceptable. But anything with cloth seats suggested that perhaps things had taken a difficult turn.

I found the whole thing fascinating and irritating.

There was so much attention paid to appearances. Houses. Cars. Clothes. Bodies. Boats. Everything seemed carefully arranged to communicate that life was going extremely well.

And I, of course, was above all that.

One morning I woke up and discovered that I was out of coffee. This constituted an emergency, so I rolled out of my tiny bed, put on whatever clothes were lying closest to it, and headed to the grocery store.

It was early and the store was mostly empty. My bedhead was grateful for that.

Well as I turned the corner into the coffee aisle…there she was.

Tammy Faye Bakker.

There was absolutely no mistaking her.

This was during the years when the PTL scandal had made Tammy Faye and her husband, Jim Bakker, household names. Their television ministry had collapsed spectacularly, and the Bakkers had become symbols of just about everything people disliked about television evangelists.

And Tammy Faye was standing ten feet away from me buying groceries.

In full Tammy Faye.

The hair. The eyelashes. The makeup. Oh, the makeup.

If Tammy Faye had been hoping to slip unnoticed into a Southern California grocery store before breakfast, she had chosen an unusual strategy. A baseball cap might have helped. Sunglasses perhaps. Maybe three fewer coats of mascara.

But no.

She looked exactly like Tammy Faye Bakker looked on television, and I remember looking at her and feeling something close to disgust.

So fake.

That was my judgment.

I didn't say it.

I didn't need to.

I had already conducted the trial in my head, presented the evidence, instructed the jury, and returned the verdict.

Fake.

Then I bought my coffee and went home.

Years passed, and in 2021 I found myself watching a documentary called The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

My judgment meter was going bonkers as it opened, but within a few minutes some light broke through and I found myself beginning to like her. And more than that, I began to realize that I had gotten her wrong.

The makeup wasn't a television costume she took off when the cameras stopped rolling. The sugary sweetness wasn't merely a character invented for an audience.

That was Tammy Faye.

Flawed, certainly. Complicated. Part of a religious empire that collapsed amid scandal and caused real harm. But she was also surprisingly compassionate, and dare I say it: genuine.

At a time when many evangelical Christians treated people with AIDS as untouchable, Tammy Faye publicly embraced them. She spoke with gay men when many Christian leaders would barely speak about them except to condemn them. She seemed genuinely interested in people other religious celebrities had decided were beneath them.

And suddenly I remembered that morning in the coffee aisle. The eyelashes. The makeup.

And my verdict.

Fake.

Except she wasn't pretending to be Tammy Faye.

She was Tammy Faye.

The woman on television and the woman standing next to the Folgers were pretty much the same woman. And that's when it occurred to me that maybe I had misjudged what I'd seen that morning.

I thought I was looking at a woman wearing a mask, but in truth, I was looking at a woman who had simply decided long ago that this was how she wanted to look.

And if there was a mask in that grocery store that morning, it belonged to the smug young man congratulating himself for being so much less superficial than all those superficial people on Balboa Island.

We humans are astonishingly good at reading one another and thinking we read them right. A haircut tells us something. A bumper sticker tells us something. A tattoo. A suit. A political sign. A church. A car.

A face full of makeup.

Within seconds we have constructed an entire human being out of six pieces of evidence and we call it discernment.

Jesus repeatedly said, “Do not judge by appearances,” which seems like an awfully simple command until you spend five minutes in a grocery store or on social media…or at church.

Maybe seeing people clearly requires something more than good eyesight.

Maybe it requires humility.

The willingness to admit that the person standing in front of us has a story we don't know. That what looks like arrogance might be fear. What looks like weakness might be courage. What looks like confidence might be loneliness. And occasionally what looks like a ridiculous amount of mascara might simply be a ridiculous amount of mascara.

Tammy Faye died in 2007.

I saw her once in a grocery store and decided I knew who she was. But years later, a film introduced me to the woman I'd met, but hadn’t really seen.

I guess that's one of the gifts of getting older. You begin to realize how many people you have misread, and if grace has done its work, you become a little slower with the verdict.

These days, when I turn the corner and encounter someone who strikes me as strange, excessive, irritating, fake, or simply not my kind of person, I try to remember Tammy Faye standing in the coffee aisle.

Sometimes appearances are deceiving.

And sometimes they're not.

Sometimes the person you see really is the person standing there.

It's your eyes that need changing.