YAKIMA, WA (August 20, 2018) – Minister Laurel Jackson believes laughing at the seven deadly sins is a good way to take them seriously. That’s why she wrote Little White Lies and the Seven Deadly Sins: A Faith-Fun Look at Daily Life.
It is a collection of humorous vignettes that help people consider how pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth play out in ways we might not imagine. Each selection is brief and can be used as a daily devotional. Jackson describes the book as “Erma-Bombeck-meets-The-Purpose-Driven-Life.”
Jackson is currently the senior director of Compass Care, a home-health service that focuses on palliative and hospice care in Yakima. But the origins of her book started 16 years ago when she was a pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church (now Yakima Covenant Church), which joined the ECC in 2014.
At the time, the pastoral team was preaching a series on the seven deadly sins. Before each service, Jackson would tell a funny story from her life or something she observed from that week that would relate to the message. People would ask her for copies of the stories.
“They’d say something like I don’t want the message, just the stories,” she said laughing. Occasionally people suggested she write a book.
Roughly 15 years later, she got serious about looking for a publisher. In the interim, she kept adding stories.
Jackson says the chapter on pride is the longest because that is the sin she struggles with the most.
In the selection “Giving Thanks…No Matter What” Jackson says the thing she most wants to be is impressive, which is what she was going for the first time she hosted Thanksgiving dinner for her side of the family, an evening when there would be 19 guests.
“I’d like to think I am a combination of Martha Stewart and MacGyver—someone who could build a table and chairs to seat 20, and then cook a meal worthy of a magazine cover.” However, mishaps abounded, just a few of which included burning the mashed potatoes, squirting juice from an orange all over her kitchen cabinets, and not realizing that one of two turkeys wasn’t cooking.
It was clear she was not the queen of Thanksgiving, and this MacGyver wouldn’t have survived the pilot to make it to the second episode.
This fall, Yakima Covenant Church takes part in the denomination’s BLESS evangelistic initiative. The congregation plans to follow up by inviting the community to engage on spiritual issues by using Jackson’s book. That will be followed up with a seven-part series focusing on white lies and the deadly sins, says the congregation’s pastor, Dean Nelson. “We will offer a forum to engage weekly with her or be in a small group with a book-club format.”
In the meantime, Jackson still has plenty of material to add. The minister who admits to struggling with pride jokes—at least it sounds like she’s joking—that she will consider the book a success when she sees it on the shelf at an airport bookstore.
“I’ve thought about putting a copy on the shelf and taking a picture of it.”
