Quick Takes: Suits

Times have changes greatly since my youth. Back in those ancient days men wore suits when in public. They wore hats, too. Not baseball caps as you see everywhere today, but wide brim hats. If going to the movies, men would don suits and certainly wouldn't be seen in a restaurant or church in anything but. I had a suit and hat as a child for going to church. I didn't like it much. That hasn't changed.

When I graduated high school, my grandmother took me to a tailor and had a suit made. It cost $100, a lot of money for a suit in those days. It was a dark gray pinstripe three-piecer, probably the only suit I ever had that fitted me perfectly. It was my only suit for a long time and it held up well over the years. Eventually it began to wear and I began to expand so it no longer fit as well.

The most suits I owned at one time were four. I was almost forty when I bought these suits for my new job at a bank. They lasted me through the twenty-one years I worked there. None were considered expensive suits although each was close in cost to that suit my grandmother gave me. The buying power of the dollar had certainly changed over the years. Men still wore suits a lot, but not as much as when I was a youth. Not very many wore hats anymore.

Needless to say, those four suits were pretty well past it when I left that bank. I had to buy a new suit for job hunting. That was the last suit I bought and last I ever plan to get. I never wear it now. Sometimes I wear the jacket like a sport's jacket when we dine out. (I can't remember the last time I wore a tie.) This isn't to be fashionable, but because it has pockets and that gives me a place to store my reading glasses. I don't wear a wide brim hat, but a baseball cap. I wear a cap because of an eye disease I had suffered that left me sensitive to overhead light. The cap visor shades my eyes.

You seldom see anyone in suits anywhere now. Some jobs still require the wearing of such outfits, but I am no longer in such positions. Very few people wear suits at my church, not even the pastor. I find it much more comfortable and less a decoration of status. I don't believe the clothes make the man. Character makes the man, and bad character can only be dressed up for so long before it is recognized. I will trust the Lord to keep his promises as to what I need in dress and if I ever need wear a suit again, I am certain I will know and it will be provided.

"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?" Matthew 6:28-30