A Different Kind of Peer Pressure

Fifteen-year-old Blair Hudson is at the mall with her parents, Richard and Ruth, when her father spots Mickey Barton, a boy Blair grew up with before his family moved across town. Richard cheerfully waves him over, but Blair is horrified - in her eyes Mickey has become a nerd, and if her school friends see her with him, they will start treating her like one too. Mickey, who now prefers to be called Mick, chats politely with the Hudsons, but when Ruth invites him to stay for lunch, Blair pointedly suggests he probably has other things to do. Mickey gets the message and makes an awkward excuse to leave.

Richard is furious at his daughter's rudeness. Blair insists she didn't make up the rules of popularity, but she's the one who has to live with them at school. Richard demands to know whether the group really decides what she wears, how she looks, and who she can be seen with, and Blair admits it does. When he asks, "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff too?" Blair rolls her eyes at the same old lecture - and her backtalk earns her a grounding that Richard raises from one week to three as she keeps arguing.

Soon afterward, at Richard's office, his employee Jerry Winters has come up with a creative plan to save time and money on an important project, and Richard promises to back him up in the big meeting. But the company president, Mr. Powell, sends Jerry out of the room on a made-up errand and confides that he doesn't trust the idea because Jerry strikes him as a hick. Put on the spot, Richard is asked whether he would really stake the company's future - and his own - on Jerry Winters. Instead of standing up for his friend, Richard backpedals, calling the plan just "a good jumping off place" rather than something he actually endorses. When Jerry returns, he is coldly dismissed, and a coworker mockingly tells him to say hello to Ma and Pa Kettle back on the farm.

Jerry storms into Richard's office. Walking past a speakerphone, he overheard Richard laughing along at the country-boy jokes. Richard was the one who talked him into moving here, and the one person who was supposed to be his friend. He accuses Richard of playing games to impress his corporate clique - watching who's hot and who's not, making the right moves, wearing the right clothes - and quits on the spot, refusing to learn anything from a bootlicking backstabber.

Miserable, Richard ends up at Whit's counter over coffee and pie. Whit remembers his own daughter Jana once loudly refusing to sit next to a boy at church because he had "cooties," and how, beyond sending her to her room, he invited that boy's family to dinner and seated Jana right beside him - because right is right and wrong is wrong, no matter what the crowd thinks. Richard confesses that he always assumed peer pressure was a kid's problem that people outgrow. Now he sees the truth: "A lot of times you don't grow out of it. You just get better at it." He sold out his best and brightest employee, who simply didn't dress right or talk right, all to protect his own image. When Whit gently says he can imagine how much that hurt, Richard starts feeling sorry for himself - until Whit points out he was talking about Jerry, the one with the deepest wound.

Whit suggests that since Richard and Blair share the same problem, they should share the solution: a family prayer meeting to ask forgiveness, and then the hard part - reaching out to the people they hurt, Jerry and Mickey, even if Jerry never accepts the apology. Richard jokes that he and Blair could start a club called Conformists Anonymous. Whit approves, but reminds him not to stop conforming altogether - just to conform to the right image, quoting Romans 12: be not conformed to this world, but be transformed.

Richard heads home, tells Ruth he needs to talk with Blair about her restriction, and asks whether they have plans after church on Sunday - because there are a couple of people he'd like to invite over for dinner.