Last week, whilst putting in my 15 minutes at the gym (not really that few, but my wife likes to say so), I noticed there was a blood drive sign up for the coming Monday. It's been a goodly while since I've given blood. In fact, I don't recall donating any since before 2005, which was the year my blood was injected full of lots of fun things in order to prepare and protect my system for a trip to Central America. After that, I was forbidden from donating blood for a year and that's now stretched into six. But I happened to be free for the Monday in question, so I signed up for a 2 o'clock slot.
Of course, five minutes after I left the gym (15 minutes later) I had forgotten about the appointment entirely, having failed to slot it into my phone's calendar.
On Monday, at 2 p.m., I coincidentally (or by unconscious self-suggestion) happened to walk into the gym, whereupon I noticed the Red Cross blood drive taking up the majority of the gym's basketball court and screamed "YAAAH!" in my head. Then I remembered that my appointment was at 2 and saw that I was exactly on time. Yay me.
I filled out the paperwork, read over the material and was soon ushered in by one of the bloodletter ladies for what I expected to be the usual battery of embarrassing sexual history questions. The bloodletter lady asked if I had brought my donation card, at which point I had to admit to her that I had not because I only coincidentally came to the gym at the time of my appointment and not not actually prepared myself for donation in advance. She was able to look me up by driver's license number and brought up all my old contact information from Tri-Metro. We updated everything, she asked me a few minor questions and then she departed, leaving me to answer all the embarrassing questions via a questionnaire on her laptop. Wow, what an improvement, and modern thinking at work.
This made me wonder if similar measures are now being taken at the blood plasma donation clinic located behind the first apartment the wife and I rented as a married couple, back in Charlotte. That plasma clinic was located behind what was then called the Sailboat Bay apartment complex, adjacent to the Eastland Mall, was a convenient place to go and make a few extra bucks from week to week. In fact, if memory serves, we used to make around $100 a week between us from donating plasma. It took around two hours to donate on a good day, more on a bad one, and you had to come twice a week to get the full amount, because they only gave you around $20 for the first visit and $30 for the second. I tried to look at it from the perspective of "Hey, I got paid $50 for reading American Gods one week." (Which reminds me, I've never told the story here of the time I worked for Onstar and once got paid time-and-a-half one weekend to read American Gods and pass out free ice cream in the break room. Erm. Well, that's pretty much the story right there. Somebody had to do it and I thought that somebody needed to be me, just so I could forever more tell folks I got paid $15 an hour plus a $100 overtime bonus for reading Neil Gaiman and watching cream. It was great.) But the reality of my situation was that I got paid to read American Gods while sitting in a waiting room amongst people who clearly had some serious chemical dependency issues who you just KNEW were only donating plasma in order to get money to go buy intravenous drugs. And while that was fascinating and horrifying character study material, it was only the backdrop to the twice weekly 100 question embarrassing questionnaire recited at you from memory at breakneck speed by the most bored questionnaire-giving plasma technicians on the planet. My answers never changed once, but I had to take it every week. Similarly, there was also a brief physical exam including a blood test and lots of paperwork to fill out, which we had to do with each and every visit. This prompted me to wonder just how efficiently this place was being run if they couldn't be bothered to keep and consult any of the massive pile of records we created in a month. Then, after more waiting in the rehab group session room (i.e. the waiting room) we were sent with our day's paperwork file to the donation room which was lined with donation stations separated by a double-sided plasma centrifuge machine covered in hoses and looking for all the world like something out of a David Cronenberg film. Once seated, we would eventually be stabbed with needles and have a portion of our blood pumped out, the plasma separated from it and then pumped back into us. Again, that was on a good day. On a bad day? Well....
Back then I was around 40 pounds heavier than I am now and not as well-sculpted as my 15 minute increments at the gym have made me now. With the added poundage, the veins in my arms were sometimes difficult to locate. Oh, the techs would stab away with confidence, even trying to use my weekly track mark as a guidepost, but rare was the time they actually hit blood on the first try. And several times, after dicking around too long and not finding blood, they had to send me home WITH pay as per their rules and regs. This was okay by me, as they had to pay me regardless of whether or not I left any plasma with them. But eventually, after many painful and fruitless stabbings over the course of weeks, it was decreed from on high that only three of the nurses working there, who were of a certain class and experience level, were allowed to touch me at all, for those ladies were the only ones who could find a vein in my ham of an arm. The plasma collection would take around 50 minutes, then we'd be paid, encouraged to come back and set free. The wife and I used to save the money we made there and buy Christmas presents for our friends and loved ones, just so we could tell them that their presents were paid for with our very blood.
At the gym, after being escorted to a bleeding station, I had to wait around 10 minutes while the techs finished letting blood on a couple of other donors. Now, after being stabbed twice a week for several months, needles don't bug me. But while I wasn't at all nervous, I must have looked it because everyone kept asking me if I was okay. "Yeah, I'm fine," I told them. Then more time would pass and they'd ask again. "Yep, I'm great," I'd say. Eventually, they tourniqueted me up and tried to fine a vein. If I'd been there on purpose, rather than coincidence, I would probably have done them the favor of doing a bunch of curls first so that the veins in my arm would stand out more. But, I hadn't, so they were left to their own devices. They seemed pretty confident they'd found one and marked it just to be sure. Then more time went by before they actually stuck me and by the time they did the vein had moved or they just missed it, cause it came up dry when they stabbed for it. Without pulling the needle from my arm, they moved it around under the skin in search of the vein.
"Are you all right?" they kept asking.
"Well, it hurts a bit, but other than that I'm fine."
This is never pleasant, but they were as gentle as they could be. Finally, the tech in charge of me tagged out and the lady who'd interviewed took over. She too moved the needle around, a bit more vigorously, causing a burning sensation to erupt in my arm. I groaned at this, causing them to ask me again if I was all right.
"That really burns, but I'll be okay," I said. The burning subsided only a little when they stopped moving the needle. After some consultation with one another, it was decided that if I felt all right and was up for it, they would like to try the other arm. They explained that since no blood had hit the bag, it would be okay to just switch.
"That's fine by me," I said. After all, I'd invested over half an hour at this point, so let em have some blood. The trouble was, they didn't take the needle out right away. I guess there was prep that had to be done and they were also wrapping up the letting with a couple of other folks, so I was left to sit there with the needle still burning in my arm for around five minutes. About a minute into that, though, I began to feel light headed. I tried to breathe harder to get some circulation going, but all I could feel was the burning in my arm and the blood draining from my face. I thought I could maybe man up and ride it out, but there came a point where I simply knew that if I didn't say something I would pass out in another 20 seconds or so.
"I'm feeling very light headed," I said.
You would think I'd said I was on fire. Immediately there was activity around me from the two ladies who'd been working on me and then a third. They lowered the backrest of the table and I slipped down into a more prone position, at which time all the blood came back to my head and I once again felt perfectly fine. The rest of the five minutes was taken up with my being asked if I was all right and if I needed anything to drink and then a straw being offered to me from a cup held by one of the ladies and then more questions as to whether I was all right.
The needle was eventually removed and then I was raised incrementally so as not to upset my delicate condition and then asked to swivel around so they could use the arm rest with my left arm, etc. I kept telling everyone for the 15th time that I was fine, but it took a while before they began looking for another vein. Then, just after they'd found one clearly visible to one and all, the tech who'd interviewed me said, "Nope. No can do." She was holding a cell phone, having consulted with someone off site. I'd had a reaction and there would be no more stabbing of my person that day. When she said "reaction" I pictured some sort of skin rash, but, no, she meant my near brush with fainting.
"But... I'm fine," I said. They just looked at me. "All right. Whatever."
They thanked me profusely for my time, told me to stay out of the gym for several days to give my arm time to heal, and encouraged me to have some refreshments before I left. I took the biggest bag of cookies I could find in their punch bowl full of bagged snacks and made for the car.
Before the day was out, the interior of my elbow had begun to bruise. As of this writing it is bright purple and looks like I've been walloped with a stout tree branch. And I don't even have the knowledge of my Type O blood well-donated, or even a check for $20 to show for it.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Leg Teeth
Yesterday evening, around 6 p.m., I came back to the office to get in a little podcast editing and noticed D.J. Kitty sitting up beneath my desk. Something about his manner seemed off, though. Maybe he was leaning against the desk for support, but I didn't consciously see that. I just got the general impression that something was not right.
"Hey, cat. What are you doing under there?"
He didn't answer, but I wondered if maybe he was constipated and was waiting for a second go-round in the litterbox.
After a minute, though, he began to move, and did so awkwardly. He backed out from under the desk, and then backed over some boxes and papers nearby. He seemed to be trying to stay off of his back right leg and held it up whenever he could. Yep. Something was wrong.
I enlisted the wife's help and together we managed to hold him down on the dining room table long enough to inspect his leg. It was swollen at the knee joint, probably twice the size of his uninjured leg, but there didn't seem to be any huge wounds. Whatever was wrong clearly caused him pain, because he started squalling and hissing at us to the point that we were afraid he might bite or claw. We wrapped him up in a towel and proceeded with the inspection, with nearly the same results.
Emmett, hearing the squalling, hopped up on the table beside him and looked very concerned. As D.J. cried, Emmett also began to cry in very sympathetic tones. I would never have guessed he was that empathetic, but it was kind of cool to see.
The cat had been sleeping on the bed for most of the day, so we didn't think it was a snake bite--at least not from anything terribly venomous Maybe a cat fight wound.
It was too late after hours to take him to the vet, but our vet has an answering service and soon enough we were talking with our vet. After telling him the symptoms, he suggested it sounded like a cat fight, as cats are notorious for swollen, puss-filled wounds. He suggested giving him a kitty antibiotic, which we happened to still have some left from one of the other pets. As nothing seemed to be an emergency, though, we decided to just keep an eye on D.J. and haul him to the vet in the morning rather than engage the kitty E.R.
It's been a long while since I had to deal with any vet-worthy kitty wounds from fighting, probably because I've mostly had female cats for the past 20 years. As a kid, though, I had a male cat named Bay who used to get laughed at by our vet because most of the fighting wounds he received were on his butt and tail. "Yeah, you could tell which way he was running," the vet would say. As he aged and gained some nun-chuck skills, though, the wounds began to appear on his head and shoulders, so we knew Bay was giving as good as he got.
D.J. seemed to be okay with just holing up in his foam kitty house, so we left him in the spare bedroom overnight. The antibiotic must have worked some, too, because in the morning he leaped off of the bed to try and get out of the bedroom for breakfast. Alas, he didn't get any, cause the vet wanted him on empty in case sedation was needed.
The vet was able to find a puncture wound on D.J.'s leg. He said they'd do some blood work and have a closer look at the wound, then clean it out and make sure nothing vital was torn.
An hour later, we got a return call. The blood work was fine and they found the source of the infection right away: it was the tip end of a feline canine tooth. Evidently D.J. had been in a scrap and ran away so fast that it broke off the tooth of the attacking kitty. Yeah, that's my brave little fighter.
He's now back in our care, extra kitty tooth extracted, still high as a drunken kite.
"Hey, cat. What are you doing under there?"
He didn't answer, but I wondered if maybe he was constipated and was waiting for a second go-round in the litterbox.
After a minute, though, he began to move, and did so awkwardly. He backed out from under the desk, and then backed over some boxes and papers nearby. He seemed to be trying to stay off of his back right leg and held it up whenever he could. Yep. Something was wrong.
I enlisted the wife's help and together we managed to hold him down on the dining room table long enough to inspect his leg. It was swollen at the knee joint, probably twice the size of his uninjured leg, but there didn't seem to be any huge wounds. Whatever was wrong clearly caused him pain, because he started squalling and hissing at us to the point that we were afraid he might bite or claw. We wrapped him up in a towel and proceeded with the inspection, with nearly the same results.
Emmett, hearing the squalling, hopped up on the table beside him and looked very concerned. As D.J. cried, Emmett also began to cry in very sympathetic tones. I would never have guessed he was that empathetic, but it was kind of cool to see.
The cat had been sleeping on the bed for most of the day, so we didn't think it was a snake bite--at least not from anything terribly venomous Maybe a cat fight wound.
It was too late after hours to take him to the vet, but our vet has an answering service and soon enough we were talking with our vet. After telling him the symptoms, he suggested it sounded like a cat fight, as cats are notorious for swollen, puss-filled wounds. He suggested giving him a kitty antibiotic, which we happened to still have some left from one of the other pets. As nothing seemed to be an emergency, though, we decided to just keep an eye on D.J. and haul him to the vet in the morning rather than engage the kitty E.R.
It's been a long while since I had to deal with any vet-worthy kitty wounds from fighting, probably because I've mostly had female cats for the past 20 years. As a kid, though, I had a male cat named Bay who used to get laughed at by our vet because most of the fighting wounds he received were on his butt and tail. "Yeah, you could tell which way he was running," the vet would say. As he aged and gained some nun-chuck skills, though, the wounds began to appear on his head and shoulders, so we knew Bay was giving as good as he got.
D.J. seemed to be okay with just holing up in his foam kitty house, so we left him in the spare bedroom overnight. The antibiotic must have worked some, too, because in the morning he leaped off of the bed to try and get out of the bedroom for breakfast. Alas, he didn't get any, cause the vet wanted him on empty in case sedation was needed.
The vet was able to find a puncture wound on D.J.'s leg. He said they'd do some blood work and have a closer look at the wound, then clean it out and make sure nothing vital was torn.
An hour later, we got a return call. The blood work was fine and they found the source of the infection right away: it was the tip end of a feline canine tooth. Evidently D.J. had been in a scrap and ran away so fast that it broke off the tooth of the attacking kitty. Yeah, that's my brave little fighter.
He's now back in our care, extra kitty tooth extracted, still high as a drunken kite.
Friday, June 17, 2011
This is why we can never have "nice" things.
JUICE'S EARBUD LAW #1: Our dogs will not utterly EFFing destroy earbuds that cost only $5 at Big Lots. Earbuds over $20 in value? U.F.D.The first act of destruction was for a pair of Bose earbuds my goodly wife purchased for me as a birthday gift three years ago. Magnificent things, they were, and actually fairly tough. But they lasted under a year before Sadie, in her puppy exuberance, jumped on their cord one too many times, severing the line in one channel. I still have them, on the off chance that one day nanotechnology will progress to a point that they can be repaired.
After that, I returned to using the Creative Labs earbuds that came with my old and dearly missed Zen Vision-M mp3 player. They too were leaped upon numerous times by Sadie, causing me to develop a tick comparable to the retarded younger brother of Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary. In the throes of these ticks, I am driven into furious screaming rages whenever my earbuds are violently yanked from my ears by a jumping dog. Again, my neighbors must absolutely love me. Eventually, the plastic casing of the headphone wires began to crack, so I repaired them using dabs of J.B. Weld. That worked well enough, but they were unsightly, so they became my backup pair that lived in the car.
After the untimely and dog-unrelated death of the Creative Zen Vision-M, I got another pair of Creative Labs buds with the purchase of a Creative Zen X-Fi, a player that I cannot recommend less. While the Zen Vision-M was a talented and elegant soul trapped in the body of a fat shlub, the Zen X-Fi was more like a really klutzy pop singer/actress with a substance abuse problem and an eating disorder. Sort of a Phillip Seymour Hoffman vs. Lindsay Lohan kind of thing. The earbuds that came with it were pretty good, though, but they too were met with doggy destruction. While I had finally trained Sadie to stop jumping up on me, we now had Moose who to this day refuses to stop doing that. In fact, after destroying the new Creative Buds, he then helped destroy the old emergency backup buds as well.
I then spent several months buying only $5 earbuds from Big Lots. They were Sentry brand buds, each pair contained within stout metal housing and not at all bad in the sound quality department. One pair lasted me nearly a whole year, with scarcely a doggy jump at all. I even managed to run them through the washing machine on more than one occasion and they still sounded fine. Eventually they too died and I bought another pair. In fact, I took to buying two pairs at a time, to have an emergency backup pair. They were great.
Nearly two months ago, I purchased a set of Tweeked Audio earbuds, which can be seen in remnant form in the accompanying photo. Tweeked is a frequent sponsor of the Nerdist Podcast, a show I wanted to support. And for about a month and a half they were great earbuds. My only beef with them is that the plastic coating is of the textured rubber variety, which catches on cargo pockets, plus the fact that the cord itself is long enough to reach my cargo pockets in the first place. My other beef is not a design flaw, but that the dogs seemed to sense I'd spent a little money on them and they were starting to get jumpy around them again. I found myself guarding my cord when in the presence of the dogs, always ready to turn a hip to the side to catch any enthusiastic leaping.
Last evening, while out playing with the dogs and listening to Jordan, Jesse, Go!, I called Sadie over to me to try and get her to play stick. As she arrived her fluffy tail caught the cord of my earbuds and its curly end deftly wound around the cord. I think she felt the cord on her tail and thought something was trying to get her, for she then tried to dash away. The buds were yanked from my ears as her tail slid up to the buds themselves. Oddly, I didn't scream even once. I just said, "Oh, Sadie, Oh, Sadie, NO Sadie!" as the cord tightened and then broke, leaving me with the lower half of the cord dangling from my pocket. One of the buds flew apart in mid-air and I saw it land. The other bud and the rest of the cable disappeared in Sadie's tail. I later found it ten feet away, where her tail must have flung it.
That's it.
No more.
I'm headed to Big Lots and will stock up on a whole pile of cheap ass Sentry headphones. I may even buy an extra pair to sacrifice to the dogs in advance.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Actual Semi-Paraphrased Telephone Conversations Heard at My House #9
(I know I'm about to sound like a colossal asshole, but there is a point at the end...)
ME: Hello?
AC SERVICES: Hi, can I speak to JUICE?
ME: This is him.
AC SERVICES: Hi, I'm Curtis with AC Services. We do fundraising on behalf of Cancer Fund of America. I was...
ME: Curtis, I need to stop you at this point to let you know we don't accept telephone solicitation of any kind at this house.
AC SERVICES: But, sir, we were just calling to confirm your mailing address as (SAYS OUR MAILING ADDRESS) so we could send out your donation card.
ME: Ummmm, I don't recall agreeing to accept a donation card in the first place.
AC SERVICES: But, sir, you do understand how this works? We send donation cards out and you send in your donation. The funds go to help cancer patients with medicine...
ME: Yes, Curtis, I do understand how this works. However, what I am saying to you is that I do not recall agreeing to accept such a card from you in the first place. I know this because we do not accept telephone solicitation of ANY kind at this house.
AC SERVICES: But, sir, we gain all of our funding through donations. This is for cancer patients...
ME: I understand that as well, but, again, we still do not accept telephone solicitation of any kind at this house.
(PAUSE)
AC SERVICES: Well, sir, may we count on your help in the future?
ME: Mmmmmmmmmmm, I think the answer to that would have to be "No."
AC SERVICES: All right, sir. God bless you. Have a nice day.
Of course, after the above exchange, I was livid.
It pisses me off to no end when telemarketing companies refuse to accept our stated refusal to take telephone solicitation. (And praise must go to the companies that do accept our refusal without hassle, because that happens about as often.) I also adore it that these companies almost always seem to think that if they're not asking for a credit card number, but instead for an agreement to a future donation, that this is somehow NOT solicitation so we should just go ahead and take it.
Now, I completely understand that getting money out of people is their job, and not taking no for an answer can be part of this tactic, but I don't have to like it nor put up with it. My wife can't understand why I don't just hang up on them immediately, but Patrick Swayze once told me that I should be nice, until it's time not to be nice, so that's my motto. The whole reason I have the no telephone solicitation policy stems from a few run ins with actual fraudulent telemarketing agencies. I realize there are legit telephone fundraising services out there, but the assholes ruined the medium for all of them in my book. As for AC Services, their tactic of playing the guilt-card to try and solicit donations is unacceptable and has now permanently secured them a titanium bolted place on my shit list. I have had many MANY cancer-sufferers in my family, including my step-mother, who's several years in remission, and an aunt who recently died due to pancreatic cancer. I do support charities that assist cancer patients. However, I will NEVER do so through telemarketers, and if I ever receive another call from AC Services they will count themselves lucky they are in another state.
Why so? Take a look around. CharityNavigator.org is a site that rates charities and offers a forum to discuss them. Cancer Fund of America does not receive a very good rating as a charity to begin with and their fundraising service choice of Associated Community Services seems to sound alarm bells in their forum about CFA. It would seem that most of the money AC Services raises goes to AC Services and not cancer patients. So they can go fornicate themselves with a hot wire brush coated in cat shit, as far as I'm concerned.
If you work for a telemarketing call center, believe me I feel your pain. Sometimes it's the only work around. Just don't call my house. And if you do, please take me at my word on the first try. Do me the courtesy of allowing me to remain nice.
ME: Hello?
AC SERVICES: Hi, can I speak to JUICE?
ME: This is him.
AC SERVICES: Hi, I'm Curtis with AC Services. We do fundraising on behalf of Cancer Fund of America. I was...
ME: Curtis, I need to stop you at this point to let you know we don't accept telephone solicitation of any kind at this house.
AC SERVICES: But, sir, we were just calling to confirm your mailing address as (SAYS OUR MAILING ADDRESS) so we could send out your donation card.
ME: Ummmm, I don't recall agreeing to accept a donation card in the first place.
AC SERVICES: But, sir, you do understand how this works? We send donation cards out and you send in your donation. The funds go to help cancer patients with medicine...
ME: Yes, Curtis, I do understand how this works. However, what I am saying to you is that I do not recall agreeing to accept such a card from you in the first place. I know this because we do not accept telephone solicitation of ANY kind at this house.
AC SERVICES: But, sir, we gain all of our funding through donations. This is for cancer patients...
ME: I understand that as well, but, again, we still do not accept telephone solicitation of any kind at this house.
(PAUSE)
AC SERVICES: Well, sir, may we count on your help in the future?
ME: Mmmmmmmmmmm, I think the answer to that would have to be "No."
AC SERVICES: All right, sir. God bless you. Have a nice day.
Of course, after the above exchange, I was livid.
It pisses me off to no end when telemarketing companies refuse to accept our stated refusal to take telephone solicitation. (And praise must go to the companies that do accept our refusal without hassle, because that happens about as often.) I also adore it that these companies almost always seem to think that if they're not asking for a credit card number, but instead for an agreement to a future donation, that this is somehow NOT solicitation so we should just go ahead and take it.
Now, I completely understand that getting money out of people is their job, and not taking no for an answer can be part of this tactic, but I don't have to like it nor put up with it. My wife can't understand why I don't just hang up on them immediately, but Patrick Swayze once told me that I should be nice, until it's time not to be nice, so that's my motto. The whole reason I have the no telephone solicitation policy stems from a few run ins with actual fraudulent telemarketing agencies. I realize there are legit telephone fundraising services out there, but the assholes ruined the medium for all of them in my book. As for AC Services, their tactic of playing the guilt-card to try and solicit donations is unacceptable and has now permanently secured them a titanium bolted place on my shit list. I have had many MANY cancer-sufferers in my family, including my step-mother, who's several years in remission, and an aunt who recently died due to pancreatic cancer. I do support charities that assist cancer patients. However, I will NEVER do so through telemarketers, and if I ever receive another call from AC Services they will count themselves lucky they are in another state.
Why so? Take a look around. CharityNavigator.org is a site that rates charities and offers a forum to discuss them. Cancer Fund of America does not receive a very good rating as a charity to begin with and their fundraising service choice of Associated Community Services seems to sound alarm bells in their forum about CFA. It would seem that most of the money AC Services raises goes to AC Services and not cancer patients. So they can go fornicate themselves with a hot wire brush coated in cat shit, as far as I'm concerned.
If you work for a telemarketing call center, believe me I feel your pain. Sometimes it's the only work around. Just don't call my house. And if you do, please take me at my word on the first try. Do me the courtesy of allowing me to remain nice.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Prodigal Sons Part 3
Sitting in the sanctuary of Grace Baptist, I was ready and willing to have fireworks go off, to know for certain that I was where I belonged and that signs had indeed led me there. Unfortunately, I was also ready and willing to pick some nits.
Instead of the usual church announcements at the beginning of the service, a lot of time was spent acknowledging the birthdays and anniversaries being celebrated by members within the past week. An awful lot of time. In fact, all celebrators were asked to stand, remain standing, and then one by one tell their age or how many years they’d been married. This seemed like a less than efficient use of time to me, especially since that information was printed in the bulletin already. And a bit later, in celebration of memorial day, all veterans were asked to stand, remain standing and then individually tell of their years of service and with which branch they had served. This part I didn’t mind so much. I was afraid when it came to welcoming new visitors, I'd be made to stand up and give my age and tell everyone what brought me there that day, but this didn't happen. Instead, music was played and folks got up for the traditional baptist shaking of hands belonging to new faces, or just saying hi to their immediate neighbors. Probably 25 people came over to welcome me. I could not say by a long stretch that I had not been welcomed.
My second major item on my checklist of Good Church Attributes is the quality of the choir. Music is important to me and if not actively participating in it myself, nothing beats a good church choir. Grace's was not awful. I've heard far worse. (In fact, in my Mamaw's church, growing up, there was a lady who frequently sang solos who insisted on having the accompanist activate the Bossa Nova beat on the church organ, presumably on the grounds that God put that button there so clearly he wanted it to be pressed regardless of whether or not the song was written for or even played at that tempo.) Grace's choir sang two songs during the service, both hymns, and they mostly sang the melody. It felt a lot like what a choir does when they've not actually prepared anything special. Granted, this is a little country church, so I wasn’t expecting the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But as important as good praise music is to me, I was not blown away. (Though I have to say, their pianist seemed to have a higher degree of skill than one might have expected and their organist left the Bossa Nova button alone.)
The third major checklist item, which is actually #1 on the list, was the message. The minister struck me as someone cut from the classic fire and brimstone cloth. The message that morning was about sin and he pretty much went through the 10 Commandments pointing out the major appearances of their violation in modern society and how tolerance of immorality has given way to acceptance for most of them, but particularly with fornication, adultery and drunkenness. And it was during the part about drunkenness being a most grievous sin that the minister made the proclamation that drinking “even one beer is too many.” And this was the point when I very nearly stood up and, Peter Griffin-style, said, “Ohhh, hey, look at the time… Yep, gotta be hitting the ollllld dusty trail... Catch ya’ll later… Have a good one… God bless… `Scuse me… `Scuse me.”
See, I like a good beer, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Did I say I like to drink 15 good beers in a sitting? No. I like to drink one. Maybe two. About once a year, I'll have more than two, but over the course of four or five hours. And while I acknowledge that alcohol abuse is a terrible problem and can lead to the destruction of family, career and lives, I’m not one of the people engaging in alcohol abuse, nor would I wager are the VAST MAJORITY of men and women who just enjoy a good beer. I understand there are people in the world who become victims of folks who abuse alcohol and see the ruination that follows in their wake. Their lives can be forever altered because of the things they endure at the hands of alcohol abusers. Doesn't change the fact that I still like a nice Belgian porter. Also, little known fact: alcohol consumption of any amount is not even mentioned in the 10 Commandments. Think about that. Now the Bible does have a lot to say on the subject of drunkenness being forbidden, and but it does not say I can’t enjoy a Dos Equis Amber. Don't believe me, have a gander HERE.
Am I being overly defensive about this topic? Probably. It's one of my sacred cows, though.
That being my mindset, I was pretty much done with the service at that point and did seriously contemplate leaving. However, I kept coming back to the events that led me to be there and decided I’d better stay. I might not agree with that particular opinion, but this was an Independent Baptist church, as it turned out, so I was probably lucky the ladies were wearing makeup and count my blessings that no tongues were being spoken in beyond Appalachian Queen’s English.
So I prayed that if I was truly meant to be there I would receive the message I was there to
receive. I also prayed that it would be a nice additional sign if my cat was waiting for me when I got home.
The rest of the message was pretty standard fire and brimstone preaching, which is to say very loud and definitely pointing fingers at aspects of our society and world that don’t live up to the 10 Commandments. The message was still one of hate the sin, love the sinner, but with a little more of a bite to it than I really appreciated. For instance, it was the minister's assertion that the nutty weather we've been having is directly due to the sin in our world and that there's much more punishment to come. This is something I don't really buy into. Not that I don't think punishment can be dolled out from on high, but mostly because I think people's memory of destructive natural disasters is sometimes really short. Yeah, we've had a lot of tornadoes this year, but there are tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and volcanoes extending back to the dawn of time, some MUUUCH bigger than anything we've seen in our lifetime. Like they say around our state: you live on the river you're gonna get wet; it might not have happened for 50 years, but eventually that river's going to flood.
The major point to the guy's message, though, was not how rampant sin is in our society, but how accepted it has become even among Christians. We are willing to take our own major and minor sins, from drugs and drunkenness, to fornication, to lust, to even swearing (another arrow that hits close to home), and chalk it all up to Ah, it's my nature. Can't change it. Why bother to fight it? Whattayagonnado? And in this we become tolerant of behavior in ourselves and in others that would have horrified us at one time. And it was this aspect of the service that stuck with me after I left. Maybe it was why I was led there. Not sure. And as many issues as I had with the service, and despite the lack of klieg lights from above, I wasn't scared off by any means.
When the service was over, I didn't hang around to chat with anyone. I wasn't angry, but I was still a bit bewildered. I left, but didn’t drive straight home. I headed to Wal-Mart for a few groceries first, (though not any beer, I have to admit).
Half an hour later, when I pulled up my driveway, there was no sign of Emmett Kitty. Perhaps I had just been suffering from a case of heavy coincidence instead of signs, I thought. Or perhaps it was somehow too much to expect that my prayer would be answered in so direct a manner.
I got out of the car and began hauling my grocery bags toward the house, fending off a vicious attack of excitement from Sadie and Moose. While they were running around, I looked at them fixedly and said, “What did you do with Emmett? Where is your Emmett?” I didn’t really think they’d had anything to do with Emmett’s disappearance, I was just talking to talk.
I stepped onto our boardwalk that led to the back door. As I reached the half way point of it, though, something grayish shot past me that wasn’t a dog. At first I thought it was D.J. Kitty, who is very gray. But then I got a good look at the cat that was even then standing at the back door.
I nearly dropped my groceries. It was Emmett. He was really thin and hungry-looking, but it was definitely, undeniably Emmett. I stood frozen in place, the weight of the groceries my only real sensation beyond shock and relief and shock again.
“Thank you, Lord,” I said aloud.
I opened the back door and put the groceries on the floor. Emmett dashed up on the butcher block table where the cats eat and began looking in the bowls for some food. I could still scarcely believe my eyes. I wanted to take pictures of him because I somehow thought my wife wouldn’t believe me otherwise. I took three blurry photos with my phone before realizing I was being an idiot. I poured both of the cat bowls full of dry food, then fetched our little prodigal a healthy dose of canned food from the fridge to go on top.
I then called the wife at work.
“Uh, Emmett’s back,” I said.
“He is?! It’s really him?”
“I’m looking at him right now.”
“Is he okay?”
“He seems fine. He’s really skinny and definitely hungry.”
“But is he hurt or wet or anything?”
“Nope. Just skinny,” I said. Then I added, “I, uh, I think I may have found us a new church. At least one to try.”
I then told her the events of the morning and how my prayer for Emmett’s return had come to
pass.
I'm sorry to say that I hadn’t had the faith to believe my prayer would be answered when I prayed it. In fact, part of me thought it was a safe bet that it wouldn’t be answered and that I could consider that in itself an answer to whether or not I was really supposed to be at Grace church. Now, and despite my misgivings about my experience, I do feel obligated to give it at least a second shot and bring the wife with me. She's up for it, too. It's hard to look in the face of such directly answered prayer and turn away.
If Grace is not our new home, perhaps the answer is only that I need to start paying more attention to my spiritual life and get myself to a church, if not that one. But we have to try that route first to see. I hope and pray I'll find out.
Instead of the usual church announcements at the beginning of the service, a lot of time was spent acknowledging the birthdays and anniversaries being celebrated by members within the past week. An awful lot of time. In fact, all celebrators were asked to stand, remain standing, and then one by one tell their age or how many years they’d been married. This seemed like a less than efficient use of time to me, especially since that information was printed in the bulletin already. And a bit later, in celebration of memorial day, all veterans were asked to stand, remain standing and then individually tell of their years of service and with which branch they had served. This part I didn’t mind so much. I was afraid when it came to welcoming new visitors, I'd be made to stand up and give my age and tell everyone what brought me there that day, but this didn't happen. Instead, music was played and folks got up for the traditional baptist shaking of hands belonging to new faces, or just saying hi to their immediate neighbors. Probably 25 people came over to welcome me. I could not say by a long stretch that I had not been welcomed.
My second major item on my checklist of Good Church Attributes is the quality of the choir. Music is important to me and if not actively participating in it myself, nothing beats a good church choir. Grace's was not awful. I've heard far worse. (In fact, in my Mamaw's church, growing up, there was a lady who frequently sang solos who insisted on having the accompanist activate the Bossa Nova beat on the church organ, presumably on the grounds that God put that button there so clearly he wanted it to be pressed regardless of whether or not the song was written for or even played at that tempo.) Grace's choir sang two songs during the service, both hymns, and they mostly sang the melody. It felt a lot like what a choir does when they've not actually prepared anything special. Granted, this is a little country church, so I wasn’t expecting the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But as important as good praise music is to me, I was not blown away. (Though I have to say, their pianist seemed to have a higher degree of skill than one might have expected and their organist left the Bossa Nova button alone.)
The third major checklist item, which is actually #1 on the list, was the message. The minister struck me as someone cut from the classic fire and brimstone cloth. The message that morning was about sin and he pretty much went through the 10 Commandments pointing out the major appearances of their violation in modern society and how tolerance of immorality has given way to acceptance for most of them, but particularly with fornication, adultery and drunkenness. And it was during the part about drunkenness being a most grievous sin that the minister made the proclamation that drinking “even one beer is too many.” And this was the point when I very nearly stood up and, Peter Griffin-style, said, “Ohhh, hey, look at the time… Yep, gotta be hitting the ollllld dusty trail... Catch ya’ll later… Have a good one… God bless… `Scuse me… `Scuse me.”
See, I like a good beer, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Did I say I like to drink 15 good beers in a sitting? No. I like to drink one. Maybe two. About once a year, I'll have more than two, but over the course of four or five hours. And while I acknowledge that alcohol abuse is a terrible problem and can lead to the destruction of family, career and lives, I’m not one of the people engaging in alcohol abuse, nor would I wager are the VAST MAJORITY of men and women who just enjoy a good beer. I understand there are people in the world who become victims of folks who abuse alcohol and see the ruination that follows in their wake. Their lives can be forever altered because of the things they endure at the hands of alcohol abusers. Doesn't change the fact that I still like a nice Belgian porter. Also, little known fact: alcohol consumption of any amount is not even mentioned in the 10 Commandments. Think about that. Now the Bible does have a lot to say on the subject of drunkenness being forbidden, and but it does not say I can’t enjoy a Dos Equis Amber. Don't believe me, have a gander HERE.
Am I being overly defensive about this topic? Probably. It's one of my sacred cows, though.
That being my mindset, I was pretty much done with the service at that point and did seriously contemplate leaving. However, I kept coming back to the events that led me to be there and decided I’d better stay. I might not agree with that particular opinion, but this was an Independent Baptist church, as it turned out, so I was probably lucky the ladies were wearing makeup and count my blessings that no tongues were being spoken in beyond Appalachian Queen’s English.
So I prayed that if I was truly meant to be there I would receive the message I was there to
receive. I also prayed that it would be a nice additional sign if my cat was waiting for me when I got home.
The rest of the message was pretty standard fire and brimstone preaching, which is to say very loud and definitely pointing fingers at aspects of our society and world that don’t live up to the 10 Commandments. The message was still one of hate the sin, love the sinner, but with a little more of a bite to it than I really appreciated. For instance, it was the minister's assertion that the nutty weather we've been having is directly due to the sin in our world and that there's much more punishment to come. This is something I don't really buy into. Not that I don't think punishment can be dolled out from on high, but mostly because I think people's memory of destructive natural disasters is sometimes really short. Yeah, we've had a lot of tornadoes this year, but there are tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and volcanoes extending back to the dawn of time, some MUUUCH bigger than anything we've seen in our lifetime. Like they say around our state: you live on the river you're gonna get wet; it might not have happened for 50 years, but eventually that river's going to flood.
The major point to the guy's message, though, was not how rampant sin is in our society, but how accepted it has become even among Christians. We are willing to take our own major and minor sins, from drugs and drunkenness, to fornication, to lust, to even swearing (another arrow that hits close to home), and chalk it all up to Ah, it's my nature. Can't change it. Why bother to fight it? Whattayagonnado? And in this we become tolerant of behavior in ourselves and in others that would have horrified us at one time. And it was this aspect of the service that stuck with me after I left. Maybe it was why I was led there. Not sure. And as many issues as I had with the service, and despite the lack of klieg lights from above, I wasn't scared off by any means.
When the service was over, I didn't hang around to chat with anyone. I wasn't angry, but I was still a bit bewildered. I left, but didn’t drive straight home. I headed to Wal-Mart for a few groceries first, (though not any beer, I have to admit).
Half an hour later, when I pulled up my driveway, there was no sign of Emmett Kitty. Perhaps I had just been suffering from a case of heavy coincidence instead of signs, I thought. Or perhaps it was somehow too much to expect that my prayer would be answered in so direct a manner.
I got out of the car and began hauling my grocery bags toward the house, fending off a vicious attack of excitement from Sadie and Moose. While they were running around, I looked at them fixedly and said, “What did you do with Emmett? Where is your Emmett?” I didn’t really think they’d had anything to do with Emmett’s disappearance, I was just talking to talk.
I stepped onto our boardwalk that led to the back door. As I reached the half way point of it, though, something grayish shot past me that wasn’t a dog. At first I thought it was D.J. Kitty, who is very gray. But then I got a good look at the cat that was even then standing at the back door.
I nearly dropped my groceries. It was Emmett. He was really thin and hungry-looking, but it was definitely, undeniably Emmett. I stood frozen in place, the weight of the groceries my only real sensation beyond shock and relief and shock again.
“Thank you, Lord,” I said aloud.
I opened the back door and put the groceries on the floor. Emmett dashed up on the butcher block table where the cats eat and began looking in the bowls for some food. I could still scarcely believe my eyes. I wanted to take pictures of him because I somehow thought my wife wouldn’t believe me otherwise. I took three blurry photos with my phone before realizing I was being an idiot. I poured both of the cat bowls full of dry food, then fetched our little prodigal a healthy dose of canned food from the fridge to go on top.
I then called the wife at work.
“Uh, Emmett’s back,” I said.
“He is?! It’s really him?”
“I’m looking at him right now.”
“Is he okay?”
“He seems fine. He’s really skinny and definitely hungry.”
“But is he hurt or wet or anything?”
“Nope. Just skinny,” I said. Then I added, “I, uh, I think I may have found us a new church. At least one to try.”
I then told her the events of the morning and how my prayer for Emmett’s return had come to
pass.
I'm sorry to say that I hadn’t had the faith to believe my prayer would be answered when I prayed it. In fact, part of me thought it was a safe bet that it wouldn’t be answered and that I could consider that in itself an answer to whether or not I was really supposed to be at Grace church. Now, and despite my misgivings about my experience, I do feel obligated to give it at least a second shot and bring the wife with me. She's up for it, too. It's hard to look in the face of such directly answered prayer and turn away.
If Grace is not our new home, perhaps the answer is only that I need to start paying more attention to my spiritual life and get myself to a church, if not that one. But we have to try that route first to see. I hope and pray I'll find out.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Prodigal Sons Part 2
I pulled into the parking lot of Grace Baptist and it seemed every bit as nice as it had on my drive past earlier. There were a handful of church busses and vans which to me spoke to a community outreach on the part of the church. Seemed healthy. The real first test, though, would come once I stepped through the doors and saw how welcoming this place would be.
Part of the reason I look for a church to be welcoming of new faces is that my dad always used to say that I should be wary of any church that was not. If you went to a church for the first time and no one said hello to you, it was maybe not the place you needed to be, he said. Even at really big churches, members know who they have and haven't seen before. I was no sooner through the front door of Grace Baptist, though, when a lady caught sight of me and walked up to shake my hand. She welcomed me in and asked if I already knew people in the church. I told her, no, but that I'd driven past earlier and thought I'd try it out. She then led me back to introduce me to the pastor and nearly anyone else who we passed on the way to and from. Everyone seemed very nice and equally welcoming.
The funny thing was, I felt I had to resist the urge to tell everyone about the events of my morning that led me to be there. What if I sold them on my road to Damascus tale, only to find out I’d walked into a snake handling church full of folks who were pissed off that the rapture had gone south last weekend? Fortunately, this did not seem to be the case
As I entered the sanctuary everyone seemed happy to be there. And there were a lot of them. The lady who had greeted me earlier apologized that attendance was so light that day because a lot of people were away for Memorial Day. Looking around, though, I thought there had to be at least 300 people there. This was a light day?
Not three steps into the sanctuary, I spotted the lady and her son who’d asked directions earlier. This was the closest I came to telling of telling anyone my story from that morning, but as they had been as big a part of it as I had been, I felt a little better. I reintroduced myself to them. "Oh, you were the man walking your dogs," she said, a little surprised. I must look much different when I'm wearing a sport coat and not pajama shorts. I then said something about how I thought it was too big a coincidence they’d asked about the church I’d driven past, so I was just following the signs. They smiled at this and seemed to take it well enough, but I couldn’t help feeling odd about it--almost like I'd just said, "I follered yew ta church tudaaay, cause it was our destineeeee!" To counteract this feeling, I smiled and nodded farewell and quickly booked it for a pew well away from them and then made it a point to never look at them again.
Sitting there before the service, having seemingly been brought to the church by a sign from God, I was prepared to receive some sort of important message. I expected it would be blazingly obvious, like the beam of heavenly light that hit Jake in The Blues Brothers, just before he went flipping down the aisle of James Brown’s church. I was prepared for my experience to push all the right church buttons in me: the choir would sound amazing, the preaching would be inspiring, someone would give me five dollars and I would know I'd found a new church home. That didn’t really happen so much, though. In fact, I'm not sure if that's ever happened for me.
Our previous church home, back when we lived in Tri-Metro, was at a church we had initially dismissed as a bit too white-bread. The service there was fine enough the first couple of times we went, but it was a different experience from our church back in Charlotte, where we usually left feeling equal parts uplifted and convicted of our failings. Just when we were about to dismiss the church, though, we visited a couple of the churches I mentioned in the previous installment, with the ribbon worship and the group hugs and the seemingly ever-present danger of encountering a serpent. Suddenly white-bread didn't sound so bad. We dashed back there and, within a few weeks, saw that it was far from the church we first assumed it to be. We came to love that church and developed bonds to many of the people there that still hold up today. It was where I not only came out of my shell a bit, but started singing in the choir and eventually sang solos in church and acted in and directed plays there. We really came to love it.
Once we moved to Borderland, we tried a couple of churches, but wound up joining one that had come recommended to us by folks in Tri-Metro. And I'm going to place the blame for our failure to make that new church our "church home" squarely on our own shoulders. In the year and a half we attended there, we never really gave it a fair shake. We didn't attend Sunday school, no matter how many people invited us to their classes, we didn't join the choir, we only went to a handful of outside church activities, we almost went out of our way not to make new friends. I think it was sort of like we were afraid the place wouldn't live up to our old church, so we just refused to let it try. We showed up on Sunday, said howdy to folks around us, mostly enjoyed the services and then made for the parking lot.
When it comes down to it, and despite occasional appearances to the contrary, we're both fairly shy people and it's hard to get us out of our shell. Even back in Tri-Metro, it took a good couple of years for us to find our footing and a lot of that had to do with being drafted into directing church plays, or acting, or joining the choir, etc. Relationship building is tough work and requires work that we just did not put into our first church in Borderland. And, at least for me, half the reason we stopped going was because after so many weeks it just felt embarrassing to go back and admit you'd been skipping church. Neither of us ever wanted to become the kind of people who only attend church at Christmas and Easter, so we became the kind of people who just didn't go at all.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Part of the reason I look for a church to be welcoming of new faces is that my dad always used to say that I should be wary of any church that was not. If you went to a church for the first time and no one said hello to you, it was maybe not the place you needed to be, he said. Even at really big churches, members know who they have and haven't seen before. I was no sooner through the front door of Grace Baptist, though, when a lady caught sight of me and walked up to shake my hand. She welcomed me in and asked if I already knew people in the church. I told her, no, but that I'd driven past earlier and thought I'd try it out. She then led me back to introduce me to the pastor and nearly anyone else who we passed on the way to and from. Everyone seemed very nice and equally welcoming.
The funny thing was, I felt I had to resist the urge to tell everyone about the events of my morning that led me to be there. What if I sold them on my road to Damascus tale, only to find out I’d walked into a snake handling church full of folks who were pissed off that the rapture had gone south last weekend? Fortunately, this did not seem to be the case
As I entered the sanctuary everyone seemed happy to be there. And there were a lot of them. The lady who had greeted me earlier apologized that attendance was so light that day because a lot of people were away for Memorial Day. Looking around, though, I thought there had to be at least 300 people there. This was a light day?
Not three steps into the sanctuary, I spotted the lady and her son who’d asked directions earlier. This was the closest I came to telling of telling anyone my story from that morning, but as they had been as big a part of it as I had been, I felt a little better. I reintroduced myself to them. "Oh, you were the man walking your dogs," she said, a little surprised. I must look much different when I'm wearing a sport coat and not pajama shorts. I then said something about how I thought it was too big a coincidence they’d asked about the church I’d driven past, so I was just following the signs. They smiled at this and seemed to take it well enough, but I couldn’t help feeling odd about it--almost like I'd just said, "I follered yew ta church tudaaay, cause it was our destineeeee!" To counteract this feeling, I smiled and nodded farewell and quickly booked it for a pew well away from them and then made it a point to never look at them again.
Sitting there before the service, having seemingly been brought to the church by a sign from God, I was prepared to receive some sort of important message. I expected it would be blazingly obvious, like the beam of heavenly light that hit Jake in The Blues Brothers, just before he went flipping down the aisle of James Brown’s church. I was prepared for my experience to push all the right church buttons in me: the choir would sound amazing, the preaching would be inspiring, someone would give me five dollars and I would know I'd found a new church home. That didn’t really happen so much, though. In fact, I'm not sure if that's ever happened for me.
Our previous church home, back when we lived in Tri-Metro, was at a church we had initially dismissed as a bit too white-bread. The service there was fine enough the first couple of times we went, but it was a different experience from our church back in Charlotte, where we usually left feeling equal parts uplifted and convicted of our failings. Just when we were about to dismiss the church, though, we visited a couple of the churches I mentioned in the previous installment, with the ribbon worship and the group hugs and the seemingly ever-present danger of encountering a serpent. Suddenly white-bread didn't sound so bad. We dashed back there and, within a few weeks, saw that it was far from the church we first assumed it to be. We came to love that church and developed bonds to many of the people there that still hold up today. It was where I not only came out of my shell a bit, but started singing in the choir and eventually sang solos in church and acted in and directed plays there. We really came to love it.
Once we moved to Borderland, we tried a couple of churches, but wound up joining one that had come recommended to us by folks in Tri-Metro. And I'm going to place the blame for our failure to make that new church our "church home" squarely on our own shoulders. In the year and a half we attended there, we never really gave it a fair shake. We didn't attend Sunday school, no matter how many people invited us to their classes, we didn't join the choir, we only went to a handful of outside church activities, we almost went out of our way not to make new friends. I think it was sort of like we were afraid the place wouldn't live up to our old church, so we just refused to let it try. We showed up on Sunday, said howdy to folks around us, mostly enjoyed the services and then made for the parking lot.
When it comes down to it, and despite occasional appearances to the contrary, we're both fairly shy people and it's hard to get us out of our shell. Even back in Tri-Metro, it took a good couple of years for us to find our footing and a lot of that had to do with being drafted into directing church plays, or acting, or joining the choir, etc. Relationship building is tough work and requires work that we just did not put into our first church in Borderland. And, at least for me, half the reason we stopped going was because after so many weeks it just felt embarrassing to go back and admit you'd been skipping church. Neither of us ever wanted to become the kind of people who only attend church at Christmas and Easter, so we became the kind of people who just didn't go at all.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Prodigal Sons
As of this last Sunday morning, Emmett Kitty was still very much missing and had been for about three days. I’d been feeling pretty mixed about the whole thing, as I was still unconvinced he wouldn’t come walking up the driveway one day. But on Saturday night, when I wrote my blog entry about my interactions with Mrs. Foreman and of her appearance during the time I risked my hide to rescue the mystery Avie-like male cat from a tree, I started to feel more than a little resentful that such good deeds had gone unrewarded, at least in the current cat department. Meanwhile, my one thin thread of hope, the Otto family, was still out of town, so I had no way of knowing if they’d seen Emmett. The knowledge that was unlikely that they're having seen him would help at all, unless they had Emmett stashed in their house, did not make me any happier.
On Sunday morning the wife left for work and I took the dogs to go out for breakfast burritos. Burritos found and consumed, I began driving back home intending to walk the dogs when I got to the main road outside of our neighborhood. However, instead of turning onto that road, I decided to keep going down the highway and headed out of town and to the next community where there was supposed to be a river of sorts. (There's a little more story as to why I needed a river, but I'll have to come to that tale later as it's long and involves small watercraft.) In the next community, I did find the river, but it was really more of a wide shallow creek that was full of rocks. Being a nice morning and the scenery being so pleasant, I continued along the riverside road I was on as it wound on around through a third little community. And during this, I soon passed a church.
The church was a medium sized one in a newish looking building and it happened to share the same name as the church I attended as a child, back in Mississippi. Let’s call it Grace Baptist, though that’s not its real name. I felt a bit of a magnetic pull toward it. It looked inviting and friendly, with a nice blacktop parking lot, lots of church buses and with the beautiful creek/river running in front of it. But I kept on driving. After all, I was practically wearing pajamas, had dogs in the car and it was barely 10 a.m. But I made a mental note that it might be a good one to come back and try another day.
See the wife and I have been in the market for a new church for a while now, but I have to confess that we’ve been dragging ass about actually finding one. Every few weeks we say, “Yeah, we probably ought to go try a new church,” and then we usually don’t. A lot of it has to do with the wife's work schedule and my unwillingness to try new places alone, but other times it's just laziness on our part. When we do try a new church, we’re usually underwhelmed by the experience and nothing really seems to fit. It's not that we're terribly picky, but in the past we've both been pretty certain when we've found the place for us and so far we've not really found it. We're fans of churches that are A) preaching the word as we understand its truth to be; B) that is friendly to newcomers; and C) has a great choir. We're not interested in a lot of frufru beyond that, by which I mean that neither of us were raised in Pentecostal churches, so we're not into the whole catching the spirit/falling out in the aisles scene, the speaking in tongues scene, the running around the sanctuary waving ribbons on sticks scene, or the entire congregation rushes the pulpit for a giant group hug scene. I don’t mean to crap on churches where those events occur, and I certainly am not calling into question the authenticity of the spiritual events (though I do suspect a lot of the speaking in tongues I've personally witnessed to be the product of drama rather than spirit). I'm just saying that it's not a flavor we enjoy. In fact, we've had some fairly negative experiences when trying churches that carry packaging claiming to be vanilla but then turned out to be Tutti-Frutti Nut Cluster when we got there. And in our particular state, there’s a lot of that sort of thing to be found. During more than one church sampling in the past, I have literally thought the phrase "I think they're about to bring out the snakes.” Never actually saw any snakes handled, mind you, but I have definitely scanned the aisles for snake cages. (And on that note: God might very well be protecting the folks who choose to handle vipers in his name, and I hope he continues to, but God also gave me enough sense to leave `em in the woods.)
Eventually the road I was on reconnected with the main highway and I took that for the five plus mile drive back to where the highway connected to the road leading to my neighborhood. Just outside our neighborhood, I parked the car, leashed up the pooches and took them for a walk while listening to podcasts. We walked for around 20 minutes and were nearly back to my car when another vehicle pulled up beside us and slowed to a stop. In the passenger seat was a high school aged boy and in the driver’s seat was a lady who must have been his mom. The kid said, “Excuse me, sir, but could you tell us how to find Grace Baptist?”
"Actually, I can. I just drove past it earlier this morning," I said, the fingers of synchronicity tickling my neck. I then told them the way to get back to the highway and on down to the next exit that would take them back to Grace in a handful of miles. "You know, I would not have been able to tell you that yesterday, but I just drove by it earlier while joy riding," I said. The mom said it was a good thing they stopped to ask me. And, while I can’t pull her exact wording now, I’m pretty sure she said something in a half-joking manner about it being a sign I should go there myself sometime. “Yeah,” I said. “I probably should.”
I got in my car and drove home, wondering if this was indeed a sign. We as humans like to grasp onto things as signs and portents way too much, but this felt like a pretty big coincidence. It’s not like my neighborhood was really even near the church itself. It wasn’t even on the same side of the highway. Was I put in their path with the information they needed, or were they sent to nudge me back in the direction of the information I had earlier been given? Maybe both? I weighed all of this in my mind and found I could not dismiss the events of the morning as being a possible sign. So now my choice was whether or not I was going to ignore this sign.
Trying the church out certainly wouldn’t hurt me, I reasoned. Might even help me. And in the back of my mind, I even found myself thinking that maybe if I followed the sign and did what I was apparently being directed to do, I might be rewarded with the return of our frickin’ cat. So, at 10:45, I threw on some nicer clothes, grabbed my Bible and headed to church.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
On Sunday morning the wife left for work and I took the dogs to go out for breakfast burritos. Burritos found and consumed, I began driving back home intending to walk the dogs when I got to the main road outside of our neighborhood. However, instead of turning onto that road, I decided to keep going down the highway and headed out of town and to the next community where there was supposed to be a river of sorts. (There's a little more story as to why I needed a river, but I'll have to come to that tale later as it's long and involves small watercraft.) In the next community, I did find the river, but it was really more of a wide shallow creek that was full of rocks. Being a nice morning and the scenery being so pleasant, I continued along the riverside road I was on as it wound on around through a third little community. And during this, I soon passed a church.
The church was a medium sized one in a newish looking building and it happened to share the same name as the church I attended as a child, back in Mississippi. Let’s call it Grace Baptist, though that’s not its real name. I felt a bit of a magnetic pull toward it. It looked inviting and friendly, with a nice blacktop parking lot, lots of church buses and with the beautiful creek/river running in front of it. But I kept on driving. After all, I was practically wearing pajamas, had dogs in the car and it was barely 10 a.m. But I made a mental note that it might be a good one to come back and try another day.
See the wife and I have been in the market for a new church for a while now, but I have to confess that we’ve been dragging ass about actually finding one. Every few weeks we say, “Yeah, we probably ought to go try a new church,” and then we usually don’t. A lot of it has to do with the wife's work schedule and my unwillingness to try new places alone, but other times it's just laziness on our part. When we do try a new church, we’re usually underwhelmed by the experience and nothing really seems to fit. It's not that we're terribly picky, but in the past we've both been pretty certain when we've found the place for us and so far we've not really found it. We're fans of churches that are A) preaching the word as we understand its truth to be; B) that is friendly to newcomers; and C) has a great choir. We're not interested in a lot of frufru beyond that, by which I mean that neither of us were raised in Pentecostal churches, so we're not into the whole catching the spirit/falling out in the aisles scene, the speaking in tongues scene, the running around the sanctuary waving ribbons on sticks scene, or the entire congregation rushes the pulpit for a giant group hug scene. I don’t mean to crap on churches where those events occur, and I certainly am not calling into question the authenticity of the spiritual events (though I do suspect a lot of the speaking in tongues I've personally witnessed to be the product of drama rather than spirit). I'm just saying that it's not a flavor we enjoy. In fact, we've had some fairly negative experiences when trying churches that carry packaging claiming to be vanilla but then turned out to be Tutti-Frutti Nut Cluster when we got there. And in our particular state, there’s a lot of that sort of thing to be found. During more than one church sampling in the past, I have literally thought the phrase "I think they're about to bring out the snakes.” Never actually saw any snakes handled, mind you, but I have definitely scanned the aisles for snake cages. (And on that note: God might very well be protecting the folks who choose to handle vipers in his name, and I hope he continues to, but God also gave me enough sense to leave `em in the woods.)
Eventually the road I was on reconnected with the main highway and I took that for the five plus mile drive back to where the highway connected to the road leading to my neighborhood. Just outside our neighborhood, I parked the car, leashed up the pooches and took them for a walk while listening to podcasts. We walked for around 20 minutes and were nearly back to my car when another vehicle pulled up beside us and slowed to a stop. In the passenger seat was a high school aged boy and in the driver’s seat was a lady who must have been his mom. The kid said, “Excuse me, sir, but could you tell us how to find Grace Baptist?”
"Actually, I can. I just drove past it earlier this morning," I said, the fingers of synchronicity tickling my neck. I then told them the way to get back to the highway and on down to the next exit that would take them back to Grace in a handful of miles. "You know, I would not have been able to tell you that yesterday, but I just drove by it earlier while joy riding," I said. The mom said it was a good thing they stopped to ask me. And, while I can’t pull her exact wording now, I’m pretty sure she said something in a half-joking manner about it being a sign I should go there myself sometime. “Yeah,” I said. “I probably should.”
I got in my car and drove home, wondering if this was indeed a sign. We as humans like to grasp onto things as signs and portents way too much, but this felt like a pretty big coincidence. It’s not like my neighborhood was really even near the church itself. It wasn’t even on the same side of the highway. Was I put in their path with the information they needed, or were they sent to nudge me back in the direction of the information I had earlier been given? Maybe both? I weighed all of this in my mind and found I could not dismiss the events of the morning as being a possible sign. So now my choice was whether or not I was going to ignore this sign.
Trying the church out certainly wouldn’t hurt me, I reasoned. Might even help me. And in the back of my mind, I even found myself thinking that maybe if I followed the sign and did what I was apparently being directed to do, I might be rewarded with the return of our frickin’ cat. So, at 10:45, I threw on some nicer clothes, grabbed my Bible and headed to church.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
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