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or you can title this “Playing Holy Hooky”
It started last night when I went to bed around 11 PM (or 10 PM with the ‘fall back’ concerning our clocks)….
I read some Scripture and said a quick prayer before dozing off to sleep. I tossed and turned until 6:30 AM this morning when I finally decided to get up out of the bed.
After some prep time of getting dressed, etc., I left the house in the ‘Greyhawk’ and stopped off by the Golden Corral for a nice and hot Sunday brunch buffet.
At 7:30-8:00 AM on a Sunday morning, there are very few people there and by the time you are finished 30 minutes to 45 minutes later, you are leaving at the same time the “church” people are arriving and get to skip the ’small talk proselytizing’ that occurs when going down the buffet line and the “church member” asks you if you know God or not and when you answer “Yes” and tell where you go to church, the minds of average “church” people become ’suspended in disbelief’ because they really do not believe that you go to church…
Because you are not “dressed up” and you are in the buffet line at the Golden Corral on Sunday morning… (go figure…)
Sunday mornings between 7:30 AM and 8:30 AM is the only time I go to Golden Corral, It’s bad on Sunday Afternoons after church, Sunday Evenings after church, and Wednesday evenings before church when Golden Corral becomes “Pig-Trough Pentecostal” when the ‘Pentepimps’ (Lexuses, designer clothes, and hairstyles full of mousse and gel) and the ‘ChurchaGAWWWD’ people (any luxury rear-wheel drive vehicle, beehive hairdoos, and 1970’s era clothes) show up telling their borderline teenage kids to lie about their age (to still get the kid’s discount) while trying to pay for two people but feeding four people and thanking God for ’succeeding’ rationalizing that they will put the money that would have been spent on the other two people in God’s offering plate (and speak in tongues praising God for this ‘divine revelation’ of ’stealing). All while being “Anti-hygenic” around the buffet food and utensils and never leaving a tip (except for one of those dollar-bill lookalike Gospel tracks) when leaving…
Enough of Golden Corral.
I then went and did my Grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. Normal and uneventful as usual. Same grocery store. Same groceries purchased. Same routine procuring groceries in the grocery cart. Same greeters and cashiers.
And the same ‘church people’ who go to the back of the store where the one day over expiration date aged french bread, cookies, pastries, and cakes are located on the roll around cart . You see these people procure these items and then go to the 20 items or less register while security is scanning section “E” and quadrant “D9Bravo”.
After checking out and the person before you triggers off the security alarm stating:
You have activated Wal-Mart’s Inventory Control System, please step back and an associate will embarrass you…
because the cashier forgot to deactivate the magnetic strip from the Hannah Montana CD (matching the Hannah Montana jumpsuit and Hannah Montana luggage set), I walk out of the store towards the Greyhawk to see the sight of the same ‘church people’ who purchased the day old french bread, cookies, pastries, and cakes removing those items from their original packaging and placing them in their own cake dishes or their own platter plates wrapping them in tin foil to take them to church for ‘dinner on the grounds’ (I prefer a paper plate placed on a table myself) after church (and taking credit for baking it when complemented on how good it was).
After loading the groceries into the Greyhawk and feeding myself and buying groceries to feed me throughout the week, it was time to feed Greyhawk the weekly allocation of gasoline to where I went back home and put the groceries up.
It was sometime after 9:00 AM when this thought came to me…
You haven’t been to Books-A-Million in a long long while…. Let’s Go
I decided to get into the Greyhawk and go to “Books-A-Million Baptist” but beforehand decided to drive around town where the vast majority of churches were to see what I was expecting to see…..
Someone out there on the property border of a church or lurking around a church parking lot trying to hand out “Official Christian Voter Guides”…
I only saw this being actively done in the parking lot of two churches where it appeared that the ‘voter guides’ were being placed under the windshield wipers of people’s vehicles while the people were in church probably receiving a ’sermon’ with a cryptic theopolitical message telling you who to vote for using loopholes and ‘creative descriptions’ without mentioning any names to circumvent the 501c3 laws. (after doing ’spiritual warfare’ that more than likely identified the ‘Senator from Illinois’ and the ‘Presbyterian Sunday School teacher want-to be future US Senator for North Carolina’ as ‘great Satan’ while identifying the ‘Senator from Arizona’, his Charismatic third-wave sidekick, and the ‘God-fearing religious right’ incumbent US Senator for North Carolina ex head of the American Red Cross who spent more of her life in Kansas than North Carolina’ as “God’s anointed ones”.
When Tuesday comes, the vote for a candidate that will alleviate the ‘fear’ of terrorists, secular humanists, the lottery, non-Christians, fake-Christians, and the ACLU will be cast because of ‘fearing’ the ‘whammy of wrath’ from God if ‘God’s man’ doesn’t win…
How oxymoronic that line of thinking is….. The church that is supposed to teach ‘perfect love casts away all fears’ (1 John 4:18) is telling people that on Tuesday, you better be ‘perfect’ in your voting or the ‘love’ of God will depart from you and that you have to ‘fear’ about your eternity…..Bizarre…
I finally arrived at “Books-A-Million Baptist” and spent a little over an hour looking at car books, car magazines, drum magazines, and the Bible section looking for this Bible to see if I really wanted to purchase a new Bible (hardback only).
They didn’t have it in stock but could ‘order it for me’. I declined.
I had been curious about the ESV Study Bible after visiting the official web page (but not getting the links to work for some reason) and reading all the free Scriptures while comparing it to my Thomas Nelson hardback NKJV Bible. I wanted to see it in person because from what verses I had read between the two versions, the two Bibles appeared to be similar in verbage and I was wondering if I wanted to purchase this Bible or just keep using my trusty NKJV. I am still pondering this one wondering even though these are two different version, would I feel like I purchased the same Bible twice?
However, while looking at the amazing selection of ‘Inspirational’ books present, I saw some intriguing books that I thought about buying but didn’t for now because I wanted to not only think about it but also let you comment on what book may be of interest
Witchcraft in the Pews (Hardcover) by George G. Bloomer
Churched: One Kid’s Journey Toward God Despite a Holy Mess (Hardcover)
by Matthew Paul Turner
Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God (Paperback) by Francis Chan
The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Hardcover) by Timothy Keller
A Scandalous Freedom: The Radical Nature of the Gospel (Paperback)
by Steve Brown
I left the store and drove Greyhawk home….
It was during my drive home that while thinking about the books and stories listed above, I began to remember something from the ‘pente-past’…
Those Stories!!!!!
The ‘fear-mongering’ stories about what happened to those people who decided to skip a Sunday and not go to church. Whether it was to ’sleep-in’, being really sick in your body, start the annual summer vacation a day earlier, experienced a painful death of a loved one and needed solitude, tired and burned out from a fifty hour work week, or to enjoy the beauty of the beaches and parks my geographical area had to offer of the beauty of God’s creation.
Growing up ‘pente’, you heard the stories. You heard the testimonies of people who decided to ship church on Sunday to go Christmas shopping, start the vacation early, spend quality family time etc.
And what would happen……
The car broke down (not a hose or a belt, we’re talking about major mechanical / electrical failure) in the parking lot of Wal-Mart….. The kid got stung by a jellyfish while swimming at the beach…. The husband got his pocket picked and wallet stolen while grocery shopping… The wife accidentally locked the keys in the house… The husband got a speeding ticket… The hotel lost their reservation… A flat tire… The kid got sick to the point of having to go to the emergency room…. The wife got laid off her job the next morning due to ‘budget cuts’.
Why? because you skipped church on Sunday…
And what if you had decided not to skip church on Sunday?… Those incidents, accidents, and obstructions would not have never happened according to them. The car would not have broken down. The wife would still have her job. The hotel would have never misplaced their reservations. etc.
In other words, you brought all of this bad stuff on yourself and God sent those incidents, accidents, and obstructions to punish you to where next time you wanted to skip church on a Sunday……….
You’ll think again………
(unless you were a deacon / elder and those things were definately the attack of Satan… funny how the blameshift takes place when you go from being a ‘pente-peon’ to being in the ‘remnant echelon of leadership’.
These people would break out and start crying and asking God to forgive them for their sins and ask God take His wrath off of them while others would rejoice that the church was becoming more spotless and getting closer to the point where God could finally move on his people for the ‘last-days end-time revival harvest’ 9come on now, repent some more…)
The reason why I brought this up was because for many years after leaving pentecostalism and the seven years since I left the charismatic / third wave movement. I lived with that same ‘fear’ of going out on Sunday to anywhere but church. If I skipped church and went out to get groceries, medicine if I was sick, or wanted to go to Books-a-million or Worst Buy, I went to and from with an high state of anxiety, fear, hysteria, and paranoia of…
Something bad is going to happen…. A ticket… My car will break down in some wierd and bizarre way…. Someone will pull out in front of me and I will be in a wreck and suffer injury or die… I will lock my keys in the house… Someone will try to steal my wallet. The food I buy will give me a stomach ache. The electronics I buy will give me constant quality problems.
The reasoning progressed from ‘because I skipped church’ later to ‘because I skipped church and because I must have made God angry by leaving the pentecostal / charismatic movement’.
And I would rush to and from a restaurant, a grocery store, a gas station, ST. Arbucks, and make sure I got home and then ‘repent’ to keep the ‘whammy of wrath’ off of me. If you were on an airplane one Sunday morning 25,000 feet high and it experienced trouble, would you be like Jonah and ask the crew to throw you out of the plane because you skipping church caused the plane to experience trouble and believing that if they threw you off the plane with no parachute, the plane would suddenly be cured from it’s trouble?
But today, for the first time ever, those anxieites, fears, hysterias, etc. never crossed my mind, raised my blood pressure, made me sweat, shook my insides out, or made me super-cautious. pentecostals and charismatics would try to explain this away as being ‘a seared conscience heading towards a reprobate mind’ but I have another explanation…
Power, Love, A Sound Mind, Freedom, and Healing….
No Bible sermon turned covert political speech at any church in America today could have ever taught me the lesson I learned and provided the relief that I felt this morning.
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