Sweet Hour Of Prayer
Good morning, y’all. Yesterday’s jaunt up and down and all around Tallulah Falls left me a little sore this morning. So sore, that I begged off driving into town to catch the services in person at The Full Gospel Original Church of God. It ain’t the driving that’s altering my plan, it’s the four block walk to get to the church from wherever I can find a parking space.
I guess there’s a price to pay for popularity, and in this case, it’s the fact that some of us who are less spry might choose to attend other services. Or no services at all, I guess. I’m not saying that the parking situation at the Crystal Palace is creating heathens, because there’s always the telecasts as an alternative. I’m just saying that some of the less energetic worshipers might choose to attend the “Little Church In The Valley” for a more convenient commune with their Lord. I can pull right up to the building at the old church, be inside and in my pew in less than a minute. It couldn’t be more convenient if it was a Drive-thru.
Going off track a little bit, but I wonder if anybody ever thought about the concept of a Drive-thru for religion? If not, I’d like to patent/copyright/whatever the idea. I can see how for the Catholics it would work great. Obviously, it would be perfect for communion, right? You’d go to the call box and order for the car, stop at the tithing window, and then proceed to pick up your order from the priest. The priest would give a blanket blessing for the car, a “go and sin no more”, and you’d be done for the week.
Confessions would be a little trickier if you didn’t want to share with the rest of the family. I’ll have to work on that some. It might be something like the bank with pneumatic tubes. Each family member could put their sins in an envelope with their name on it that would then be sent in to the “confessional”. The hearer of confessions would then open the envelopes, read the confessions and then place a penance response back in the appropriate envelope. Little Johnny might send in “I kicked the dog” in his envelope, and receive a “say ten Hail Mary’s” as his penance. I can see a wall mounted rack of penance cards color coded and graded by severity from top to bottom. The venial sins would be handled by the penance cards closer to Heaven, the mortal sins would be handled by the cards at the bottom, closer to Hell.
The confessional line could be a second drive thru with just the one extra stop. That way the confessors wouldn’t hold up the folks receiving Communion. If tens of billions of hamburgers can be served quickly and efficiently using drive thrus, can’t we expect “Church In A Box” to be just as successful?
What’s really cool is that there is already a network of drive thrus in almost every community already setup to handle the traffic. Chik-fil-A is a religious based organization that doesn’t open on Sundays. This would be a perfect marriage of functions. Before you pooh pooh my idea as pure balderdash, believe me, “Church In A Box” makes much more sense than the daiquiri drive thrus in New Orleans.