God Of Our Fathers
Good morning, y’all. Absolutely feeling like Winter here. Dark clouds of the snow variety rolled in and I was fearing for the worst. Fortunately, they blew out as the day progressed and it warmed up a bit. I do not know what to make of this weather. I guess I should just be glad it’s not up in the 90’s and beyond yet. Be thankful for the small blessings, as they say.
Well, I’m counting the blessing of the Right Reverend Dale E. Bread being employed. I decided to take a turn this week to catch the show at “The Little Church In The Valley”, as opposed to driving into town. The new location of the Full Gospel Original Church of God doesn’t need my support as much as the old location does. Certainly the Reverend Helen Handbasket doesn’t need my patronage. She’s kind of become the Elton John of the Evangelical set. She is “number one with a bullet”, as they say in the recording industry. Her souls saved to sinners ratio has got to be off the charts.
In fact, I do wonder if there is a chance that the Reverend Helen Handbasket might get called up to the “bigs” as they say in professional sports. Currently, I think there are only two or three larger Evangelical churches in the country than the Crystal Palace. Certainly all of them have bigger TV markets. I’m sure that local restrictions in big cities like Dallas and Houston and Charlotte don’t allow for the handling of serpents. Objectively, I don’t know that the testament of faith as performed by the Reverend Helen Handbasket is her strongest job qualification. She does need to keep her skills up to speed, though. You never know when some community will just go completely off their nut and vote in a concession to religious zealots that goes contrary to common sense and the public good. It happens.
Anyway, I felt the need to be counted in attendance at the “The Little Church In The Valley”. I feel I need to show my support for continuing to pay the Right Reverend Dale E. Bread a salary. He is caught up on his rent now, and I’d like to maintain the trend. In truth, the attendance is about half of what it used to be at the little church, and I don’t want the Elders to consider closing the church. I’d say the congregation consists of the diehards who won’t go into town, the folks who are watching for a repeat of the Right Reverend’s famous incident, and me. Also there are those who are romantically linked to the Right Reverend, and I’d just put a guess on those by gender and age group. I’d say the age span is from 18 to 55, but it could slip a little in either direction. The Right Reverend does not surprise me as much as he used to.
Well, we had a good turn out, and the Right Reverend did a fine job of delivering his message of “Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself”. It is a good theme for me. In fact, I don’t know that anybody ever needs to preach anything else, but I know they will. Churches sure enough would go broke if week after week they just taught the Golden Rule. It would be like the preacher standing up behind the pulpit saying, “that’s it, that’s all I’ve got”. Well we know that would last about three weeks, even for the most repentant sinner. Churches are competing with every form of distraction you can think of, including laziness. When you slip over into competing with professional football you get into really dangerous ground.
Most men can be corralled into attending a Sunday service if it doesn’t go past noon. We’re willing to forego a few minutes of in depth analysis by NFL retirees for the potential salvage of our immortal souls. If the service starts slipping towards kickoff, all bets are off. Fortunately, the Right Reverend knows his audience, and he has slipped the last serpent back in the box by twelve noon. I don’t know how folks that celebrate their Sabbath on Saturday could get through the college football season. I don’t think there’s a male in these parts that would darken the doors of a church if he thought there was any chance he’d missed kickoff. There’s religion and worship, it’s important to know the difference.
Anyway, the Right Reverend set us free and I headed back to TackyToo to catch the Reverend Helen Handbasket on the DVR. She was in fine form. We’ll talk about it later.