Please read this as entertainment, I was blowing off steam and trying to make Linnea laugh after working on book stuff. Again, I mixed a lot of my life up just to make it seem funny. OK, here goes….
Many of us have heard a person give a testimony of how they have commited their life to God. So much of the time, this person says they were scared to fully commit to God because they were worried God might call them out of their life of comfort and maybe they would have to go to Africa. I would listen and think, Africa must really suck if you would rather sit in church every week.
I was always a bit of a half, uh, stepper myself when it came to following God, still am. Kind of physically present, but the lights are off. I guess I may have been scared of saying yes to God most of my life, because the only people I knew who said they have said yes to God were so boring and so depressing. Women with boy haircuts who tell us not to have sex, and I think that that must be easy for their husbands. I look at the men and realize I have a long way to go before I have fully given up on life and am ready for the long excruciating process of service to the church. It seems that service to the church meant speaking softly and with a crap eating grin, like they are asking if they have me convinced that they believe in all this God stuff. Passive men who go through the motions and only feel truly alive when they have a temper tantrum and beat their children or throw their root beer can at the TV when the Red Sox lose.
I guess that being a church guy was the most a boy can aspire to, a life of shoving casseroles down into my gluttonous belly at potluck dinners, dour prayer meetings and one monday night a month committee meetings where we agree on the impossibility of it all, and this is the way we have always done it, so why bother trying anything new? Won’t work anyway. After a few cups of the addictive substance of choice in the church, coffee, and we can discuss in detail how the boy’s ministry plays too rough…it needs more of a woman’s touch.
I sat through Sunday school and sat through sermons, thinking my head was going to explode at any minute, I got told about how a cross bridges the gap between dirty stinky me and the high and mighty, and that if you say a little prayer I am saved from the lake of fire and eternal torment in hell, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I thought that if someone gnashed their teeth at me I would kick him. I learned that it is our fault if our friends burn in hell, it is our responsibility to invite our friends to church so they can get saved by Jesus. I thought, if I had any friends, which I don’t because I say this prayer every week and tell people they will go to hell if they don’t pray this prayer, in fact I have a book with different color pages that proves it, if I did have friends, sure as the hell I am scared of, I wouldn’t want to invite them to this place, where I get yelled at for laughing and fooling around and we have a lesson plan we need to finish and a bible verse to learn. If I had a friend who invited me here, I sure would say no, but I had no choice and anyway, at least I wasn’t going to hell like the Catholics and Methodists and Congregationalists and the especially the Jehovah’s Witnesses. At least the Baptists know the proper way of baptism, just the way Jesus was baptized.
If I had really big, uh, courage maybe God would call me out of this building into Africa, but that would take big hairy, uh, courage, because God hates me, he knows the sin in me and he hates me. He hates me so much he killed himself on a cross just to make me feel guilty, like I owe him, I didn’t ask to be born, and now my option is to be washed in the blood of Jesus or go to hell. I knew I was going to hell, because no matter how many times I asked Jesus into my heart and thanked him for killing himself on a cross for me, I still had a bad temper and liked to say the f bomb when no one was listening. The highlights of my life were looking at pictures of naked women and reading dirty jokes. The good things that I did, like go to christian school, sing hymns, not smoke cigarettes or drink beer (I vowed never to let alcohol pass my lips, like Samson) and made fun of only the most appropriate sinners. In fact I was downright mean to the downright downtrodden, they deserved it, because they were going to hell.
I remember liking watching christian stuff during junior church, like Story book. A boy named Christopher and his girlfriend and a robot would travel through time when they read the bible and they would go into a bible story. That sure beat coloring. Sometimes we would even watch movies like the “apple dumpling gang”.
The most important thing I knew about God was he wanted me to be good or he wouldn’t listen to my prayers. But maybe, if I was washed in the blood of the lamb, and we sang there was pow’r pow’r wonder working pow’r in the blood, and I was really sincere about never being bad again, then God would hear my prayers. In fact, I prayed about stuff, but mostly to save my tail after I had done something stupid or I prayed that a certain girl would like me, that is what I thought would be the best…every year there was some girl I was praying that God would brainwash and blind her eyes and somehow this girl would like such an awkward chubby chump.
So that is the answer, huh? An angry God calls someone no one likes to a place no one wants to be so he can convince the savages that if they were good, God might cause the girl in the grass hut across the street from him to fall in love with him, then she would cut her hair like a boy and scold him for thinking dirty thoughts, hold out the nookie from him, and if he keeps the faith long enough he might become an elder and sit through committee meetings listening to someone else’s wife at the table complain about how her husband doesn’t want to come to church. The scumbag would rather go to the bar, go figure.
So, that is missions. When someone’s guilty conscience causes him to become a missionary, because this is the last resort before giving up totally on an ignorant and weak faith, he heads off to missionary school for a couple of years to learn a language and makes sure he knows the proper definition of God as described by the leaders of the denomination, and then he has to raise support.
Support raising is a process where a poor misguided person who is hungry for a powerful God has to go to people who barely believe in this God, as evidenced by their lifestyle, and justify their giving their money to this cause. There are certain standards that God calls us to give our money to, it is called being a good steward, and what is a person thinking, doing something so irresponsible as missions? Why can’t he just get a good job like Jesus did and not make waves and leave people alone?
Maybe this person has a special calling, he probably never said a swear in his life, probably doesn’t even look at girls, and if he saw someone smoking a cigarette he would probably just walk right up to the person and snatch it out of his mouth and squish it with his foot and say God hates smoking because your body is a temple, don’t you know?
Our God isn’t made of money, you know, it doesn’t grow on trees, and besides I can hardly pay the bills on my oversized house, put gas in my oversized cars and buy enough food to feed my oversized kids.
This person, who has a special calling from God, called the great commission, which he takes seriously because he has actually read the book he was given for perfect attendance in sunday school in 3rd grade, finally sells everything he has, has given all his pride away, and trods off to africa. Once in africa he spends most of his time frustrated and alone, alone because he has the social skills he learned in the church, dresses like a color blind christian, and he is frustrated because that same church wants a progress report to justify the money they are sending him which could be put to better use buying ice cream for the punch at the potluck dinners.
While in africa, this missionary would miss MASH or Who’s The Boss every week, and probably would not be able to find work when he returned, because as we said, our God isn’t made of money, it does not grow on trees, and everyone knows that when a man has ‘done time’ it is difficult to readjust to nice pleasant society. Everyone knows that missions is a dead end, don’t they?
Maybe that is why Linnea cried when I showed her the ‘World Race’ information from the website. Do we have a special ‘calling’? Does money grow on trees? How would we be able to do this? Who knows, but you just heard where my thoughts come from.
I loved when the missionaries were on furlough and we would have ‘missions minute’ in between the announcements like Mrs. Oldchurchlady is having a tea party and the women are welcome at ten oclock, but they need to bring their own sugar because sugar doesn’t grow on trees and the prayer requests such as this same Mrs. Oldfounderofthechurchlady is scheduled to have surgery on her bunkles that same day at 11 am and would someone give her a ride? And then the guy that is supposed to be on meds shouts out a prayer request for the persecuted jews and everyone smiles and nods and says oh yes the persecuted jews, they need prayer because they crucified Jesus.
These missionaries would have a table in the back and I would grab the pray for me cards and look on the map at where they were and think how awesome it would be to get out of church somehow, and I would hear the other ladies commiserating for his poor wife and then they would rush off to burger king, because, well, that is what we do.
I remember buying arrows, that looked like spears, from a missionary. I think he was from Irian Jaya or some place like that, and I remember he brought some of the former cannibals with him. They laughed alot and lit a fire from sticks and held the flames in their bare hands to show how tough they were and all the men in the church grinned sheepishly and wrung their clammy hands, that must really burn someone would say, and one of the smart guys in the group would explain how this type of fire wasn’t hot, blah, blah, blah.
By the time I was old enough to stop being fascinated by missions, we stopped having mission weekends, I guess it was for some reason like when people give to missions they don’t support the church, or maybe hearing the missionaries stories makes too many people ask why we don’t see God’s power here, or maybe it just made people uncomfortable to know that there is actually need out in the world and it seems more important than who is screwing whom in General Hospital.
Well, when I first started to share this vision of ‘the World Race’ people didn’t seem to understand the concept. Why couldn’t we just do it the way everyone has always done it. How would we pay for this, money does not grow on trees, don’t you know? What was truly amazing to me is all my misunderstanding of how God works and how the church words began to crumble. People actually cared. People were actually interested. Maybe this idea was just radical enough to listen to? I hoped that this was a God thing, because honestly, that is what I needed at this time, to restore my faith in my faith.
