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 for the Catholics it would work great. Obviously, it would be perfect for communion, right? You’d go to the 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.
Anyway, convenient repentance for the unabsolved is what I’m all about. To that end, I am in my usual spot to watch the Right Reverend Dale E. Bread deliver this week’s sermon on God’s watchfulness. I think the title of the sermon was,“His Eye Is On The Sparrow”. The implication being that if God has the time to watch out for something as small as a sparrow, he’s certainly watching over us. The Right Reverend tried to blend in equal parts of “God is watching out for us”, and “God is watching us”. I think he came down a little heavier on the “God is watching us”, from my perspective.
Maybe the heavier message was delivered to himself. I know that if God has as good a method for watching as the TackyToo surveillance system, He’s got the Right Reverend dead to rights on a couple of issues. I think I’m remembering right that adultery still applies if only one of the parties is married. Of course, if both parties are not married, fornication applies. I do not see a Heavenly course for the Right Reverend, if the Lord is watching.
Well, the good news is that the Right Reverend has worked a timber rattler back into the testament of faith. The rattler seemed amused by the Right Reverend’s “tap dance for Jesus”, but not so amused as to be offended. The new team member played nice and went back into his box without incident. I’m sure that the Right Reverend will tell you that sometimes prayers are answered. I know mine were when the services ended at 12 noon on the dot. I left a pork butt on the Big Green Egg that needed basting. We’ll have to get to the telecast from the Crystal Place later.