Mindset of Cynicism II
Continued…
As I was saying, this past Sunday morning, I was visiting Trinity Baptist Church in Nashville with my sister and her husband. It’s a small church… maybe 50 or 60 people. Nick and I had just been hunting that morning, so we were a little late coming in. I was wearing tennis shoes, blue jeans, and a navy blue button down shirt. Nick was wearing the same, only chacos instead of shoes. Everyone else was wearing either a full suit or a dress… the little 5 or 6 year old girl in front of me had her hair up in a bun with a sophisticated looking dress on. I tried to hide my tennis shoes under the chair…
I finally looked past the fact that I wasn’t wearing a suit amidst the small, formal gathering of people who were in their finest Sunday clothes. I stayed close to Nick… somehow we formed a special connection in the fact that we were both underdressed. As the service wore on, I did as I have done in many past services… looked at the floor and figured out how many different designs I could make in the carpet, watched the second hand on the clock make its way around the sphere (it always gets boring after two times around), counted how many bald men were in the crowd (wondering if I would also have the chance to sport my finely-shaped head in all of its glory someday), and re-living the days when I was young enough to ask my dad how much longer church would take.
Fifteen or twenty minutes into the sermon, I realized that I didn’t know what the pastor was talking about. I couldn’t have even told you the passage from Scripture that he was teaching from… much to my shame, I still can’t tell you what the specific Scripture passage was. But as I began to listen, I realized the pastor was talking about something that has been a struggle for me for a long time… reconciliation. What caught my attention was a story about gasoline and explosions. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
This is a version of his story, as told by me… nothing is directly quoted.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and I decided to get rid of some logs and old wood that was sitting in the back of my yard. I piled up the wood and dumped it in the back fire pit. It had been raining the last few days, so the wood was somewhat damp. “Gasoline would solve that problem,” I thought to myself. I grabbed a can of gasoline from my garage and emptied its contents onto the wood. As I stood carefully away, I lit a match and tossed it onto the fire… being careful not to be close enough to singe any part of my body. The gasoline ignited, followed a split second later by a massive explosion… BOOM! As the flames and smoke cleared, I saw the remainders of the concrete fire pit that I had lighted the fire in only seconds earlier. The gasoline had somehow seeped through the cracks in the concrete and pooled in one spot a foot or two under the soaked wood. The sudden explosion destroyed any evidence of there being a fire pit there before.
To be continued…
Published on 10 Nov 2007 at 10:07 am.
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