Okay, this is Connie and it’s my week to write a little something, so I was thinking about how I didn’t go to church this past Sunday. Instead I chose to stay at home and lay around the house with my boyfriend. We watched a little television. I read the newspaper and we did plenty of “sinning”, if you know what I mean. I had a good time. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
I must admit that I did feel a tinge of guilt about missing Sunday service. It’s not something that I do often. I’m a a widow in my sixties, born and raised in the south. I’m from a generation when going to church every Sunday was mandatory. Everything we did revolved around the church and that didn’t change when my late husband and I moved to the north. I’m a member of the church choir. I go to bible study now and then. I am a card carrying member of the southern Baptist tradition. Yet I am sitting here wondering why do I go to church?
Sometimes the services can be so boring. There are the sermons that can put you to sleep, or the fire and brimstone sermons that can scare you to death. There are the solos that are sung off key and the gossips who talk about everybody. There are the better-than-thou-art Christians who judge, and the ministers who admonish, when they’re not begging for money or chastising you about keeping up with your tithes. Why does anybody go to church? It is an intriguing question and there must be a million different answers.
To some church attendance is the reinforcement of their faith in a Higher Power. To others it simply soothes their souls to hear the Word of God. Then there are those who are following the directives of one of God’s Commandments that states that we should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. However, that same commandment goes on to say that we’re not supposed to work on Sundays either. Of course that part is totally ignored by the vast majority of Christians, which means that only half of that Commandment is obeyed by the majority of us.
That got me to thinking about how many of the Commandments I have broken over the years in spite of my church attendance. I reviewed a list of them the other day and of the Ten Commandments so far I’ve broken five and honored five. That means that I’m holding at 50%.
I haven’t put another god before him. I haven’t killed anybody. I’ve honored my parents and I haven’t committed adultery. I also haven’t borne false witness against a neighbor—although the last one is debatable since my friends and I have been sued for slander, but the woman who filed the charges is a lying heifer, so I doubt if that counts. Oh, and I really haven’t stolen from anybody, except when I was a kid I did lift some penny candy from the Five & Dime store on a dare. I guess that counts. Anyway, if I compare my rate of Commandment breaking to that of the rest of the people in this country then I haven’t done badly. I’m probably average. That 50/50 thing is one of the reasons that I go to church, that and fornication outside of marriage.
Now we all know that’s a sin. That’s not one of the commandments, but it says not to do it in the bible. Yet, that’s probably the most widely disregarded sin in this nation. I doubt if many of us are going to give that particular sin up any time soon, and committing it on a regular basis certainly isn’t keeping anybody from going to church. Perhaps that’s the main reason that we attend. We know that nobody is perfect, and we’re all trying to become better people in spite of our moral ambiguity, so when our time is up we can plead our case.
Anyway, muse on that. I’ll see you in church this Sunday—maybe.
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