Church

I have a dear friend named Irene, who lives in my pool house. She arrived from England 4 years ago after her husband suddenly died. We had decided that we should try going to church to meet some new people, it had been many years since either of us had been to church.

So, on one Sunday morning:

I had a quick bath, headed for the wardrobe and wondered what to wear. Selected a slightly bright colored mid-western patterned blouse/skirt. After, getting dressed I walked into the pool house to get Irene, and noticed she had on a pair of gray slacks and nice sweater. Oh, I said, do you think we can wear slacks, she said "well they can take me as I am or they can stuff it. " :-) Hummm, I was beginning to feel a bit overdressed, even for church, in this cowboy town. We were late setting off, (my fault) and to boot, we had to get some gas. As I was putting gas in the Van, Irene ran in a paid, I didn't fill the tank, that would have taken too long. As we drove out of the gas station we looked at the clock and realized that we would arrive at least 15 minutes late. Dilemma ....what to do...we decided to turn around and try another church a bit nearer, but we didn't really know what time their service started. There was a phone book in the back of the Van, Irene jumped over the seat, grabbed the book and searched the yellow pages for "cow creek church" or something like that, and damn, but their service had started 30 minutes prior....we tried to see in through the windows of this church from the van, and it looked like people were milling around, therefor, we couldn't decide if it was all over or not. So to play it safe, we headed for Redding (15 minutes drive) and our original destination "Bethel Church", with the thought that we would at least look in the windows and check it out for next week.

This church is huge, and the long steep driveway is lined with poles flying different flags. Since is was a dull windless day, the flags were hanging limp, so what type of flags they were just wasn't obvious. The parking lot was large. We entered the main foyer, and there were a few people sat around. On a wall there was a TV blaring out music, showing a group of people on a stage singing and waving their arms in the air, and some holding and waving small flags. The audience (congregation) were also waving their arms and looked to be singing too. It took a few minutes to realize that this picture we were watching was in fact showing a live version of what was happening in the main body of the church. Wow, we thought, what catchy music, it was real toe tapping. So with grins on our faces, we hot-footed it over to the swinging doors at the other end of the room.

As we opened the doors the full blast hit us, quite loud but very engaging. We headed for the nearest seat, but didn't sit down as the rest of the people were still standing while singing their hearts out and waving their arms in the air. It didn't take long to notice the large drop-down screen up at the front which was being used to show the words scrolling down to the song that was being sang. We stood their feeling a bit like gooney birds, not really knowing what to think. Around the room on the large walls, were brightly colored different types of banners/flags. Our attention was drawn to the words that were scrolling down, at the same time we saw "Zion", we both turned to each other and said, "this is a Jewish church". Irene said "we shouldn't be in here". I said "Hang on, this doesn't make sense, Nancy isn't Jewish and she comes here." I looked a bit more closely at the different flags and we both soon realized that they represented different religions. Hence, they call themselves "non-denominational".

About 4 songs later, the choir left the stage and the priest/minister began a rather upbeat sermon. Irene went real quite, and I thought to myself, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she nod's off, and about 20 minutes later, she did. We left the church shortly after that.

I'm not sure what we were really hoping to find, but I said, "you know we really need to get involved with what goes on behind the scene". Sitting there listening to a man give us his point of view about what the bible "really says" isn't what either of us appreciates. But we aren't totally put off, we intend to go to another church next week, perhaps a "new age". We'd like to check out a "Buddhist" church, but the nearest one is 1.5 hrs. away in Mt. Shasta.

We are both more inclined to feel that we would probably like to donate our time to some organization like the 'women refuge'.

Anyway, as far as checking out men for Irene, that was a lost cause, I don't think there was a 'single' guy in the place. :-)