Each Sunday, and some Wednesday nights, I would arrive at my scheduled churches, find a place to sit, greet some of the congregants sitting around me, open a Bible I had purchased and wait for the service to begin. I always made a point to not be the show. I tried not to work the room, which is very natural for me, especially in a room filled with potential voters. I kept reminding myself, that on this day and in this place, I was not the focus, but rather the congregants were and I needed to show respect for their reverence. Luckily for me, enough congregants would seek me out, and introduce me to others I had not yet met, that I usually had the room worked on me.
As the weeks went by I started to notice a curious phenomenon: regardless of the denomination, gender, age or service style of the various Pastors, they all seemed in their sermon to be delivering the same message. And, each week regardless of what part of scripture each used in their sermons, they were speaking to me about either something already on my mind or some area of my life that should have been on my mind. I caught myself saying to myself each week, “oh, that’s what’s going on, and that’s what I should do about it!”
One of my favorite lines from the movie “Wild Things”, starring Kevin Bacon, is “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” I take away from that line that anything can happen and if it happens again then maybe it is coincidence, but if it happens too often, then there is no randomness about it. This is how I began to feel about the messages I was receiving from the pulpit. Generally inquisitive, I decided to research Christianity and in particular these denominations.
