17/09/2024
A MIRACLE HAD OCCURRED
A local priest of the Church of Our Lady of Solitude, had summoned me to his modest abode with a most unusual request."Time marches and the congregation shrinks, my son," the good father sighed, fi*****ng rosary beads worn smooth as river stones. "We must find words to wet the people's appetite for spirit again.I hear you are creative and you have some experience with communication. Suggest me a message for the billboards.".Perhaps I took this as a chance for atonement for all the times I have missed communal worship. And so I found myself pondering the divine dilemma deep into twilight, as nightbirds' lullabies drifted through bamboo.In the witching hours as herons called out sermons across mist-shrouded reeds an idea came to me then, borne on the humid air like an angel's epiphany.
So what message did I suggest and why? Read on
I knew a man once who had a peculiar method for finding new girlfriends. Whenever he set his sights on someone new, he’d follow her to church. Any church. It didn’t matter if it was Baptist, Pentecostal, or some little shack by the roadside—he’d ask, “What church do you go to?” and show up, as if he had been a devoted member all his life.
Now, you’d think a man with no real knowledge of church customs would stumble, but no. The moment he stepped inside, he was no stranger to the ways of the Lord. On his first Sunday, as they sang “Oh When the Saints,” there he was, right up in the front row, moonwalking like Chris Tucker (fake Michael Jackson), utterly possessed by the holy spirit of “Jesus is coming.” When they shifted to “Around the Corner,” he’d gaze into the distance, as if Jesus himself were turning the corner, waving. And by the time “Upande Upande” filled the air, he’d spin dramatically, seeing “mataifa yote” gathering before him. He pulled this off not once, not twice, but three times. Different churches, of course. He knew better than to repeat himself—word travels faster than light in those places.
And each time? He left with a new girlfriend, as sure as the sun rises. But on his fourth attempt, the winds of fortune changed. He went to a new church, confident as ever, but this time(lady luck betrayed him) Someone had traveled. A sharp-eyed young woman, who had witnessed his holy theatrics in another town, was now a senior member of the clergy. She caught him at the gate, her eyes narrowing like a hawk spotting a chicken. She confronted him, right there, about his suspicious motives. And what happened next? Well, they say he married her. That, of course, is a joke. But the rest? Based on a true story, more or less.
Now, there’s another man I’ve heard about, and his story is no less peculiar. He was always annoyed by his wife’s nightly serenade, her soft voice singing “My Jesus, My Jesus, When Will You Come?” “Shut up, you mad woman!” he’d yell. “Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep? Your Jesus isn’t coming. It’s over!”
But fate, or perhaps a twisted sense of humor from the heavens, had other plans. One day, the man was struck by a sudden illness that threatened to carry him away. That night, as he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, contemplating the end, his wife snored peacefully next to him. In a panic, he shook her awake. “Call your Jesus tonight,” he whispered urgently. “Tell him this is an emergency.”
And just like that, he joined the legions of sinners who turn to God when the wolves are at the door. It’s an old story, one that repeats itself in every dusty corner of the earth. Hypocrisy, you might say. But as Me-moist Marry Karr wrote in Lit , “It seems hypocritical… to turn to God only now during whatever crisis is forcing them toward it—a child with leukemia, or a husband lost in the World Trade Center. But no one I know has ever turned to God any other way.” "
Even St. Augustine, in his Confessions, admitted that we only find God on a road thick with mud. We wait until we’re knee-deep in it, stuck and sinking, before we look to the heavens for help.
And speaking of mud, when J. Robert Oppenheimer the man in charge of the atomic bomb at Manhattan witnessed the destruction in Japan, he muttered a famous line from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” As the old adage goes,There are no atheists in foxholes, they say.
So yes, perhaps the saint come To God because of an inborn righteousness, but the rest of us show up like beggars with a tin cup. And if we stay we come to learn to stop asking God for wheelbarrows of gold and instead realize like Mathew MacGough said in his famous Oscar acceptance speech that " when we got God we got a friend"
Therefore the message I suggested was simple:
SINNERS ARE WELCOME.
And to that I say ,"Hi Men , alright alright alright"
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