Between Sundays

The Sunday Sideshow - Part 2

Then of course who can forget the candy connoisseurs who walk into the service more well stocked than the local supermarket. The sugary confections which are carried into the service through the purses and pockets of these members could fill the Christmas stockings of all the world’s children. Now why they feel the need to carry this much candy I will never know because they simply pull out the same piece they fail to open every week. You see, every good candy connoisseur knows that it would be improper to open the confectionary treat before the singing is done. How can you sing with a jawbreaker the size of a golf ball in your mouth? So once the song service is done and the sermon starts this member will quietly pull out their prized piece of candy and come face to face with the unanswerable dilemma that constantly confronts them at this point of the week. Standing between the object of their desire and the enjoyment of that desire is a wrapper more tightly bonded to that candy than a tube of superglue. Now why these wrappers seem to guard the candy more tightly than a guard at a maximum security prison, I’ll never know. But as soon as you try to free the prisoner from its container a warning alarm sounds through the auditorium in the form of a crinkle that causes everyone’s head to turn. As soon as this sound reverberates through the room, the candy connoisseur suddenly turns stealth and tries to cover their act. They too will look around as if they are not the culprit and wait until a more opportune moment to try again… maybe next week. What this individual fails to realize is that the distraction they cause is really of no consequence once the bathroom bandit springs into action.
The bathroom bandit is a one man procession that is only missing the signage and crepe paper to rival a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I have yet to figure out how an individual can not figure out the timing of their bladder enough to keep them in their seats for the entire service. Maybe as part of their pre-service ritual they choose to down a Big Gulp for fear they might dehydrate from a lack of liquids. Perhaps it is simply from a claustrophobic fear of having to be in one room for longer than the length of an average sitcom. For whatever reason, these individuals will get up week after week at the same point in the service to traipse along the center aisle as if no one else notices. You could almost set your watch by some from this group. When individual “A” gets up there is twenty minutes left and when individual “B” marches to the back there is five minutes until the invitation. What is even more amusing about this group is that most of the newborns in the nursery don’t have their diapers changed as often as this group goes to the bathroom.
The next act in the Sunday Side Show takes more perception to find because they don’t advertise like the others. These are the sermon sketchers. They figure as long as the church provides them with such artistic utensils as a sheet of paper for note taking and small pencils for writing, why not turn them into something useful. These artisans will work feverishly creating any number of doodles and landscapes across the pages of the bulletin. If the sermon runs over there is no cause for alarm for the offering envelopes make an excellent canvas once the first page is filled. Now these sketchers might escape detection entirely except the artwork is left for the pew cleaner to find. I wonder if one day I might hold a gallery showing for all the beautiful artwork I’ve collected. Then again a better idea might be to enroll most of this group in an art class. They have the practice but miss the presentation. Perhaps if we provided watercolor paints instead of small pencils in the pews?

[Conclusion on Thursday]

posted by Eric @ 7:38 AM