August 8, 2006
There is a church in our town that has one of those changeable signs, where the minister can put up a thought for the day.
I don’t know where he gets these ideas, but quite a bit of the time I have to resist the urge to pull over, pound on the door and debate him on syntax, philosophy, or the inability on his part to understand the implications of what he’s writing.
Last week, it was:
JESUS CALLED
HE WANTS YOU TO COME HOME
Now, for the last six months, I’ve been working for a conservative Lutheran charity. As a lapsed Roman Catholic turned practicing Episcopalian, stirred up with heavy doses of hardened cynic, this is occasionally a challenge.
My mother is Lutheran. I speak Lutheran, but as a second language. I can get by.
A big part of my job has been finding dead Lutherans. In the database. Not just laying around anywhere. I help find death records and obituaries to confirm the location of donors so we don’t waste postage trying to send bulk mail to the wrong astral plane. During the course of a week, I read a lot of obituaries. It is more than a little depressing.
And I know what it means when “Jesus calls you home”. It means you’ve hopped the last flight out with a one way ticket, and I can decease your record and stop your mail.
I don’t think
DROP DEAD
is an appropriate thing to write on a church sign.
There’s a whole cottage industry for the creation of cheeky sayings for church signs. The more political they get, the worse they get. I always thought they were written by struggling romance novel authors, but I guess I’m mistaken.
Romance writers get a bad rap for stuff like this.
tsk tsk tsk.
I wish I could remember the combination that was on there one week, comparing two words and ending with
SAME ROOT
SAME FRUIT
I wanted to pound on the door and point out that the two words had the same PREFIX, and two entirely different ROOTS.
I may have skipped Seminary, but I got As in English.
There’s a whole cottage industry for the creation of cheeky sayings for church signs. The more political they get, the worse they get. I always thought they were written by struggling romance novel authors, but I guess I’m mistaken.
Romance writers get a bad rap for stuff like this.
tsk tsk tsk.
I wish I could remember the combination that was on there one week, comparing two words and ending with
SAME ROOT
SAME FRUIT
I wanted to pound on the door and point out that the two words had the same PREFIX, and two entirely different ROOTS.
I may have skipped Seminary, but I got As in English.