i'm gonna love you til the wheels come off...
Happy Thanksgiving! It’s official – the day is here and I am lounging on my couch, watching the parade on tv. Rick Astley was just on some sort of float of puppets from cartoon network. America, you’ve just been rickrolled.
I am thankful for this internship placement. This place is teaching me more than I’ll probably ever be able to articulate, although thanks for reading the blog as I try to articulate all that I can perceive that I am learning. But sometimes, being the bus monitor on Wednesday nights pushes my patience, my tolerance, and stretches any grace I have been given. It’s gotta groan from the strain it feels sometimes.
One of the significant differences between, say, your “average” pew-sitters in the church and these “city folks” I work with is while a polite, middle class Lutheran isn’t going to share what they really think about someone they don’t like or ‘care for,’ to use the polite lexicon, while the “city folks” are gonna lay it out there. The folks on the bus generally lack an inner monologue. If they had a filter, it’s clogged or has a very generous filtration system.
The bus was packed last night and I think people were feeling feisty. The heater doesn’t work, so there was lots of complaining about that. Then one person in particular felt it necessary to talk about who was going to hell and was quoting biblical passages (complete with “thee” and “thou” – the way the Bible ought to sound, ya know) to support his claim. He got loud enough and it, quite frankly, pissed me off enough that I finally was able to say in even, measured tones “This sounds like a conversation you should have in private. I don’t think you get to decide who goes to hell or heaven. God’s the one who is in charge.”
Do you want to know what I wanted to say? I wanted to say “coming from someone who is high all the time, possibly even right now, what do you think the Bible says about that?” (I did not say it. Repeat. I did not say it. Thank God.)
Terrible, terrible, terrible, Laura. Mind you, this was on the way to church, so during worship when I wished this person God’s peace, I really made sure I looked him full in the face when I said it, headphones in his ears and all. This kid has had no good news in his life, and that’s what church is to him, even if he doesn’t “appreciate it.”
Do any of us fully appreciate the grace that is given to us, even as we look at one another in terrible judgment, feeling feelings that are opposite of love? Nope. So thank God for God.
Thank you, God.
Before I got on the bus for the Wednesday night festivities, I saw a baby bat on the ground in the parking lot. I thought it was dead. It was not. I took a video of it crawling, but haven’t uploaded it yet to post here. It made me scream a little bit, as I thought it was dead and had gotten rather close to it. Then, while on the way to pick up the first person on the bus route, the wind (it was really windy) blew open one of the bus doors and shattered the entire window. The sound of shattering glass is really something to hear – I haven’t heard it since I broke my grandmother’s clock many years ago (sorry, grandma).
