Sunday Morning Sharkfest

Short version: This morning, my friend, my little brother, and I were going to go to church, but we didn't. The End.

Longer version: My little brother is always really slow to mobilize. He has to be roused at least three times to get out of bed to go to school in the morning, so it's not uncommon for whoever's driving to burst a blood vessel trying to get the little fartknocker out of bed.
So we needed to leave for church by 9:45 this morning to get to the 10:30 service. Where is Geoff? On the toilet. Males in the Dunn household, except me, have been known to sit on the can for up to half an hour just moseying and taking their time, so my friend and I take turns shouting at him to hurry up. He mumbles from behind the closed bathroom door that he has a stomachache. We wait while he sits on the can for 20+ minutes.

Three options formed in my head, in this order: (1) hurry his malingering ass out of the bathroom and get him to the car so we can speed down the freeway to stumble in late and flustered to church, (2) leave him on the can (he's 17, he can handle himself), and go to church -- I mean, if he's not going to get anything out of it, I might as well get some spiritual mileage out of the day, right? (3) Not go to church, sit around and fume all day, and unintentionally-but-sort-of-intentionally guilt-trip the little fartknocker.

It seems obvious when I list them out that those three options are incredibly unloving. But those were the first things that occurred to me to do. And if you stop and think, that sort of scene probably plays itself out around the American South Bible Belt on Sunday mornings. Foxtrot cartoons always have the parents screaming and hollering in order to get their lackadaisical kids into their pews on time. It's almost become a cultural joke to think about two congregants engaging in apoplectic road rage and then finding themselves next to each other in church. I remember a lot of Sabbath mornings that felt extremely stressful because everyone was running into the congregation on edge -- I remember wondering where the love, joy, peace, patience, and all that jazz had gone.

Two scriptures came to mind: the Mark 2:27 part where Jesus points out that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," and the 1 John 4:20 part where "if anyone says, I love God, but hates his brother, he is a liar." How could I abide in God's love, how could I celebrate God's love on His Sabbath, and still lack the patience, the love, the concern for my brother -- who actually did turn out to have a pretty bad case of stomach pains for the next few hours. God gave me my brother that I should have the opportunity to love him, and my first few thoughts today definitely failed that.

God doesn't want us to wallow in our guilt, but if we're doing something wrong, then we need to know it. Think about those two churchgoers who scream at each other on the road and then end up in adjacent pews feeling guilty. They have a right to feel humbled: as Jesus put it in Matthew 5, "If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift."

God looks at our hearts, not our church attendance, in the end.

Fortunately, God's grace gave me those thoughts before I did anything rash, and what we ended up doing was staying home, while I wrote this entry and gave my brother some soda and crackers. Which I know, sounds pretty basic.