Here in Colorado Springs, the “Sierra” store is in the same spot as a “Mardel Christian and Education” store. I needed Mother’s Day gear, so after perusing Sierra to price compare “Expert Voice” “deals”, I took the kids across the lot to Mardel. (Sierra seems to be winning on every level, if curious.)

While perusing the Bibles (specifically interested to learn the LSB has made it to retailers yet), I passed by a couple of ladies (the types which strike everyone as just as permanently affixed to the spot as the bookshelves behind them) who were putting on a show of “enjoying” some restful repose inside a great store.

I made eye-contact with the elder and listener as I heard the other one say, “I am done reading theology. I tried for a while but, honestly, just give me Jesus.”

It’s a fairly trite and common assertion among under-achieving wives and over-achieving baptist ministers, so I cannot say for sure whether she was the echo chamber or in earnest. But it called to mind a conversation I had with my mom the other day about church.

Sunday School was the topic, or the setting of the topic. The real topic was the morons who lob terribly uninformed opinions about terribly vague and uninteresting parts of scripture at all comers.

I told my mom, “Remember when Charlie Sheen was in all that drama and his show fell apart? At one point he said, ‘You don’t pay prostitutes for sex, you pay them to leave.’”

“Oh, yeah. I remember. Ugh.”

“Well, with that nature of flip-sided perspective in mind, as I get farther and farther from my time at Seminary, I believe that is how the money part works. If churches aren’t doing it for ya, you finally decide to pay money to try to find meaning in silence. The nicest way of putting this perspective being that seminary students want to be around other people as serious as themselves (calling or no), but the truth (and cynical perspective) is that seminary students want to be around people who are able to keep their mouth shut when they don’t know what they are talking about. And the money has something to do with segregating those two groups.”