July 24: Sunday morning vibe

My Sunday morning vibe is this: I go to church. I take kiddo with me too. Even though he spends most of his time in the nursery (I pull him out for the sermon) that is fine with me. I want him to get used to making time for church on Sundays.

Sadly, my church is in a period of flux right now. We have no permanent pastor. As such, we rely on an alternating roster of preachers. Some I like. some, not so much, but such is life.

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Kiddo is getting immersed in Godtalk when he's in my car. The radio is tuned to the Mars Hill Network and this morning, I got a Holy Spirit slap in the face courtesy of Charles Stanley. "God hates a proud heart," Charles Stanley was saying. "He hates it when we take credit for the gifts He has given us. He wants us to be humble and to rely on Him."

Yeah, that cut to the bone for me. I've been getting a LOT of magic work as of late. I've got three county fairs, a bunch of campground shows, and I'm pretty confident that I'll get some more school show bookings in the fall and spring as well. At the back of my mind, I know that buggabugga could stand up again and take all that away. I can't control buggabugga. Only God can.

So thank you, Lord, for the magic shows that I did last weekend. Thank you, that I am starting to build up a savings account again so I can get the family through another winter. I am grateful. I am thankful.

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Irony alert. In today's sermon, Pastor Steve preached to us about the words of the Lord Jesus, specifically when He told us not to pray out loud like the pagans, looking for people to praise us for our piety. Pastor Steve told us that Jesus wasn't warning us against public prayer, but that we should examine our hearts so we'd know why we were thus praying. The example he gave us was the practice of saying grace before a meal. 

Now I am a sporadic grace sayer. I don't always say grace before each meal - I might be batting 50-50. My dad always says grace. Once, when I was a teenager, I got to go to Sera's Perogy Hut in Calgary with my dad and a guy named John Teibe, who used to run an apologetics ministry in Calgary called the Christian Research Institute. When the meal came, John Teibe insisted we pray over it.

This made me nervous. I was mostly nervous because I never prayed in a restaurant before; I had gotten used to the idea that saying grace was something you only do at home. There was a family history of this. My family NEVER prayed when we ate in restaurants. Now that John Teibe was making us all pray in a restaurant, I felt a whole lot of emotions go through my head. Basically, this is what happened in my brain:

Shteevie: We're praying in a restaurant? Oh no. What if one of my friends sees me. They won't think I'm cool anymore.

Holy Spirit: Who cares if your friends think you're cool? Remember what Jesus said: "If you're ashamed of me on Earth, I will be ashamed of you in front of my Father."

Shteevie: But... but... my family never prays in restaurants.

Holy Spirit: Well, maybe you should start.

And that was the end of that conversation. 

John Teibe probably said grace before he dug into this cake

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A little over a decade ago, I went for supper with an unbeliever friend of mine. I said a brief and quiet grace when the meal came. My friend was perplexed by this and politely asked if she could challenge this practice.

My friend found it bizarre that I was thanking God for my meal when, to her way of thinking, God had nothing to do with the meal. She suggested that my thanks would be best reserved for the chef and the wait staff at the Boston Pizza where we were dining.

Well, like the bumper sticker says, if you ate today, thank a farmer. There's a whole lot of people I could thank for what was on my plate at Boston Pizza that night. My server, the chef, the host, the architect who designed the Boston Pizza, the person who paved the parking lot that enabled me to park my car outside the Boston Pizza, the truck drivers who brought the food to the Boston Pizza, the farmers who raised the food, etc. If I want to add God into that mix, that's my prerogative. Also, I thanked everyone else in that list - directly or indirectly - by paying for my meal and leaving a generous tip. 

Now please don't think that I am mocking my friend here, who did have a point. I have no idea how to solve the problem of God's sovereignty and man's free will, but I do believe people need to be thanked for the hard work they do. Case in point: If some poor surgeon works a 10-hour shift bringing your son back from the dead, thank that surgeon. Yes yes yes, to God be the glory, but He gave that surgeon a gift of healing hands and you'd better tell him or her how much you appreciate that hard work.

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Today's Sunday morning vibe progressed from church in Cornwall to the splash pad in Williamstown again. If the splash pad was a person, my son would be his best friend. When we arrived, there was a soccer tournament going on and the splash pad was full of kids who had either just finished playing or were waiting for their game to begin. My kid outlasted them all. When it was time to go home, we were the only ones there.

Sometime between when the soccer games ended and kiddo and I left, a half dozen young adults descended on the park. The reason was they were organizing a mental health fundraiser at the park in early August; they had stopped by to work out some logistics.

I was practicing a magic trick, which happened to be three card monte. The young people asked if they could see the trick and, I am happy to report, they were impressed. The irony that I was performing one of the oldest con games in the books about three hours after church was not lost on me.

This evening, I hope to watch the Saskatchewan Roughriders defeat the Toronto Argonauts. I won't talk about that though. That's because all I have to talk about is my Sunday morning vibe. I hope I did that.