PLAY PRACTICE

One evening, years ago, as a young youth pastor I walked into a scheduled church meeting, hoping it would be a short one. 

And not just because it was a church meeting, but because I had play practice to get to. I was just out of college, living in LeMars, Iowa, and I had been pulled into a community theater production of a goofy play called "Bleacher Bums". I had been way too shy to ever get on stage in high school, but I had always wanted to try. And now I was doing it. The cast was an eclectic group of 8 individuals and the atmosphere of practice was thoroughly secular, if you know what I mean.

But I loved it.

So I really wanted this church meeting to be brief. 

When I walked into the church parlor, though, I knew this wasn't going to be an ordinary meeting. It was going to be an attack. 

At the folding table, sitting next to the pastor, was the mother of two youth, neither of whom EVER came to any of the church activities I planned. This woman seemed to be the pastor's guest of honor. And she was scowling. 

After the opening prayer, for the first 40 minutes, the meeting was nothing but this woman dumping all sorts of criticisms on me and the pastor nodding in assent, occasionally tossing in his extra two cents. When things finally calmed down and we moved on to other business, I realized this meeting was not possibly going to end early enough for me to be on time for play practice. And I didn't dare leave before the meeting ended - out of fear that I might receive a fatal back stab on my way out of the church building. 

So I stayed to the bitter end and then drove myself a half hour late to the little community theater maybe ten blocks away, crying and pounding the steering wheel violently as I went.

After parking, I dried my eyes, collected myself briefly, and entered the building. As I walked down the center aisle toward the stage, the cast members looked up from their scripts, jumped out of their seats and someone declared, "Thank goodness you're here - we were all afraid something bad had happened to you!" The pain on my face must have been fairly obvious; the cast members surrounded me and several put their hands on my shoulders to comfort me. 

And for the first time that night, I felt loved.

There's a moral to this story but it is too terrible to spell out in black and white, so I won't.