While Driving...

I am driving to a meeting scheduled an hour and a half away.

This itself doesn’t bother me, being scheduled so far away from home, except the meeting is supposed to start at 9:30 in the morning. Meaning I have to leave earlier than the time I normally drop our middle child off at school.

As I drive, I’m reminded of the months I worked at my previous office, when I commuted about 50 minutes each way. That drive, which allowed me time to gear up in the morning and unwind after work, had the disadvantage of rush hour traffic on Interstate highways.

But the drive this morning actually seems quite different. I start out on an Interstate going west – instead of north, as I did when I commuted – and the traffic is much lighter. And only half of my route takes me on a major highway.

The second half of the drive takes me off the main interstate and onto a series of back roads and two lane highways that give you the kind of view you only get in the Midwest. Not that other places in the country don’t offer great scenery, too. My wife and I spent the second half of our honeymoon driving through gorgeous parts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and I remember the scenery on that drive being filled with 18th century homes, trees in a rainbow of colors, and old white churches with steeples and bell towers.

But that was the Eastern seaboard. The drive I’m on today brings me through small Midwest towns that nobody has ever heard of. And probably never will. Places like Bedford and Dowling, towns without the tourist-y romance of Boston or Concord.

The drive keeps my attention in a different way, however, because even though I grew up in the Midwest, I’ve never been down this particular road before. These small towns all end up seeming kind of the same, though. You leave a slightly larger city, some place like Battle Creek or Kalamazoo, and the two lane highway takes you winding through the outskirts of the town, past factories, schools, and finally to the in-between areas, where you drive through parcel after parcel of farm country.

Then when you get to the small town itself, you're greeted by the usual local businesses -- a tractor dealership, a local mechanic, often an antique shop –- then on to the newer commercial district with fast food places and one or two car dealerships. What ‘folks’ in the forties and fifties would have called ‘fancy’, a word that went out of fashion when Generation X came along.

Like the phrase 'going out of fashion.'

Sometimes you even get a small shopping mall in these towns. But eventually you’re into the old business district, the place in town that had its heyday like fifty years ago, with local insurance agencies and government buildings.

So as I’m driving this morning, I come into the first town between the larger one I’ve left and the one I’m eventually trying to get to at the end of the trail. And I see right away the reminder that I’m in the Midwest, strapped tightly into the Bible Belt, because the first major building I come to as I arrive 'downtown' is a Methodist Church.

I’m reminded I'm in the Bible Belt not just because it’s a church, but rather two other reasons.

First, the architecture of the building isn’t architecture. It’s the cheapest way to make a buiding in a town that requires a builder to follow standard building codes – no frills, no stained glass windows, no style or design. (Though the church congregation has made sure it still has a steeple.) Commercial buildings for businesses aren’t normally made like this, but the business of church is always different…

And second, there’s the sign out front, a good thirty yards away from the main building, right out close to the curb, so traffic zooming by will read as they pass:


God’s Stimulus Package Was Signed At The Cross.


This makes me sneer.

To me, it seems an obvious affront to the Democratic Party, worse yet, it probably wasn't intended to be. I’ve voted mostly Republican since I’ve been old enough to vote, and raised in an Evangelical church. So you’d think I’d feel a sense of kinship with whoever changed the letters on that sign to form that message. Instead, I feel a little revulsion.

I'm thinking, if you can’t see why the sign would be offensive to members of the Democratic Party, then you probably shouldn’t be the person in charge of deciding what to put on the sign in the first place. Especially with a Democrat in the White House and the words 'Stimulus Plan' splashed across the front page of every newspaper and online news source.

And if you’re goal is to use the sign that’s decorating the front lawn next to your place of worship to poke a jab at Democrats and liberals, then you might want to take a good long, hard look in the mirror and try to see yourself through the eyes of the person you claim to be representing.

All this is going through my mind as I drive, and I’m again reminded of Anne Lamott’s words, which I quoted in an earlier post: it’s safe to say you’ve created God in your own image, when it turns out God hates all the same people you do…

And then, too, it all brings to mind Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon Days" and a passage about Sundays and church:

Blue laws once frowned on Sunday labor, also loud recreation,

unseemly dress, and any "deportment inconsistent with proper reverence," and

those laws still frown but do it in private, in the book of old ordinances, in a

section unread for many years. Still, as recently as last summer, when Corinne

Ingqvist, home for the weekend, walked four blocks to the lake in her red

bathing suit, people who passed her going the other way, to church, felt that

something was definitely not right.It bothered them. She is Pastor

Ingqvist's cousin, a slim connection, but it made for a disturbing note, a long

red honk in the middle of a peaceful Sunday morning. They prayed that she would

leave town, and on Monday she did.

And that is what the sign is for me. A long red honk interrupting a calm, sunny drive through a small town.

So as I continue on, I’m pondering in a very obtuse and abstract way the bitter taste left in my mouth by this experience. My thoughts turn cynical as I consider this church I've passed, probably much like the one I grew up in (though we never really put anything on our sign as gauche or coarse as what I just read). It seems to me a church projecting its own image on God the way a young girl might paint her face when she’s first allowed to put on makeup, doing what she thinks is correct, trying what she hopes would look best, mimicking what she's seen others more mature than her do.

And unaware of words like ‘subtle’ and ‘elegant’ and ‘graceful.’

So with all of this, was the drive ruined? Not at all. Grace, after all is said and done, instead comes in the strangest and sometimes funniest ways. A little farther up the road, I find a church perhaps more to my liking, a stone's throw away, and my only regret is not having a camera to capture the moment.

The sign outside this church has been posted with the following message:

THE PASTOR TOLD ME TO CHANGE THE SIGN.
SO I DID.