The Third Chair

Yesterday was a fun day that involved playing in the rain and friends and many memories that I cannot even begin to think about and recount.  Alas and alack, that is the problem with waiting to blog.  So you, my most loyal readers, will have to suffer through only today’s adventures and forgive me for not giving you the ¾ I left out of yesterday’s blog.

Today was incredibly exciting as I worshiped at the First Christian Church of Pontiac, Illinois.  It is almost the farthest on my list, with only one other being the same distance away at 39 miles away.  I chose it because of the time I would have to go and experience Pontiac.  Tomorrow I can do the homework I would have done today, and it turns out I will definitely need tomorrow to complete all of the piles of work left to me by the good professors here at Eureka College.

 I left Eureka at ten to nine.  The church was an expected forty minutes away, so I knew that I would just squeeze in with no time to spare.  Naturally I got behind a truck with a camper on it that felt it was a deep sin to go any other speed but 51 miles per hour.  The camper added the complexity of seeing around the cab to pass, so I tailed, slightly agitated, for roughly fifteen miles. 

I made my way to the town of Pontiac, which is a decent sized town with 12,000 residents and countless farmers who use that community as their “urban hub”.  However, I did not copy the address from the Disciples website correctly and navigated myself to 1314 E Indian, when I wanted to go to 1314 E Indiana.  IndianA not Indian!  I decided not to be the stereotypical egotistical male and to stop at the gas station just ahead of me to ask for directions.  I soon understood why men rarely stop for directions- the attendant spoke little English. I don’t begrudge him this, but it did make my quest for FCC of Pontiac even slower and by now it was 10:40.  My hope was that somehow, someway, they started services at 10:45 or that they were even one of those radical churches that pushed the limits and started at 11:00. 

On a stroke of desperation, I whipped out my iPhone and told it to calculate to “First Christian Church, Pontiac IL”.  In my mind I thought there was no way it would get it, but it identified the location!  I was shocked, and I told it to navigate the some odd two miles to the church.  Please note that I don’t consider navigating and driving with a smart phone very safe, but it is not the same as texting while driving… although, even I will admit that they are very similar.  So I’m cruising the streets, checking the phone, looking for the streets, fixing the errors I make along the way (which if you're me, which I was, it was every other direction that I was missing) when I look up and I see a big truck coming down in my lane. 

“Look at that idiot!” I think as I’m in my compact Saturn staring down this double cab Chevy Silverado, “He’s passing a car on a city street!  Wait a second, that’s a white line!!” I soon realized that I was going the wrong way on a one way road and I quickly ducked into a parking lot to let the truck go by.  As he passed he did the “turn and gawk” and his face clearly read, “Look at that idiot!”  Karma stinks.

So I get to the church at five minutes until eleven, clearly late even by normal standards.  I ran the car into a parking spot, jumped out, clicked the lock button and did a half jog to the doors.  According to Murphy’s Law, the plate beside the door declared that Sunday Services started at 10:30 (for those of you not too fond of math or have had trouble keeping up with all the times floating around in this blog, it makes me 25 minutes late to church).  So I took a deep breath and barreled into the church.

I desperately hoped that all that I missed was the “call to worship” or the beginning, slightly more boring, things.  For once luck prevailed and I walked right in as the minister was instructing people to “please turn in your bible to Luke…”  I plopped down in the last row and started paying attention to the half of service that I made it to.

The message was okay, fairly basic on joy that Christians should have.  It was an older audience where gray hair was the norm, just like in most churches in the denomination.  From the looks of it they were a church long gone that were now living the days of “hospice ministry” and if I had to guess, this minister had even been plucked from the congregation to give a sermon on Sundays.

I was wrong, thankfully.  However, it was almost worse news.  The man, Pastor Jerry, was an interim until they found an acceptable part time minister that could accept the reduced salary package the church was offering.  Not only that, but the church had just recently gone through an “advanced membership reduction” or “split” as most of us would call it.  It was just a mess, and the twenty five left in the sanctuary were saddened to see death was written on the walls, and they now were urging their eighty year old bodies to do all they could to see life for their beloved congregation.

Two people, a mother in her eighties named Wanda and her fifty year old son Bruce invited me to go with them to the Threshermen’s Annual Parade.  They said they had set up three chairs, and that I was welcomed to be the third.  I was scared to accept, because I was planning on going back home to the college, but I decided friendliness was to be the order of the day.  They lived in Saunomin around seven miles out and had brought their lunch as they would make their day in Pontiac.  They offered me part of their meal, but I declined as I did not want to make three portions out of two, so I ran through the Dairy Queen (a leap of faith for me because I suffered from food poisoning the last time I ate there) and grabbed a bite to eat.  I consumed my food (read: inhaled) and headed back to the church to meet up with Wanda and Bruce. 

It was yet another leap of faith I took when I accepted their proposal to carpool to the parade.  Wanda drove her Chevy Venture, which was a good thing, because she definitely needed all the safety a minivan offered.  God was absolutely in the car with me, but he too was screaming his head off as he worked miracle after miracle to prevent an automobile accident.

We arrived at the parking lot safely and we then watched the parade.  It was lovely with tractors, old cars, new cars, bands, walking groups, and the infamous politicians.  It was almost two hours’ worth of parading!  I then received a tour of Pontiac from Bruce and Wanda and saw one of the highest maximum security prisons in Illinois, Chicago’s trash mountains (the landfills were literally as tall as mountains) and a Caterpillar factory.  It was lovely and I got to know the mother and son on a deeper level.  They were family already.

 Bag Pipers!!

 Very neat American flag

 Pontiac Firebird- probably the coolest car ever.  Christmas, anybody?

The American Legion of Flanagan's Water Tank.  Kids throw water balloons at the tank as it shoots a water gun at kids and adults in the way.  Not sure if this has any deep psychological problems to worry about later on... ha ha.

The time to say good bye had come once more.  I thanked them for the time and the invitation.  I thought to ask them why they had set up a third chair.  Miss Wanda replied that they had the three, and they thought the minister or someone from the church would want to come so they thought it would be nice to go ahead and set it up.  Little did we know that God would set up a situation where I would be the one to stay in the third chair.  I wrote it down as a God thing. 

Today was good and I saw a place that I can be used.  It is possible that I can be an instrument of hope and change for Pontiac, and if I could I would love to go there each and every Sunday.  However, by the same token, I would do the same with Eureka Christian Church.  So I press on, and I will complete my list.  It gets hard though when you know that happiness could happen anywhere, and that in my own way this is a delayed gratification.  Church doesn’t work well like this, it is in the community of faith that the bonds and the workings really take the presence of God- but that is also how it works for me.  So I am getting tastes, not the real thing. 

By the time this is over, I will have sampled every flavor of ice cream I can get my hands on from this one ice cream shop.  However, the more pressing question is will I be full?  Or will I be so full I won’t want to eat a single scoop and that my samplings will be sufficient for me?  Or could it be that eating all of this different ice cream makes me sick?  Oh the questions I ask before my bedtime snack.