April 29, 2011

Those of you who have been reading my blogs for a while may recall my many challenges with proper church etiquette when I was a boy.  For those tuning in for the first time let me just say that my middle name is not Damien and I don’t have 666 on the back of my head.  I was just a little boy with ants in my pants and I was too little to be held responsible for all the hellfire and brimstone the preacher was a hollering about in the pulpit.  Needless to say I got pinched a lot for moving around too much during the service.  The fact is, the electric cattle prod or the taser may never have been invented if my mother had only pattented her ability to pinch the tar out of me.  It would stop you dead in your tracks!

But, what you don’t know is there is a very good reason why I would be moving around so much while everyone else was getting told off about how bad a sinner they had been all week.  Growing up in a rural, farming community there wasn’t much else to do other than one’s chores during the week, but come Sunday you’d better put on the spit shine because that’s when folks would check you out.  Oh yeah, there’s the whole hallelujah, praise the Lord stuff going on, but the church was the social hub of our community.

Now, my grandmother held court on her pew every service and we were dutifully expected to fall in behind her in the the next pew.  Undoubtedly, several of the other good sisters would file in and fill up the pews in front and to the side of us.

Here’s where the trouble starts.  You see, most country folks work hard all during the week and if you happened to just drop by you’d catch them in their house clothes.  Most of the women would have their heads tied up in a scarf or rag or something or other on a weekday, but come Saturday most of them had a standing hair appointment.  That is most of them except my grandmother and mother.  My grandmother had declared that regular folks had no business putting on airs, so she and my mother would dutifully wash and roll their own hair themselves.  I can hear my grandmother like it was yesterday, “Yep, those good sisters are up in that beauty parlor getting their hair jacked up to Jesus just like that’s gonna get ’em into heaven a tad sooner.  Regular folks ain’t got no business puttin’ on airs.”  Now this comes from a lady that only kept enough money in the bank to handle her business.  The rest of it was stacked like bricks and wrapped in tin foil and stored in the freezer.  Heaven help for a neighbor to think she had more than enough money!

Now, what do you think a little boy is supposed to do when all these good sisters waved and nodded as they sashayed down the aisle and plopped down in the pews around us.  After all, that hair was jacked up to Jesus and on special holidays they added a hat.  I guess they thought there might be a photo finish crossing into heaven and between the hair and the hat they might get to call dibs on a good seat.  Since I couldn’t see for all the hair don’ts I had to make due with what resources I had left and that usually meant I was gonna get pinched somewhere in the mix!

Would there ever be a time when being  jacked up to Jesus would be a good thing?  You bet!  We asked for your help to re-name one of our cottages recently and then we shared a collage of some of the remodeling that had been done.  It’s so beautiful I wanted you to take a video tour with me today.  Here’s the newly renamed Tucked Inn At Tybee and she’s jacked up to Jesus!  She’s a beautiful sight and one you won’t mind looking at either!

 

It’s about singing praises and acknowledging beauty when you see it!  It’s COTTAGE CHEESE!