120. I hate Walmart

I hate Walmart. It’s just so big, and full of people and stuff. I mean, seriously, why is there so much stuff? I went because I was looking for something specific that I couldn’t find anywhere else – and they didn’t even have it. I sifted through all their mounds of stuff and it wasn’t even there.

So, for my recovery from my traumatic Walmart experience, I came home and watched Canadian Idol, and was very relieved to see one of my early favourites has gotten through to the voting portion of the show, so no one had better call me next Monday between 9 and 11, because I’ll likely be voting over and over again like a complete loser. I’m telling you, I get totally sucked in by this show.

In other blog-related news, I’m thinking about visiting another church on Sunday. I’d done a search for gay friendly churches in my city a few years back and only found the one I ended up going to, which, while very friendly, is not at all my type of church. This time, I found a website with a list of about 8 different churches in the area, so I’m thinking I’m going to give one of them (that happens to be about 8 minutes drive from me) a shot on Sunday. I’m a little nervous about it, because I mentioned the name of the church to a friend today and her response was “Oh, yeah… that’s one of the liberal churches”, which was disappointing, because the church has the word “evangelical” right in its name. And it’s not like I have anything against the word ‘liberal’, it’s just that when my friend said that, I knew what she meant was “oh, yeah, that’s not a Bible-believing church”. I know it shouldn’t matter what she thinks, I just would have liked it to not be so easily classified in her brain – you know, “of course they’re gay friendly, they don’t really believe the Bible”.

My book club met on Sunday night, and my pastor’s wife is in my book club. She had recently returned from some sort of district conference or something like that… actually, I don’t think it could have been a district thing because she was in Florida, but it was an official Wesleyan thingy… where they were discussing official Wesleyan doctrine. The thing we got talking about (that had nothing to do with the book we did this month, which was a graphic novel called Watchmen by Alan Moore) was the issue of alcohol. My pastor’s wife, along with pretty much everyone from my church, is part of a group that is trying to get the official doctrine of the Wesleyan church changed so that Wesleyans are allowed to drink. This might not seem like a big deal, or even that important an issue, but it actually does affect things at our church. Being in a city with lots of people from different cultures, especially French Canadians, for whom drinking wine with dinner is a matter of tradition, it means that there are many people who love our church, who attend regularly and are involved who would like to be in areas of leadership or ministry, but in order to do so they would have to give up part of their culture. And while it is really not that big a deal, I mean, it’s just wine, it’s also really silly to say that you can’t have a glass of wine with dinner if you want to be on the board at our church. Anyway, back to the discussion (which I swear is blog relevant, just wait, I’m getting to a point), she talked about how frustrating it was because the people who were arguing against her were taking the position that they were the “Bible believers” and she and her faction were the ‘liberals’. The language they used, the tone of their voices, the way they interacted with them… it all said “we believe that we have the truth, and that you are wrong, and you are attempting to dilute our truth, and we feel threatened.”. She was so frustrated by the dismissive way she and her opinions were treated that I’m surprised to hear she didn’t start an incident down there (I love my pastor’s wife – she is not a demure and self-effacing woman like so many pastor’s wives are, she’s quite feisty).

So, I sat there, listening to her express her frustration, and I couldn’t help but think about what I’d written before, about the dismissive way most Christians look at the Side A arguments… they assume, even before they’ve heard them, that they are perversions of Scripture, they refuse to engage the arguments on their actual merits, they assume a defensive posture of “You’re wrong. I don’t really care what you say, you’re just wrong.” It makes any attempt at conversation in this arena very near impossible. I’m still trying to figure this out.

Anyway, in light of this whole thought process, and in light of my possible visit to a gay friendly church, I thought I’d share a video I found by lesbian singer, Sara Em… it’s her song to the church.