For years now, I have been accompanying my beautiful bride to church. Some guys think church is a waste of time. Personally, I think that a fellow should attend church. It’s good for the soul, as my wife says.

Our pastor once told me a man’s aim should be to meet with God and find our rest in Him. Seeing as I believe the Bible to be the inerrant word of God, I completely agree. That is why, just like clock-work for as long as I can remember, I’ve been meeting Him in the sanctuary at 11:00am Sunday mornings and finding my rest until around noon when the choir wakes me up with their closing number. The benediction I think it’s called.

I must admit that my wife has never been all that thrilled with my snoring ( I breathe heavy. She tends to exaggerate) through services. Still, It’s a routine that worked for me. That was until the recent retirement of our pastor. Forty years he had been there. Great preacher. I loved his style of preaching. The sound of his voice was like rain on an old tin roof. The sandman and I were usually prayer partners before he had thanked Miss Edna for her beautiful solo.

All good things must come to an end, as the scripture says. 1st Peter, I think. Might have been Buck Owens now that I think of it. Whichever, the arrival of our new pastor brought an abrupt end to my days of slumber. The wife made me promise I’d stop sleeping in service. She said the old pastor didn’t mind because he knew how I was, and besides, he was so blind he couldn’t see a fly if it landed on his glasses lens.

I discovered quickly that first Sunday my promise would be hard NOT to keep. Everything about the new pastor was loud. His Voice. His laugh. His suit. A nice guy, but that voice of his could scramble an egg while it was still in the chicken! Resigned to my fate, I settled in to hear what he had to say. His first sermon was titled: “How we began – The story of Adam and Eve”. At least, I thought to myself, he was doing me the courtesy of starting over in Genesis. That way, I really hadn’t missed anything while I was sleeping all those years.

I listened pretty closely. After all, I figured that Adam was the first guy ever married to a woman with no girlfriends who pointed out all of his inadequacies. That in itself was pretty interesting. The pastor went on (and on) for the next hour or so explaining how Adam and Eve fell from grace because of their disobedience to God. I really thought remaining conscious would get boring. Turns out, the story of Adam and Eve really answered a lot of questions for me.

It seems they lived in a really nice garden home in this place called paradise. They were naked, jobless and never got old. (Note to anyone thinking of asking me my definition of a perfect world: See previous sentence.) Anyway, it seems one day Adam was watching the Lions and the Bears (literally), just minding his own business. It must have been suppertime because Eve was standing there with the garden gate open trying to decide what to cook. After a few minutes, she slams the gate and proclaims that she doesn’t feel like cooking and she wants to go out to eat. Dismayed by the fact that she was interrupting his Sunday afternoon rest (It must have been Sunday. Everything religious happens on Sunday) he tells her he isn’t going anywhere.

Well, to make a long story short, Eve storms out. A couple of hours later, Adam gets hungry and begins looking for something to eat. Eve arrives back with this apple
(Pastor says it probably wasn’t an apple, but I think it was. The picture in our Sunday School class showed one) Eve offers Adam half. He’s starving. He takes one bite. One bite! Now God’s mad at them, she has nothing to wear, he has to go to work and babies are everywhere! Pastor says the moral of the story is we should obey God. I’m sure he’s right. I think there’s another moral:

Plan your meals ahead of time!

Next week pastor is telling the story of Noah. I think he was the founder of PETA. Should be interesting.