They're Not All Baptists

The title of this has nothing to do with the faith or the practitioners of the faith, well... at least not a lot.

When I was growing up, and even through high school, we always went to a baptist church. First Baptist, Riverview Baptist, and Calvary Baptist were the ones we were members of at various times.; but at other times we would visit Corinth, Blairland, Mt. Zion, Prospect, Jackson Chapel, or any number of others. Then if you throw the Missionary Baptist churches in with all those... well, that's a heck of a lot of churches for such a small town.

Obviously there were other denominations; Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Church of God... did I miss anybody? And when I think back, the few people I knew who said they were Methodist were always at the Baptist church I went to. I don't think even now I could tell you the exact differences between the different faiths, but back then there seemed to be a lot of gray areas and blending together between them.

That establishes my attitude, either right or wrong, about religion when I graduated high school. Then along comes the Air Force. Military basic training has one job -- to get you ready to become a useful part of whatever branch of service you're in. The quickest way to get this done is to more or less scare the everliving daylights out of you by coming down on you as hard as they can and see if you will break. If you break, they get rid of you, and if you don't, you're at the perfect mindset for them to start funneling everything into your beleaguered mind.

And so it was for me. After a few days there I was just as scared as everybody else and I prayed to God that if He got me through it, I would go to church so much everybody would think I lived there. Anyway, for the first couple of weekends at basic you are pretty busy and there's limited time for anything extra... like church. But on the third week we were able to go, so I went looking for the nearest church. We still couldn't leave the base so I found a military chapel a few streets from the barracks. I was ready to live up to my part of the bargain. This is where my slightly bent attitude about religion came into play.

It never, EVER occurred to me that there could be any reason I couldn't just walk right into the church and sit right down. It was a church, right? There was one of those glass covered signs out front, but I didn't bother to read it. Why should I have to, a church is a church is a church, right? So I walked right in as pretty as you please and sat down. I didn't think anything was different until everybody stood up and the procession started and then I realized I was right in the middle of a Catholic mass!! I had no idea what I was going to do. I couldn't get up and walk out, I had picked a seat up near the front on the aisle. If I got up everyone would see me! So I sat there. Well, actually I sat there, stood there, knelt there, then I did it all over again a couple of more times. There was no preaching, no hell fire and damnation, and in the end, not really that bad of an experience. But it was definitely an eye opener for a small town boy being exposed to the world for the first time.

I think even God got a chuckle out of that one.