I'll never forget the time...

We all go back a long way, and quite naturally we begin telling war stories, the ones that inevitably begin with "I'll never forget the time..."

We don't see each other that often anymore, and we haven't seen each other's parents in years, and there is the southern custom of asking about one's parents.

It goes, "How's your mamma and 'en (and them)?"- which translates into, " In what condition are your mother and your other first of kin?"

We took turns talking about our parents. "My mother puts terrible guilt trips on me," somebody said. " I'll call and tell her I'm on my way shopping, and she'll say, 'I wish I had the money to go shopping.'"

"Mine does the same thing," said somebody else. " I won a trip to Las Vegas from my company and I called my mother and told her about it.

"She said, 'I guess that means you won't be coming to see me in a long time.'

"I said, 'Mama, it's just for a week.' She said,'I might not be here in another week.'

"She's in perfect health, but I called her every day from Vegas just to make sure she hadn't contracted some sort of terrible disease."

I said my mother still worries about whether or not I'm wearing clean underwear because I might be in a wreck and the doctors would seemy dirty undershorts.

"My mother does that, too," somebody else spoke up, "but it all means they really love us."

It does. It's funny how our attitudes change about our parents as we got older and they got older. These people were our enemies when we were children.

They were the ones who made us eat our vegetables, madeus go to bed earlier than we wanted to, fussed over our grades, lectured us and wouldn't allow us out of the house with dirty underwear.

But you forget all that, and you would miss the guilt trips if they weren't around to send you on them.

"Tell them about your dad and the buiscuits," one friend asked another.

"God, it still makes me cry," she began.

"Every morning when I go to work, I go right by my father's house. And every morning- I've been doing this for years- I stop by and drink coffee with him and he makes biscuits for me because he doesn't want me going to work on an empty stomach.

"One day I overslept, and I knew I wouldn't be able to stop by and see him. The weather was awful. It was cold and it was raining.

"So I called my dad and told him I wouldn't have time to stop by. He said, 'You won't?' I could hear the disappointment in his voice, but I said, 'Daddy, I'll stop by tomorrow morning, so don't worry about it.'

"So I get in the car and I start driving to work. As soon as I rounded the corner to drive the past the house, I saw this figure standing out in the cold and rain with a sack in his hand.

"It was Daddy. He was out there waiting for me so I would still have my biscuits."

Everybody in the room was in tears when she finished. 'Tis the season to be thankful. Thanks for the parental love, the purest love of all.

Revelation

I went to church today. That makes four times since I've moved to Las Vegas. Most 'non-practicing' believers who don't attend on anything resembling a consistent basis usually come for the holidays, Easter and Christmas. Obviously I bucked this trend, but I personally don't count myself as a believer because I don't think you can be a believer and not practice. It may sound like a funny distinction to draw, but I just feel like pretending otherwise would be to demean by association the faith of those who do actually live their beliefs. Could you honestly call yourself a lawyer if all you ever do is crack a few books and file a few briefs?

There are about five christian churches within the mile and a half between my apartment and the library I work at. This is because there are over 300 different denominations within protestantism catering to almost every interpretation of the bible and theological fetish. If the devil truly can quote scripture to his purpose, there's probably a church or two out there who would more than willingly justify welcoming him as long as he tithed and filled up any empty space on their pews.

Let me first say there are a lot of people-consumed with-hate who call themselves christians. I defy them for the same reason I do not call myself a believer, being that I refuse to slander those of good heart and true faith through such association. In their defiance of the word they prove they are not christians, but zealots. The hallmark of a zealot is a person who uses righteous anger to justify their hatred. These persons of hate slander the message they claim to uphold. They are wolves in sheep's clothing, and drive others away from the flock. I would challenge anyone who believes caring for a woman who has an abortion makes you complicit in the murder of a baby by asking whether Jesus caring enough for the adulteress to ask 'He who is without sin' to cast the first stone and spare her in doing so, made him complicit to adultery?

For all the problems in the christian faith, I deeply respect the basis of love and respect that its founded on. For every bible thumping zealot chastising homosexuals and women who get abortions, I know twenty christians who practice the love, tolerance, and equanimity that Jesus practiced. I believe in this concept and that all spiritual growth comes along these lines and is interconnected. Jesus provides an excellent model for spiritual growth which- depending on what you believe- is either echoed or an echo in other spiritual traditions. I have a very good friend of mine who is a member of the self-realization fellowship and he is still astounded that he can open up the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda and find the exact passage he needs to guide him when he needs it. Perhaps its providence, perhaps its just the application of a spiritual context which allows him to move beyond his limiting influences. Either way when you open yourself up and ask for spiritual guidance you will find it, because just as science proves entire universes can exist within a single speck of sand, so too does the profound lay within the mundane.

That's what brought me to church today. I have been going through a spiritual crisis lately because of a writing contest I was recently involved in. In the process of the contest it made me confront certain parts of myself that I don't necessarily like to deal with. It also brought me face to face with whatever divine power I might yet possess while affecting within me a profound sense of my own limitations. It feels like the gauntlet has been thrown down and I must now either take it or walk away. So I opened myself up and walked down the street, fishing for guidance. I passed a Catholic curch and an Evangelical Free church before feeling compelled to enter the Methodist church across from UNLV.

My grandparents were/are Methodists, and my dad was raised in the Methodist church. Despite this family tradition and being raised in church, I had only been to a Methodist church four times in my life, and one of those times was to celebrate the fortieth aniversary of my grandparents singing in the choir. This particular church offers a 'contemporary' christian service which caters to people going through a mid-life crisis and a younger crowd with attention spans formed by years of video games and television. I've been avoiding this one because somehow breaking into a guitar solo in the middle of 'Be still my Soul' seems to be missing the point. Church should provide spiritual fellowship, but it should not just be the place you go and hang out on sundays. That's why I've always preferred the early morning services which cater to the older generations. I like to think that I'm enough of a spiritual grown-up not to require the litergy to be spoon fed to me. That and I've always liked old people. They tend to be much more empathetic.

The sermon was exactly what I needed. It was taken from Hebrews chapters 11&12 and made one essential point. There is a difference between trying and training to do something. I have been trying to do many things lately. Some things I've been trying to do for a while now without much success. I realize now that it is because I tried that I failed. Trying is expending an effort in the hope of a given outcome. Training is preparing yourself so that given the opportunity you will acheive a given outcome. If your goal is to run a sub-four minute mile, you can either try to run it and kill yourself in the mean-time more than likely without accomplishing your goal, or you can train yourself eventually reaching your goal through perseverence. It is simply not enough to try to do anything. In the course of spiritual evolution which we all go through, natural tendency only takes you so far. You have to make a committed effort to become a better person.

I also realize that I've been looking at things in the wrong way. You don't get a choice whether or not to accept the challenge. The challenge is upon you whether you like it or not. Life is how you respond to that challenge. So far I think I've failed.