The Camerado Chronicles -- Part One -- Chapter XI

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20 June
rolling back through Mizzou

I was served by Mercy this morning. At the Waffle House in Joplin. She was my
waitress. If you’re in the area (I-44, exit 8 north), stop in and say hi, she’ll
probably be there. She’s very nice, and looked very burdened by the job. It’s a
mighty tough place to work, if you ever watch what those people have to do to
serve us, especially on a Sunday morning when everyone in town comes in to eat
and you’d much rather be anywhere else.

If you do see Mercy at the Waffle House, make sure she knows that she –she
personally—is a child of God, and all this work we do to serve “others” is
really serving I AM. You can tell her the guy who had the “really cool”
wedding ring with the multi-colored rocks said so. I should have told her myself.
I need to make some cards or something. I still feel kinda shy about just volunteering
such information verbally, until the conversation suggests that it would be welcome. Otherwise I feel too much like an evangelist. I’d
rather just be a person talking with another person. I want the other person to feel listened to more than talked to. Writing gives me
plenty of opportunity to do all the talking. I want to be the audience for those whose Great American Novels will never make it to
paper.

*                  *                *                    *

The only part of the Chronicles so far that didn’t come easy, that felt forced and unnatural, was the part last week about the church
service in Iowa. I thought it was because I was trying to write during a baseball game when I should have been digging the crowd and
the action on the field. But today I realized it was something else. I was trying to describe my experience at the service, and it was
coming out like a church review. Am I wrong? Is that not how it read? I am bothered that I could go around the country and be a
“church critic” in these pages. That’s not my intention. But there is still a rogue element in my mind that is very critical and
judgmental, and if I’m not careful I will exercise it each week on these poor churches, and that would be very distasteful to me. (“On
the five-cross scale, I’ll give the Good News Center three crosses; it would have been two-and-a-half, but the communion Goldfish
were a big hit in my book.”)

So I’m going to completely rethink my approach to “reporting” on my church experiences. I’ll still write about them, even critically if
that is the voice that speaks loudest to me. But not in the sense that I am trying to turn people away from the ones that don’t work for
me. If the denomination of the church has any significance to themes I’d like to discuss, I’ll mention it, but not automatically; likewise
with the name of the church. If the experience or the sermon provokes ideas or touches themes I’d like to bring into this forum, I
won’t hesitate, whether positive, negative or neutral. Otherwise I won’t say anything.

Today, for instance, I went to what the Joplin phone book has listed as a “Pentecostal" church, and I was very excited because I’ve
never been to one. But the only person there who seemed Pentecostal, in the sense of my preconceived notions of a very boisterous
and vocal congregation, was the pastor himself. He was in an absolute rage during the worship songs, gesticulating with his arms and
stomping his feet and jumping up and down and shouting into a corner of the stage –not always the song lyrics, far as I could tell. But
it didn’t seem to translate in the pews at all. One of the poor backup singers actually looked scared; she hardly moved a muscle the
whole time and had no facial expression. His sermon was just as dramatic –boy did he have that ol’ time holy roller voice down! But
the crowd just would not be rolled. They said “Amen!” on cue, usually at his prompting, and some occasional “Yeah!”s and “That’s
right!”s. But man, I’ve never seen such a one-man show at a church service. And it was a sincere show. This guy was workin’. He
had to keep patting his face with a handkerchief, even during the sermon.

Here's an analogy I remember from a conversation with one of our housemates back in Ashland: Sometimes when a basketball team
has a superstar player, the other four guys on the court will do a lot of standing around on offense, waiting for their star player to win
the game for them. My roommate says this of his favorite NBA team, the Sacramento Kings, and Chris Webber. Maybe the same
thing happens in some churches that have a charismatic preacher....

(Or Jesus?....)

There are always things I can nitpick too that stick in my mind after a service. I think I should limit them to matters of fact and not
theology. For instance, sure enough, the pastor called out “Hollywood” for portraying Jesus as a “sex fiend” by having him fantasize
about Mary Magdalene on the cross, and said something to the effect that “they” –whoever Hollywood is—will pay for that someday; I
don’t think many church people realize that movie was based on a novel written by a Christian.

He also said something about no one being saved by “Buddha or Muhammad,” but no one ever claims to be “saved” by them. The
Buddha gave explicit instructions to his disciples not to worship him, and with Muhammad it ain’t even an issue –he is a Moses to the
Muslims, not Jesus. The notion of a Jesus is antithetical to their concept of the oneness of God. Like the Jews, Muslims aren’t trying
to hear that three-in-one/one-in-three thing. Without taking sides, I say that one should have the facts straight about the opponent, if
one intends to oppose.

But now I’d like to shift the focus to something I really did like, mostly because it helped clarify something for me that needed clarity.
I’ll get to it when I get past St. Louis, it requires some research.

*                 *                  *                  *

Completely forgot to mention that Hermit Crab has a new shell already. I

moved out

of my truck yesterday in Oklahoma

City, on account of my old

one got all smashed

up by a deer, and it was lookin’ like two days to fix

it. It happened no more

than 30

miles from Santa Rosa, where I spent

Friday night. The deer came from the left,

sprinting like mad across the

median and into the eastbound lanes. Sometimes on the

freeways they get

so confused and hyped up on adrenaline that they

just zoom out

there like

a kamikaze pilot. This one thought she could get in front of me, and what

made it impossible to

avoid was she came sort of diagonally from my

side. She got to

the dead center of my horizontal plane before smashing

into Camerado’s grill, and I

saw her poor doe head snap up over the hood

before she fell to the asphalt. I’ve

heard that

moose often walk away from

vehicular collisions, and even deer now and

then, but not this one, God

rest her deer soul.

My initial damage survey was that it was mostly cosmetic: all the

horizontal bars on

the grill were knocked off, the frame

that holds them on

was bent and the chain mail-

looking thing behind it in front of the radiator

was sort of concave. Other

than a few

cracks in the hood and a smashed

left turn signal, it was running fine, so I drove it the six hours into our Oklahoma City terminal. Turns out it wasn’t much worse than I
thought, but the problem was that one crucial part that did need replaced –something I don’t even recognize the name of—would have
to be ordered, so a three or four-hour repair would now take two days.

But quite to my surprise, USX put me in a new rig rather than have me sit, so me-n- the Hewlett Packard computers (main units made
in Mexico, hence their presence in an El Paso warehouse) were back on track by 8PM Central, a mere five hours after we arrived in
OKC.

(This truck too is Camerado, and not “Junior” or anything like that. Camerado is the spirit who inhabits the machinery. One rig dies,
another is born –Camerado is unchanged.) HC – Cloverdale, Ind.

© 2004 by Hermit Crab
a Fish Out Of Water production

Next -- Chapter 12