I love days with my mom

Went to Jamestown, Ohio, for the first time that I can remember today. One of my many distant-yet-not-so-distant cousins is getting married next month and his sister and cousin had a shower for his fiance. Nice to see the folks and nice to see new faces. I hate party games but I loved the rest. My cousins--four sisters who are as close as anyone can get--wise-crack the entire time they're together. I took Mom and Aunt Patty, too. A fun time was had by all.

When we dropped Aunt Patty off at home at the end of the day, Mom and I had over an hour on the road by ourselves again. Before long, she was asking me about Bart's blog--the one where he mentions that he's thinking about not going into the ministry because he doesn't want to use God to make money. (Rich told her; Mom is not a bloggie OR a blogger.) The question was essentially, "What's up with that? Ministers have to make a living and that is their job, so there's nothing wrong with it."

Now I haven't been one to really stand up to my family to say, "This is what I believe," so to say I was hem-hawing is an understatement. It's a good thing I didn't have gum or I would have swallowed it along with my tongue. Mom is a Sunday-morning/Sunday-night person. I'm more and more a what-is-with-church-anyway? person. I saw B-A-D written all over this. (It's at these moments when you realize once again just how much you respect your mother, regardless of age.)

Once I could breathe again, I kind of stumbled through with this explanation--paraphrased. "Uh, well, we're--uh--non-traditional kinds of believers, I guess you'd say. I mean--uh--I think he's finding out what ministers go through with what happened to ________ and ____________ and now ________ and--uh, we were talking about this Tuesday as we came back from Louisville and it was the first I'd heard of it. He's tired of seeing his buddies--uhh--and others...maybe...use the ministry just to get money or whatever."

That was accepted, I guess, so then I could roll.

"See, uh, we believe that Jesus didn't really intend for the church to become what it has and we don't believe that it is what it set out to be in Acts."

"That's right."

Whoa.

"And I get tired of ministers telling me all the time that I need to do stuff in the church when Jesus said to go into the world and tell everyone, and he's starting to think that maybe he needs to find another place where he can be a minister without doing it in church. We spend too much time IN the church and few people believe that what I do or what others do outside the church is FOR God. No one believes that I can do more for God---or better, WITH God--by working at school or wherever than I can at church. They think that you're only working for God or with God when you're working IN the church itself, and that's not helping anybody except those who already believe." (Thinking later, I should have stopped with the "anybody" because that's more the truth--it doesn't really help anybody at all!)

"That's right."

Wow. I had my own little "amen corner" in the passenger seat of my car! My mom believes what I believe to more than a little degree and I don't know if she realizes just what that means. I'm not sure I do, either, for that matter.

I may have muddied the waters a little. I told her about the latest railroad scheme that I found myself in (just how many times do you have to tell a person that you need to focus on your work at school because that is your mission field and that you AREN'T interested in helping with youth groups on a full-time basis?) and how I now refuse to do anything else that Dave asks because I don't trust him, but I also said that that's what we do to each other at church and it's a wonder that anyone wants to be affiliated with it at all, considering that that's what we do--we use folks then lose folks when they make it clear that they're tired of being used.

Anyway, I've spent the rest of the evening thinking about that conversation. I'm hoping I can talk more to her about it at some point. The way things look at their place right now, I think it may happen.

I hope I can talk to my husband, too.