It’s my favorite place to be
Where I can hear the Word of God
And listen to the preacher tell
Where Bible men have lived and trod.
To hear about commandments ten
And learn by heart the Golden Rule;
To sing the songs that I had learned,
In younger days, in Sunday school.
Old songs that never seem to age
But ever seem to ring anew.
I sing, as I stand there aching,
With warm thoughts of my cushioned pew.
As while our learned pastor speaks,
With the words that seem to carry,
The elegance that he had learned
In some distant seminary.
And then he always stops to ask,
“Does anybody else feel hot?”
He never sees me shake my head,
And mumble that, “Of course I’m not!”
So then I have to wrap up in
My constant friend, my woolen shawl,
And through thick glasses, try to read
Words always printed ‘way too small.
By then my legs have both grown numb,
And my whole back I think’s gone dead.
Right then is when I start to wish
That I had stayed at home in bed!
My every thought by then has turned
To all the places that I ache;
That’s when I notice, when he prays,
How terribly long it seems to take.
As I obediently stand
There, literally it seems, for days,
I should appreciate, I know,
His every thought and every phrase.
But the words for which I’ve waited,
Words I long to hear repeated,
Four little words I never miss,
Are the words, “You may be seated.”
I enjoy our church. We have a great pastor who preaches great sermons; it just seems to take him a long time to get around to them. Quite often, after telling us to stand for a song, he forgets about the song and forgets that we are standing! Worst of all, especially for all of us older people, he forgets to tell us we can sit down.
Our church, like most, has a senior citizen’s group, those fifty-five and older, called Prime-timers. No one over the age of fifty-five likes to stand when there is a close place to sit down; seconds seem like minutes and minutes seem like hours.
Our pastor has a good sense of humor. Even though he has a long way to go before he’s fifty-five, we always invite him to our Prime-timers meetings. He enjoys the wisdom of his older parishioners but most of all he enjoys the good food. We always have potluck and people over fifty-five really know how to cook.
When I wrote Church, I had all of the Prime-timers sign it. We framed it and gave it to the pastor for Christmas.
It might just be my imagination, but it seems we stand a lot longer now!
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