I reconnected via Facebook with a really good friend from high school. I adored this dude. We both played trumpet in the band and knew all the words to “The Humpty Dance”. And we just got each other, you know? My memory of us is in a state of constant giggles.
(I don’t like the syntax of that last sentence, but I’m too tired from seeing Wicked at DPAC tonight [amazing!] and dehydrated from mowing the lawn in the 90 degree heat/1000% humidity this afternoon to figure out a better way to say it.)
These days my friend lives in Texas with his wife, having survived cancer (“butthole cancer”, he told me), and he has become a foster dad to two little boys, brothers.
Today, his Facebook status update was:
My non-English speaking sons came home today singing “our God is greater, our God is stronger”. Thanks [his church] worship!
It made me profoundly uncomfortable. I had many thoughts. The one that I wrote to him was, “Greater and stronger than other people’s God?”
Remind me to tell you sometime about my experience growing up with an atheist father and Unitarian Universalist mother and being told by my classmates, who all went to Brushy Fork Baptist Church, that I was going to hell. Maybe it will illuminate a few things.
try growing up one of 7 jewish families in an east tenn factory town and being told
by everyone you are going to hell.
or being chased down the hall in grade school by boys who wanted to see your horns.
I’m rooting for “…stronger and greater than bigotry and persons who would persecute others on the basis of their religion,” But it doesn’t sound that way.