Excerpts from the Peanut Gallery

Lenny Kravitz on lead guitar in an east hastings soup kitchen

So tonight i ventured to a place i go to little in a city i love the most. I went on a reconnaisance mission for our college group which is trying to get plugged into a downtown ministry. So with three others i went to potter's house, store-front church on east hastings. It aint pretty, thats for sure, and when we entered i had this mentality of making sure i steered clear of most of the first people i encountered, because, well lets be serious, you know very well why, and its not one of my finer moments.
However there were several things that struck me tonight. As i sat in an extremely uncomfortable pew listening to a pastor from some nice suburban clean big church, not unlike my own, preach after the horde of teens sat down after singing God of wonders in an assortment of keys, i thought "none of these people are listening, they are here to get food, they are surely not listening, por ejemplo, this woman to my right, she is asleep, so she is most certainly not listening." There was even a man four or five rows ahead who was talking the entire way through the preacher's talk, rambling on the things that drunks with ADD do. One woman, who appeared as odd as he did, came over cuffed him on the top of his head then handed him an empty plastic bag, as if that would keep him occupied. The man in the row behind all this spent the sermon fingering the sleeve of the man who was chaperoning the suburban youth group, and at one point, tried to see if there was anything in the back pocket of his jeans. he made a terrible pickpocket, the chaperone noticed and looked at him half out of amazement and half out of indignation.
But then i noticed something else. THe preacher had sat down again and the horde of youths were back at the front singing in multiple keys with their youth leader on lead guitar. the youth leader, incidentally looked exactly like Lenny Kravitz, although shorter than what i imagine Lenny to be, but maybe its only cuz Lenny used to always be with Nicole Kidman and i imagine her to be very tall, but then again Tom Cruise isnt and she never really towered over him so what is to say any of them are that tall anyway? But i digress... Anyways i noticed while the singing was going on, that several of the ones who had been rocking back and forth, muttering to themselves and clutching tattered grimy backpacks with their worldly goods in them the entire sermon were now standing with their arms raised to God in worship. The man in front of me who had sat motionless the entire time, with greasy unwashed uncut hair that hung limp to his shoulders had fished through his bag and produced an old Bible and was reading through Acts.
Who do i think i am?
I assumed that these people were so changed, so messed up by the drugs, alcohol and mental disabilities that there was no way they were there for a meaningful church experience.

posted by Kiki @ 12:14 a.m.