A Day of Worship

I went to sleep too early last night; the days of parties and Saturday Evening dinners at extravagant restaurants are over. So – as I predicted to my wife – I awoke at 3:00am, full of energy and unable to return to sleep. I fed Doodle, our car, Shaka, our 90 lb protection, and made myself a strong cup of coffee. Today, I will go to church – as I have for the last several years. As a kid, it was any excuse to miss church. Weekends would have been perfect…were it not for church. Now, I go even if I am sick. Growing up, I noticed early on that ‘the elderly’ were big on church. I figured that they were hedging their bets; one foot in the grave, the other at church. While I was young, I could believe in God without attending His party. Indeed, I myself went a couple of decades with only the rare appearance at Christmas or Easter. Then, exactly one week shy of our 25th Wedding Anniversary, my lovely wife – Diane Lynne Johnson – suddenly died of a brain aneurysm. Diane had been born with an ‘irregular spider vein’ in her brain. Perhaps the only aberration in her entire existence, our doctor explained that it was a delicate vein that could have ruptured when she was three years old or forty-three years old; it chose 43 years old and, despite my tremendous anger, I thanked the Lord that our two daughters were both in college. Personally, I was now in a desperate mess and my daughters – immediately recognizing this – pleaded to come back home to stay with me. Knowing the level of my anger and desperation, I told my daughters that they could not be around me for awhile and I sent them back to school…a five hour drive away. For months, I was so angry with God that I let Him know hourly. We had lived in Grass Valley, California. The funeral, five days later, was held at the Presbyterian Church in neighboring Nevada City, California and the nearest Airport – Sacramento – was two hours and a rental car away. Despite this, the Minister asked me during the funeral, “Was your wife a celebrity? I have never seen anything like this.” There were approximately seven hundred people who had come from as far away as the East Coast to attend Diane’s funeral on short notice. This is WHO I lost. Diane was very special. So, I was so deeply angry with the Lord for his ‘mysterious work’ that I came to the conclusion that I truly believed in God. There was no other explanation. My Austrian mother thanked the Lord every day and spoke of Jesus almost daily while I was forming my ideas. Now, if I truly believed, I needed to return to the church…and I did. I dressed up in a suit and my best tie and went to a local Christian Church in Grass Valley where the Preacher – and almost everyone else – was in blue jeans and a tee shirt. I found another church. If you truly believed in the Might of God, how could you show up for the day of worship dressed so disrespectfully?? All these years later, I go to church for an additional, selfish, reason. I want to be a better man. Like Helen Hunt in “As Good As It Gets”, I find that attending Sunday Services “makes me a better man”. Sunday Worship is a reminder that we need to improve our attitudes, our optimism and our interactions with our fellow man. If a man cuts me off while driving – after I have attended church – I react by assuming that he/she is under some kind of stress and I instantly forget that it ever happened. If only on Sunday, we need to care about each other more. Each of us has our own set of troubles. How many people end up in jail because they provoked or admonished someone for their behavior?? Most often, our reaction is linked subconciously to our own set of troubles. So, be as forgiving as we pray that the Lord will be. And yeah…pray. Simply thinking good and positive outcomes will improve your life immeasureably.