Leery and Weary

Church wearies us.

Church attendance never played a huge role in my religion. I feel following Christ in day to day living is more important than meeting with others one day a week but I’ve gone through the motions of church activities for years because it seemed the thing to do.

But recently changes in our group’s theology and practice have changed the basic tenants of the historic faith and Ginny and I feel both leery and weary of attending. Not that there’s not a church of some kind on every corner in Jacksonville, we could worship with another group if we chose, but we are just weary and, at the moment, choose to exercise our faith at home, in the neighborhood, at work, and with the people whose paths cross our's.

We may be wrong about this but that’s where we are at the moment.

All that leads up to the fact that Sunday instead of going to church anywhere, we chose to spent the morning walking at the zoo.

Here is a photo of me (on the left) and a giraffe skull:

I attended high school in an old building. For 50 years past generations of students and teachers placed natural history samples in huge mahogany, glass-fronted cases in the biology lab. No one had kept track of what these samples were or where they had come from.

My biology project was to examine the large accumulation of animals skulls in these floor-to-ceiling cabinets, to identify and label each skull. I learned dentation formulas so that (back then) I could tell a possum’s skull from a raccoon’s or a dog’s. I even tracked down one monkey’s skull to a specific species.

Some of the happiest days of my youth were spent among the skulls in that lab.

Which says a lot about my youth.

So, yesterday I was thrilled to get to examine a giraffe’s skull; I’ve never seen one before.

Doesn’t take much to thrill me.

The zoo’s landscaping and gardens pleased us enormously. We enjoyed the plants as much as the animals. Here’s a photo I snapped of Ginny among the flowers:

Saturday night my friend Dolly died.

In all the years I’ve known her, I never once spoke to her about Christ.