Looking Fabulous

My friend Wes and his best buddy J.J. just got back from a long weekend in Charleston, S.C., where they worshiped the Lord in a Jewish synagogue, an Episcopal church, and a cigar store.

A few weeks ago the guys got a wild hair about taking this trip. The purpose of the trip was for them to buy brand new tailored suits, dress up, and “walk around Charleston’s historic district looking fabulous”.

This whim grew and grew.

What the heck. The guys decided to do it. They bought new suits, reserved rooms, arranged time off work, and drove to Charleston.

What a lark!

While visiting the city as tourists, wearing linen suits, looking fabulous, they chanced upon the oldest American synagogue in continuous use.

Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (Holy Congregational House of God) founded in 1749, is renowned as the fountainhead of Reform Judaism.

Someone invited Wes and J.J. in for a service and to hear a special speaker extol the virtues of Abraham Lincoln. Wes said the format of the service resembled the liturgy of his own church as he and J.J. followed along in the Hebrew prayer book.

Then Sunday, in tailored suits, looking fabulous, they worshiped at the 258-year-old St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, the oldest church building in Charleston.

In the photo, notice the sounding shell above the lectern. In the days before microphones were invented, the sounding shell reflected and magnified a speaker’s voice so everyone could hear him clearly.

Wes said that from this high pulpit, so tall it puts the speaker on a level with the balcony, the pastor declared a powerful evangelistic message.

In the evening, Wes and J.J. ,still sporting their new duds and looking fabulous, relaxed at a gentlemen’s club…

No, not that kind of gentlemen’s club.

Not the kind we have here in Jacksonville with ten new nude dancers performing continuously.

The gentlemen’s club the guys went to resembled the kind of club you see in 1920s British films where university professors and retired colonels discuss the state of the Empire. This club—sorry, Wes told me but I’ve forgotten the name of it—stood above a refined tobacco shop/cigar store.

There Charleston’s elite gentlemen assemble of an evening to lounge in brass-studded leather easy chairs and discuss intellectual topics. Besides a regular clientele, tourists of refined taste, especially those wearing tailored linen suits and looking fabulous, engage in stimulating conversation for hours on end as smoke from pipes and cigars floats in foggy layers under the ceiling.

In that atmosphere, Wes and J.J. encountered a young man, a former cordon bleu chef, who’d had some spiritual experience and was training for the ministry…

But now that he’d made this decision, doubts and questions arose. In bewilderment and confusion, the young man’s faith was shaken. He explained his crisis of faith to these two oddly dressed strangers.

Again and again Wes and J.J. answered the young man’s questions and encouraged his reliance on the Lord Jesus. Again and again they saw his face light up as comprehension dawned after discussing some knotty problem.

You can’t get disillusioned unless you’ve been operating under an illusion in the first place.

So Wes and J.J. pointed the young man back to basic, foundational spiritual truths.

Toward the end of the evening, Wes and J.J. simultaneously felt compelled to lay hands on the young ministerial student and pray for him as he reached a new level of commitment to Christ.

As Wes and J.J. left the cigar store, they simultaneously felt that their trip to Charleston had had one divine purpose which they had not realized till that moment—to meet that young minister and minister to him.

They’d begun their road trip on a near frivolous whim; they returned, feeling that God had sent them even they’d not realized it beforehand.

I’ve noticed in reading my Bible that sometimes people do things without realizing why they are really doing those things.

We are physical beings living in a supernatural world.

We walk among wonders unaware.

Reality eludes us.

But sometimes, some rare times, we catch a glimpse of purpose beyond the mundane.

We glimpse reality.

That’s a good thing.

Well, most of the time it is. Sometimes, on the other hand, we can bob along happy under an illusion while completely out of touch with reality.

Case in point—when I think of Wes and J.J. dressed up in new tailored linen summer suits, one white, the other pale blue, strolling Charleston’s historic district… sporting panama hats, wearing dark sun glasses, puffing big black cigars, feeling cool, feeling proud, thinking they look fabulous…

Well—and I’m speaking entirely with a sense of objectively reality about this—godly men they may be, but I think they look like dorks.