3rd Grade Theology

Wade in the water and never get wet

If you keep on doin' that rag

Doin' That Rag- Grateful Dead

Most of my friends at school were nominally Christian. I think most of them went to church.  My best friend all though grade school (let's call her Anita) went to a Methodist church with her family.




I would have sleep overs at her house on a somewhat regular basis. It was a big beautiful house right in the small town where we went to school, but as Lisa Simpson once said about the Flanders's house it had a  creepy, Pat Boone-ish quality to it.



I never felt that I could really be myself over there. Her dad was super nice, with a gentle voice and genuinely friendly smile, but I suspected that her mom didn't like me one bit. Perhaps it was because I was allowed to watch TV shows and listen to music that Anita was not allowed to. I was able to have boyfriends and she was not. Although they did take me to my first concert- Amy Grant.  Maybe it wasn't me at all. I don't think Anita's mom liked much of anyone or anything. She was deeply religious and it seemed to me like she took herself too seriously. It was if she was constantly on guard. I would become that later myself.


The house was always immaculate and Anita and her brother were always very quiet, very obedient with rooms that were also immaculate.  Everything was very nice, a little too nice for it to be comfortable, real.


They would regularly pray before meals when I was there, which I also assumed they did when I wasn't. Not in a rote way, but in an everyone around the table give thanks for something way. It's ironic how I put my own kids' friends through that also, but anyway... For a little kid being put on the spot to thank God for something as if that kid held your beliefs, I thought was just plain weird.


Anita never tried to tell me about God, Jesus, the bible or anything like that, but did say something strange in choir once.

We were singing "Wade in the Water" and she asked me as if she knew a deep secret,

"Why should they wade in the water?"

"Why?"

"Because God's going to trouble it."


I was completely lost as to what that meant, but she knew and it kind of perturbed me. God was going to "trouble" something and not only was it good (apparently) but we are supposed to line up for it.




I didn't bother to ask for clarification, though, but it stuck in my memory as another strike against this God thing.



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