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God likes to show up for his followers just in the nick of time
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 The month of June is known as the beginning of the hurricane season and the height of the wedding season (not that the two are necessarily related).

One wedding that I conducted, while not stormy, was nearly disunified.

The bride had already come down the aisle. The vows had begun. However, the wedding director was horrified, because the unity candle had not been prepared.

If you are not familiar with a unity candle, it is a candelabra with a large center candle and two smaller candles on each side. The custom is for the bride’s mother and groom’s mother to light each of the smaller candles before the service. After the bride and groom exchange vows and rings, they use the two small candles to light the large center candle, representing the coming together of two families to make one. The only problem was that the two smaller candles were not lit before the service began.

The wedding director had little time to decide what to do. Plan A would be to walk up to the candelabra, which was beside the minister, and say to the wedding party, “Excuse me, could you pause right there at ‘for better or worse’ and let me light these candles before things do get worse?” No, she decided that plan A was too much of a distraction.

So she activated plan B.

The wedding director grabbed a candle lighter and ran upstairs to the second floor level behind the pulpit area, looking for an entrance to the choir loft. Since this was not her home church, she was not familiar with the building. Several times she opened doors to closets. She could hear the vows continue, and she knew that if she did not hurry, soon the couple would be up a candle without a lighter. Finally, she found a door from the second floor to the stairway that descended to the choir loft. She descended the stairs and slowly opened the door to the choir loft and motioned to the photographer. He was sitting on the floor behind the choir railing, taking pictures by a remote control of various cameras that he was monitoring. He was out of view of the congregation, but he was right there on the other side of the choir railing from the unity candle.

The photographer turned white as a sheet when he saw a woman lying on her stomach, peering out of a crack in the door to the choir loft, poking a stick at him. But he caught on quickly.

I was unaware that any of this was going on. All I remember is that as the groom was placing the ring on the bride’s finger, out of the corner of my left eye I noticed a person rise up from behind the choir railing, light each of the two side candles, and then disappear again behind the choir railing. I didn’t even know there was a crisis, but the photographer came to the rescue, just in the nick of time!

God likes to show up just in time. When the Israelites crossed the Jordan River, God waited until their feet were in the water before He opened dry ground before them (Joshua 3:15-16). Even Jesus Himself showed up just in time. The Bible says, “But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman...” (Galatians 4:4, New Living Translation). God is always on time; He’s never too early and never too late. Isn’t it time that you trusted in Him?

Copyright 2007 by Bob Rogers. Read this column each Thursday for a mix of religion and humor. You can read more “Holy Humor” stories on the Web page of First Baptist Church of Rincon at www.fbcrincon.com.

Is there a church for a big woman with an itch?
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A pastor was called to be guest preacher at a church. He knew this church was different when the congregation ended every line of the hymn with the shout of “yeehah!”


As he stood to preach, he noticed that people were spread out on the pews. He would see a person, then a space, then another person, and another space. He wondered why nobody sat next to another person, when he noticed on the pew beside each person was a cowboy hat.


Another time this same preacher was invited to a new church in the city. He was surprised to see that everybody there looked like they had fallen face first into a tackle box, because they had piercings and earrings on every part of the body imaginable. A rock band was playing alternative music on the stage.


As different as these two churches were, they were both growing and reaching people for Christ.


Years ago I was pastor of a small country church in the backwoods of Mississippi. There was another Baptist church just five miles away in the town (population 600). The pastor’s wife at the town church asked me, “Why don’t our two churches merge?” I said, “There are people in my church who would not feel comfortable or fit in at your town church.” She said, “Oh, come on. We’re a small town church. What could be so different?”


I said, “Well, I got one really big woman in my church who, when she gets to feeling an itch, she pulls her dress halfway up and she scratches herself.”


The eyes of this pastor’s wife got really big and she said, “I see what you mean.”


I forgot to tell her about another woman in my church who saw a roach running across the wood floor, so she stomped on it with her bare foot, laughed and shouted, “Aha! I got him!”


Yep, the culture was definitely different where I was pastor.


Jesus upset the religious establishment because He crossed cultural barriers. He loved to eat with tax collectors and Gentiles and other strange people. Jesus walked into the land of Samaria, full of half-breed Jews who worshiped in weird ways and talked different and smelled different.


Jesus walked right up to a Samaritan woman at a well and started talking her language. He accepted her culture, but he let her know her sinful lifestyle had to change. Soon she had the whole town following Jesus (see John 4).


So what cultural barrier is keeping somebody in your community from hearing the gospel? If you tear down the cultural barriers to share Christ in your neighborhood, you may hear the angels shouting, “Yeehah!”


Copyright 2014 by Bob Rogers. Email: brogers@fbcrincon.com. Read this column each Friday in the Herald. Visit my blog at www.bobrogers.me.