A painful Saturday night, evangelicals and a funny poem

1. I reached deep into parenting patience last night and spent about one half of an hour looking at Oliver's Wacky Pack collection. I made comments, tittered over the gross ones and expressed interest in the sheer numbers that he had collected.
2. I watched Facing the Giants with the boys,  perhaps the lamest movie about high school football ever made. Weirdly, I hate football but am a complete sucker for a football movie (not to mention Friday Night Lights, one of the best tv series ever produced). That this pathetic excuse of a movie was also over-the-top evangelical Christian was salt in the open wound of football. Evidently, Christian filmmakers believe that God is on the side of the football team that prays the hardest and leads their entire sinner high school to revival, and they also write lines for the coach that include various Biblical phrases to pump the kids up (I apologize about the spoiler, but I'm assuming that no one here will waste their time on such pablum unless you want to be a martyr). I amused myself by noting how the opposing team (at the Georgia State championship) was made up of animal-like mostly African Americans dressed all in black while "our" team was entirely white, a veritable army of future Ricks (Santorums and Perrys). The only salvation was that even Oliver at some point looked at me and rolled his eyes. I know I probably sighed a lot and prompted the derision, and lest you think me entirely heretical, I did assure both boys that yes, I thought the movie was really nice, but the acting was terrible. I also threw in the fact that I believed in God but I didn't believe he cared one whit about football. Oh, and the other salvation was that we ate a lot of Girl Scout cookies.

How did you spend your Saturday night?

15 minutes go by....I am reading in bed...and now I've turned the computer back on and am finishing this post.

I opened up my New Yorker to this poem, which demonstrates, if not an act of God, a perfect synchronicity:

Testimony


The Lord woke me in the middle of the night
and there stood Jesus with a huge tray,
and the tray was heaped with cookies,
and He said, Stephen, have a cookie,


and that's when I knew for sure the Lord 
is the real deal, the Man of all men,
because at that very moment
I was thinking of cookies, Vanilla Wafers


to be exact, and there were two
Vanilla Wafers in among the chocolate
chips and the lemon ices, and one
had a big S on it, and I knew it was for me,


and Jesus took it off the tray and put it
in my mouth, as if He were giving me
communication, or whatever they call it.
Then He said, Have another,


and I tell you I thought a long time before I
refused, because I knew it was a test
to see if I was a Christian, which
means a man like Christ, not a big old hog.


--Stephen Dunn