Mothers' Day

You know what's great about mothers' day? Avoiding church.

It's a double blessing. Apart from the enjoyable time spent with my mum, there's the added joy of not sitting through another hallmark-flavoured excuse for a church service. The one where the bible is replaced with a greeting card.

Essentially there's two parts to this:

Firsty, it's another example of black box theory. Here in church-land, everyone belongs to a standard 2-parent family with 2-3 kids. So that's who church is designed for. We've heard about this place called "real world" and its growing number of marriage breakups and estranged families, but we ignore it.

Sure there's real-world people - made to feel isolated, inadequate and annoyed by the manufactured hype of the day. And we could inspire these people with the hope of Jesus, but instead we rub salt in the wounds. We even have special prayer - thanking God for blessing us with our wonderful mothers. It's our way of saying "If you don't fit the mould - get out!"

The second part is the banality of it all. No need to speculate what piece of godly wisdom the preacher has in store for us today. No need to wonder what the Holy Spirit has prompted this weekend. Surprise, surprise - it's about mothers. The greeting card people and the Holy Spirit are so on the same page. ;)

Is the bible so thin on material that we have to scrape around for stuff to fill our worship services? Or did we just ditch the God-focussed worship service in favour of dancing to the tune played by the retail sector?