WORSHIP WITH A STRAY DOG
When I was a child, my family and I worshiped in a small clapboard church set in the red clay farming land of rural Georgia. We were a congregation of simple folk, farmers and schoolteachers mainly, and our ministers led worship wearing inexpensive and ill-fitting dark suits, believing that robes were a sign of ostentation. The heavy summer heat of that region settled in at sunrise and gathered intensity through the day, so that Sunday worship in the hot months was punctuated by the waving of funeral-home fans and the swatting of gnats. All the windows of the sanctuary, and the main doors as well, were opened wide to accept whatever merciful breezes might blow our way. On some Sundays, however, it was not a draft that blew in the church door, but a neighborhood dog, a stray hound of indecipherable lineage who somehow found our service irresistible. He was not there every Sunday by any means, but his…
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