scintilla day six- faith is a…five letter word.

Day Six of The Scintilla Project! 

Talk about faith. Yours or someone else’s.

I am an avowed agnostic, and a few years ago I discovered that I come by that honestly. My mom joined the Worldwide Church of God when I was four, and although we kept thinking that one day Daddy would start going with us to services, he never did. The WCG was a very different creature than the Baptist church my dad grew up in- the church that Mama took me and my brother to before she converted. (She actually grew up not going to church at all, and was a religion-sampler herself until she settled on the WCG.)  The WCG met on Saturdays, had very strict rules about keeping the Sabbath and what you could eat and what you could wear and it had a bunch of holy days throughout the year, including one whole eight-day extravaganza that our family always spent at Jekyll Island in Georgia, which was a fantastic perk I still remember fondly. Daddy would not go to Jekyll Island either. Well, he did go one year, but he spent the days fishing instead of going with us to the enormous tent that was pitched in the parkinglot of the AquaRama and listening to sermons.

Mama stuck with the WCG for the rest of her life, though internal upheavals and losses of ministers and scandals and everything else that has plagued pretty much every religion in the history of religions. Daddy never said a word against the WCG or the many services we’d go to (often travelling to other towns because it was a religion with a relatively small membership and congregations from different towns tended to get together for holy days), and he didn’t mind that we couldn’t eat pork (he’d keep his own  bologna in the fridge and fry his own pork chop once in awhile) and he didn’t mind that we couldn’t eat anything with leavening in it for a week during the Days of Unleavened Bread (the house was supposed to be totally de-leavened, but Mama would keep him some bread and crackers in one corner of the kitchen cabinet that week). And Daddy liked all of Mama’s friends from church, and became good friends with quite a few of them himself.  

Mama was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s ten years or so ago (she’d been showing worsening signs for a number of years before that) and she passed away in 2009. Her church had dwindled down to so few members that they’d been having services in one’s house for several years. When she couldn’t drive anymore, but still wanted to go to church, Daddy would take her and drop her off, then go back and get her afterwards. When she was worse and it was a huge effort to take her anywhere, he’d sit at home with her. They sat at home, with the occasional monumental-effort trip to the grocery store and Cracker Barrel, for at least a year.

Daddy was diagnosed with colon cancer several years before Mama died. He had an operation, took pill-form chemo, came through it all with flying colors, and is fine now. But after she died, he’d often say to anyone who would listen, “I just thank the good Lord and the doctors that they were able to patch me up long enough to take care of her so she wouldn’t have to go into a nursing home!”

I finally told him I thought the Good Lord kind of owed her one, actually, after putting Mama through all the hell He’d put her through. Daddy did laugh at that.  

All this wasn’t really what I was going to write about. What I started out intending to write about was the time Daddy had surgery again last summer. That surgery was for some kind of a hernia, and wasn’t a terribly serious operation, although since he was 83 at the time, any surgery is kind of serious. I went to the VA with him, and we were waiting in the pre-op room for them to wheel him back for the surgery. As we sat there, the preacher from his old Baptist church dropped by. Daddy’s sister’s best friend still goes to that church, and she’d sent the preacher. The preacher asked if Daddy would like to pray with him before the surgery.

Daddy said, “Well… whatever!”

I.nearly.choked. The preacher looked a little taken aback, but bravely soldiered on through a quick prayer. As I sat there trying so hard not to laugh that I had tears in my eyes. The older I get, the more obvious it is who I really took after.