My family has sat in the same pew for as long as I can remember. Near the front, on the left, by the window that sticks. Nobody put our name on it, but nobody else sits there either. When I settle into that pew on a Sunday morning, I feel the way a man ought to feel in church. I feel like I belong.
I want to say a word in favor of that feeling, because it has gone out of fashion. There are preachers now who seem to think the job of a sermon is to make you uneasy. They want you to leave church with something stuck in your craw. I have sat through a few of those, and I have never understood the appeal. I go to church to be strengthened, not to be rearranged.
Faith, rightly understood, is a comfort. The Psalms are full of it. The Lord is my shepherd. He prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies. I have always loved that line especially. It tells me He knows who my enemies are, and that He means for them to see me blessed.
I have heard it said that our Lord spent His time with the wrong sort of people, and that He was hard on the comfortable and gentle with everyone else. I will not argue with Scripture. I will only say that every man reads it in his own season, and some passages are for other seasons. A Christian has to know which verses are for him. I have found mine, and they have served me well.
I am glad to see faith come back into public life. The Legislature has required the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public-school classrooms, and while federal courts have blocked it in some districts, I take it as a good sign. It means the right people are in charge, and they want everyone to know whose side the Lord is on. A faith that wins elections is a faith that is doing something right.
There are verses about washing feet, and about going the second mile with a man who did not ask nicely. I believe every one of them. I have just come to think the most faithful thing a man can do is see to it that people who share his faith are running things. There will be time for the rest afterward. That is how I think about my vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. I gather the other side would like faith to do more serving and less ruling, and I have always felt more at home with the ruling.
So I will keep my pew, and my verses, and my certainty. I will go on Sunday and come home feeling better than when I left. If that is wrong, I have not yet heard a sermon that convinced me.
The Gospel has never once asked me to change. I have always taken that as a sign it agrees with me.
D. M.