Oh, yeah.  In the middle of a pandemic.  Still not fun.  I was in Jerusalem—the one in Israel, where Jesus used to hang out—on March 10.  It was my birthday.  I got to celebrate with Clarkie Burks, of the Bowling Green Burks.  She shares a birthday with me.  We were supposed to visit Egypt on March 12, but it was closed. 

Moses spent 40 years trying to get out of Egypt and never did.  I have spent 68 years trying to visit Egypt and they closed the whole country to keep me out.  I didn’t mind.  I just wanted to get home, which was the general consensus of our group.   Y’all remember how Lewis Grizzard told that British heart doctor that he wasn’t going to spend football season in “no foreign country?”  We didn’t want to spend a pandemic in one, either.  

Luckily, we all got home on March 12.   I was settling in getting ready to watch the SEC basketball tournament when all heck broke loose and events started cancelling and closing down and it has been one thing after another ever since. 

I mean, we been at home, y’all. 

I have missed a lot of traveling.  There are hotel rooms all over the world with a mint on the pillow just for me.  If I have to stay home another fifteen months, I’ll run out of those little bottles of shampoo I have been bringing home from the 300 hotels I’ve stayed in the past seven years.  And who would have ever believed that running out of toilet paper would have become a thing.

I am pretty sure Georgia would have won the NCAA Championship in baseball this spring.  Dr. Flynn Nance agrees with me, so I’m going to pull a UCF and go ahead and claim that.  I think I’ll order a banner from Matt Stewart and send the bill to Greg McGarity.  I’m pretty sure Geoff Collins’s aunt, Christie Collins Mitcham,  has already had him engrave a plaque celebrating the fact that Tech will not lose to Georgia this fall, and more power to them.  At least the ACC was willing. 

I have also missed dining out in some of my favorite restaurants, but honesty compels me to admit that I haven’t missed many meals and have the waistline to show it.  If anything, I may have eaten a little more than usual.  A guy can only watch so many episodes of Ozark and Yellowstone before he gets bored and starts snacking. 

But you know what I really miss?  Going to church on Sunday. 

I know that folks are having church in a lot of creative ways and I have taken part in most of them.  I’ve listened to church while riding in my car.  I’ve watched on the computer in my pajamas.  Many Sundays I have watched two or three services.  I’ve taken part in an online Bible study, led by the great young Methodist preacher, Jonathan Andersen—who is actually kind of branch kin to Clarkie Burks with whom I spent my birthday in Israel.  But that’s another story for another day.  

I have even preached online a few times for some of my friends who are pastors and a couple of weeks ago I got to preach at my first drive-in church service.  From the pitcher’s mound I brought the message, while the congregation all sat in their cars.  Unlike the drive-in picture shows I used to attend at the Moonlight and the Hub, everyone at Shiloh UMC stayed in the front seats of their cars, as far as I could tell. 

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We even had a virtual camp meeting at Salem this year, and while I appreciate the effort folks put out to make that happen, virtual ain’t real and it just wasn’t the same. 

I did preach an in-person funeral in deep South Georgia, way below the gnat line, for a dear saintly lady who was born on the same day Babe Ruth shut out the Boston Red Sox in the 1921 World Series, but it was mostly family and we avoided hugging one another’s necks, even though we all really did want to. 

Now please don’t hear something I’m not saying.  I’m not casting stones at church leaders who haven’t seen fit to resume face-to-face, inside the church, fannies in the pews Sunday morning services.  I’m not.

I understand the inherent risks with getting a crowd together, no matter how much hand sanitizer is dispensed, and how socially we try to distance ourselves and none of us really know if masks work or don’t work.  I don’t blame church leaders for trying to play it safe.

But I sure do miss going to church.  I miss visiting with folks beforehand.  I miss having Billy George ask me how I’m doing, and I miss having Bill Rogers tell me a joke every week.  I miss hearing John Bunn play the piano and Cindy Elliott play the organ and I miss hearing our magnificent choir at Conyers First and shaking hands with everybody during greeting time. 

And I miss hearing my buddy, Dave Benson, preach.  I miss him more than words can say. 

I sure do miss going to church. 

But friends, remember this.  What seems like an eternity to us—five months and counting—isn’t even a blink of an eye when you consider actual eternity.  We’ve been through the fire before, as a country, and we’ve survived.  We’ll survive this, too.

Stay safe.  See y’all Sunday—straight to your inbox.