This I believe
I finally found a credo at the Southern Baptist church I could wholeheartedly embrace.
"Regular walking can strengthen your heart and improve your general health...
Walk and enjoy yourself as you enhance the quality of your life."
That’s what the sign says. I believe it, and I’ve done my best through the years to proselytize it. I approve this message.
It used to be posted on the pedestrian path encircling the Southern Baptist church in my neighborhood. We’ve circumnavigated it countless times, my procession of rambling pooches (including Angel, Grace, Phoenix, Lilli, Scooter, Nell, and Pita) and me, going back to ‘96 when we moved into town. That’s our late Best Friend Angel checking it out in this old photo, on a rare Nashville snow day a decade or so ago. She’s been gone since 2017.
The sign’s been gone for years now too. I emailed the pastor, when it was suddenly and inexplicably missing one day. He said I could have it, if they decided not to replant it. But it’s still missing, and I still don’t have it. Disappointing.
Should have been more skeptical, as I generally am when pondering protestant pastoral promises. A rare lapse on my part. But I do still always see it in my mind’s eye anyway, every time we pass the spot. And I do have its image on the wall next to Mr. Rogers, out back in the Little House.
I’m always cheered and buoyed by the reaffirmation of my Peripatetic faith.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist church in Missouri, until I realized at about age 12 that what they were teaching in Sunday School regarding sin, redemption, the fallen state of humanity, life after death, damnation for non-believers etc. etc., was contrary and offensive to my own emerging naturalistic and humanistic worldview.
I haven’t set foot in a Baptist church since, except to vote (and to drop Older Daughter off for Daddy’s Day Out a couple of times in the ‘90s, before her vocal protests made that too distressful).
But we do amble over to this one just about every day, Nell and Pita and me, to perambulate and contemplate and take a moral holiday… and to circumscribe the terms of our free man’s (and canines’) worship.
Our conviction remains firm. Thank goodness.