hello it is i! since the rant about church never did show up, perhaps i will just repeat my observations here. i guess my point was that in the 30-some years i've been attending the same lutheran church, things have really changed. when i was a kid, girls wore dresses, and every Easter, you would get a new dress. boys wore button up shirts and nice pants and the hairstyle of choice was either the buzz cut or the crewcut. when i reached my teen years, i longed to rebel and wear jeans but that simply wasn't done. now i wear jeans to church if i feel like it and dress up if i feel like it. proper church attire runs the range from dresses and suits to shorts and viking's jerseys. back in the day, no child dared to bring toys to church for their amusement. the closest we ever came to playing in church was to use the pew pencils to draw and scribble on the bulletins. i do however remember falling asleep with my head leaning against my mothers shoulder. these days kids bring toys into church and some of them actually make noise. you have parents whose pagers and cell phones "accidentally" go off during the service and kids who spend more time traveling downstairs to the bathroom then they do sitting in church. the weirdest thing though, is the inability of some to make it through an entire church service without something to drink. do you mean to tell me that you can't a) find time to drink your coffee or latte or whatever, before church and b) you can't last 1 hour without having some beverage poured down your throat? i think that nobody ever says anything about all of these changes because they're afraid that they will drive people away from the church. to me, a lot of it is just about respecting God and His house. i believe church should be a place of reverence - a place where you put aside all of the outside things like toys and cappuccino and focus on God's word and his importance in your life. and while i don't see anything wrong with wearing jeans to church, i think there has to be a line drawn when it comes to wearing shirts with logos and sayings on them. it's fine to show support for your favorite teams but there are 167 hours outside of church each week in which you can display that pride. since i'm ranting ( ok, i'll admit it - it's more like a rant now), i think that the changes that have taken place in church behavior and dress are reflections on the attitude of the world at large, our casual disregard for traditions that seem irrelevant in this day and age. but it's these very same traditions that shaped who we are and what we have become. i think it's time for people to reflect on the great gift that we as Americans have in our freedom of religion and make sure that we don't take it for granted. posted by kim 6:20 AM . . .
