"To err is human. To really screw things up, you need religion." -?

Just this past Sunday, I went to church like always, because my parents force me to do so. There was a guest preacher (I’m not even going to touch the sermon, at least not in this post), and at the end, he called for people to come up for prayer. My mother went up, and one of her friends got our neighbor, whom we drove there, to go up as well.

The neighbor got ‘saved’. He asked the friend who brought him up what she was to him, and after she replied with ‘friend’, he stated that she was a great friend to give the gift of salvation. He then asked my mother what she was to the neighbor, and she replied with ‘neighbor’, saying that she brought him to church that day. The preacher said that my mother, too, was a good friend.

He moved on to pray over other people. After maybe ten minutes of this, my mother left the front and walked over to me with suppressed tears in her eyes. After she had calmed down and we were driving away from the church, she told me what was wrong:

I wanted to be prayed over, because Mark (my step father) always ignores me and it hurts. And then the pastor did the same thing as he does.

I tried to explain that, from where I was, it seemed like the preacher had the impression that she was there with our ‘saved’ neighbor. She didn’t listen to that reasoning.

My mother spent all day in a depressive mood, until my father left for the evening service at his church and told our other neighbor, Lilian, to come over to our house and talk to my mom. Lilian told my mother that the guest preacher just “knows so much”, and she heard him say that my mom was “a good Christian woman, and that god wants you to keep doing what you’re doing.” I personally didn’t hear that, but perhaps it was because I was getting irked by the fact that service was going about half an hour over the usual end-time.

These words from Lilian, however, cheered my mother up. Of course. Lilian also said to her that she should go to Sibby, the pastor, and tell him, “‘You know, I just really need to be prayed over.’ It worked with your back and it will work with this.” Yes, never mind the fact that my mother is still walking hunched-over with a hand supporting her spine, or that she’s still filling her Vicodin, Lyrica, and muscle-relaxer prescriptions.

Now, onto the real purpose of this post, as the title suggests. After saying the above to my mother, Lilian said, “And Tess could really benefit from being prayed over, too.” I was in the other room loading the dishwasher, and responded to this without missing a beat. I cannot remember my exact wording, but it was either “I don’t think so” or “Yeah, good luck with that.” My response earned me a, “That was very rude” from our neighbor.

I was too angered to reply to that. But, I must wonder where this woman gets the gull to say things like that. She asserted that my comment was rude, when she was the one suggesting that I should be subjected to the practices of beliefs which I do not hold and, quite frankly, find offensive and rather useless.

I no longer pretend to be a Christian, like I did through middle school. I most certainly am not going back to that.