from the congregation

Whenever I attend church, I can always find her sitting in the third pew. Once spotted, my mind tends to sway toward very un-Christian like thoughts. She’s gorgeous and, sitting so near the pulpit, it becomes very hard to focus on what sermon is being preached on any particular Sunday. Good Samaritans. The parting of the Red Sea. Love thy neighbor. It’s impossible to pay attention…though she is clearly a neighbor that I could easily love.

The problem, however, is that her husband always occupies the spot next to her. Which, from what I gather during the fragmented sermons that have seeped into my consciousness, is in some type of violation of one of the commandments. So I am relegated to observational admiration only.

Week after week, they’re there in the third row, dressed in their Sunday finest, this woman and her husband. And I began to view her much like I would a television show, once a week in one hour installments, filling in the blanks as to how I imagined her ‘outside of church’ life to be. What type of shampoo did she use? What was her favorite flavor of ice cream? Did she wear toe socks on cold weekend mornings?

These were questions I pondered during each Sunday service…though I knew that I should have been doing more church-like things, such as listening to the sermon.

Then one week, she arrived alone to church. ‘Perhaps her husband is on a business trip,’ I thought to myself. The following week he was absent again, and the week after that as well. I began looking for clues. And while some people, I’m sure, attended church for things like praying and for seeking eternal salvation, my mission was to figure out what was going on with my crush-from-afar woman.

Having only one hour a week to observe, my detective options were limited and, thus, consisted of trying to sit close enough to her in order to see if a ring was still on her finger. This, I felt, was a plan that even Sherlock Holmes would be proud of.

Eventually, I was able to find a seat that provided an optimal view of her hand. By this time, her husband had been missing for several months. And after some creative neck craning, I confirmed that all fingers were ringless. Clearly, the marriage was over and she was unencumbered by things such as husbands and joint checking accounts. I now had a chance at becoming the future second husband of someone whose name I didn’t even know.

The problem, as I saw it, was how to actually meet her. Sure, I had seen her in church…but how was I going to somehow turn this into anything more substantial?

Should I try to coordinate my exit with hers, exclaiming, ‘Wow! I see that we both believe in the same God. What a coincidence! Would you like to get dinner one evening?’

Or perhaps I could plan on reaching for the holy water at the exact same moment as she did so that our hands touched with, hopefully, ensuing sparks.

But as I went through various other options as to how I could create some type of holy-hookup, I realized that nothing I had conjured was likely to bring about the desired results. I was going to need some type of divine intervention. Divine intervention that I knew would probably go to someone else…someone who actually paid attention during services.