This morning Aimee and I went over to Junction City to measure a building that the JC Little Theater bought for some extra space.  Get this - the place started off as a mortuary, and most recently was some creepy-ass church that God was probably not even gonna claim.  So after hearing nothing but bad things about this building, imagine my surprise when I walked into the main room and felt nothing but inspiration.

John Ashcroft would be so proud!

I breached out of my deep inner circle of friends this morning to try a conversation with my lovely cousin.  She chatted (is this a verb yet?) me:

UNIDENTIFIED COUSIN:
hey how are you?

10:00am Lauren:

Hey! Not bad.

Getting ready to go up to Tennessee tonight, you?

Things got worse from there.

Lauren:

So what does “having a spiritual garage sale” entail?

10:07am UNIDENTIFIED COUSIN:

like i want to get rid of anything blocking the way of me being as close as i can to God.

10:08am Lauren:

What’s blocking your way to god?

10:12am UNIDENTIFIED COUSIN:

like not memorizing my scripture enough, umm giving my sickness to God, not witnessing enough, and finally not asking God what his will is for me, like college and job stuff, because I feel like I’m worshiping the plan of God.

So, this is pretty much where I needed to stop, drop and roll.  She’s 17 years old, and isn’t that a little young to be a religious fundie?  Notice that she capitalizes “God” but left “i” as lower case.  I just want to shake her and tell her to read some books that don’t occur in the Bible, and for christ sake, go to a decent college.  I’m not entirely sure why it bothers me so much.  I’m totally glad that she wants to be a nurse and help folks in places where people don’t have clean water and all, but the part that really bothers me is that she’s so intent on SPREADIN’ THE WORD OF GOD to people that already have their own shit going on.  Yeah, I’ll say it.  Christian missionaries really piss me off.

Yep, Jesus is Picarding you.

Ohhhh, Christ.

Oh, our great leader in Georgia, Sonny Purdue… he’s really gettin’ crackin’ on this little drought problem. Here’s a link to the story. Basically what he says is “don’t you worry y’alls’ pretty little heads about this, we gonna leave it to a higha powah. Now the reason we ain’t got ‘nough rain heah is because we haven’t been prayin’ enough! So what we need to do is get in front of the state capitol and PRAY to the LAWD for watah and lay it all on him.”

I guess I really have a couple main problems with this solution. First off, this has been an issue for the last twenty years in this neck of the woods. Atlanta has sprawled out of control so badly over the past two decades… and they’ve been in these water wars with Alabama and Florida for just as long. Shouldn’t we be practicing conservation like it’s going out of style?

Also, I have a real problem people thinking that god is always on their side. He’s busy with so much stuff already… being on our side for the whole killing terr’ists thing, making sure that we strike down all the gays, getting people to bomb abortion clinics for him… tell me how a guy finds a line in his day-timer to pencil in “make it rain in Georgia enough to fill lake Lanier so that Atlantans can go back to filling up their pools again”?

And don’t even get me started on that whole issue of separation of church and state.

I’m just gonna go ahead and say, Georgia is a special place, that’s for sure.