Can I Get a Witness?

This is a story of temptation, perseverance, and partial nudity.

I have been really wanting to go to the Unitarian church in town, for a while. But after having Halle all week, then weddings on Saturdays, my Sundays are justifiably lazy. Which means I can come up with 2,000,000,000,000 reasons why I don't have to get up and go to church. Bad, I know.

So yesterday I swore, come hell or high water, I was gong to church today. Today was the first service back for the Unitarian Universalists of Bozeman (UUB). They do not do summer sessions I learned because everyone is out enjoying nature, like the rest of the Bozemanites, and expected to have private practice.

So I figured today was the perfect day, the first day back for everyone else, and I didn't have a wedding this Saturday, so I couldn't say, "Oh, I'm just too tired, God will understand."

Here is the temptation part of the story. I woke up to a blissfully overcast day. The kind that makes you want to sleep in, and not get up for church. Ughh, but I did.
I went downstairs to take the dog out. I have been swearing to myself to put a note on my door to remind myself, "Unlock Knob" because it is some special (by special I mean cheap and hateful) kind of doorknob that you can open from the inside while it stays locked from the outside. Which means that you can open the door in a sleepy rush and close the door behind you and find yourself locked out at 8:00 am. Which is exactly what happened to me this lovely Sunday. So I spent a good thirty minutes trying to figure out how to break into my new townhome, finally resorting to completely ripping out the screen of a back window and climbing in. Of course there had to be two giant labs harassing me and Zeppelin the whole time, finding it very exciting that I was cussing and ripping at my own house. People here don't exactly adhere to leash laws.

I finally get back in, and make my coffee, thinking, oh I've got another hour before I have to leave, but I better go ahead and check directions.
Only to find out that the service starts at 10, not 11. Its 9:55.

This is where the perseverance part starts. This was the PERFECT excuse!! Oh, I got locked out of my house, and then got the time wrong. Easy as pie, no WAY God could dispute that one! He saw the whole thing!

But something told me it was time to stop with the excuses. So I ran upstairs, threw on my go-to floorlength hippie sundress that has saved me in a rush so many times, a light jacket, sunglasses on my head to hide the bedhair, and ran out the door, thinking, I am going to be so late.

Luckily, now that I live in town, it was not that far of a drive. An easy bikeride really, and I got every green light, seeing it as a sign. I walk in, 10:05, ready to be "that person" who interrupts by coming in late, and lo and behold, the service had not started! I had made it!

Now I bet you are wondering about the partial nudity part of the story.
First, let me say that I am so glad that I went today. What a great place. Very low key, just a few short hymns, and a great female Rev. that told the story of her summer sabbatical of silence, calling the two monks that ran the retreat place the "monastic versions of Cheech and Chong." It was a wonderful sermon about the joy and value of silence, and as soon as they post it online I will send the link, it is worth sharing and listening to. It was not only inspiring, it was very educational about the benefits, joys, and troubles that we humans have from pure silence. I am going to get a silence chair today to start a new morning ritual, it just sounded so great from her story, and I am now totally inspired to go on a silence retreat myself.

Anyway, I am sitting there enjoying the story, when I shift to recross my legs, and realize something very funny;

I am not wearing any underwear.

In my haste to get out the door, I had dressed from the top down and since my dress was long, I had totally forgotten underwear!!

Embarassingly, I felt a giggle start to turn in my stomach, or as my grandma says, my giggle box start to tip over and spill out all my giggles. It just struck me as so funny, and it made me think if all the times that I would catch one of my sister's eyes during a prayer at a family gathering and see their lips tighten and their eyes squench shut, trying to fight the urge to laugh at one of the most inappropriate times. Which made me want to laugh even harder.

So thank you, God, for pushing me this morning, for making me get my bee-hind out of my house and into yours, and for reminding me that it did not have to be so serious:)