Row and Bee

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Just a metaphor

Kilre

on Nov. 2, 2010

This isn't exactly how I heard it, but it's close enough.

The folks, who are kind enough to put up with me while I search for jobs, hosted a meeting of their church women's group, or something along those lines. It was a bunch of old ladies sitting around, patting each other on the back for believing in Jesus Christ.

One of the stories I heard through the wall went something like this: a carpenter is invited to a banquet hosted by a king in a far away land. The carpenter starts out, and at a rest stop for the night his ingenuity gets the better of him and he turns the hut he'd built for shelter into a grand home, which he sold off.

He would then continue down the road until he had to stop again, and again he'd build his shelter up into a home to sell.

The king supposedly was worried for the carpenter, so he sent out a servant to gather the man and bring him to the banquet, which, all this time, the king had graciously kept warm. The servant found the man as he was, building and selling homes, and convinced the carpenter to leave his passion and come to the banquet.

This is of course a metaphor for the Christian dogma of redemption in heaven after death. You just have to accept the king's banquet for forgiveness.

Of course, the women in the next room obviously missed the main point: the carpenter gave up his livelihood to go to the banquet. All his worldly possessions, for the afterlife. The women, as I watched them file out in their pressed and clean clothes, with hair primped up, nails done, were all rampant materialists. It wouldn't be so ironic if they weren't so deep-seated in their delusions.