Jitterbugging for Jesus

Well leave it to my daughter AMY NICOLE MCKAY not to forget that I blogged here just last week saying that I’d been pulled over for speeding by a Dallas officer who I flat charmed out of giving me a green stamp when I said to her “HEY! It’s the Fourth of JULY and have you EVER seen the freeways this VACATED in DALLAS on a SATURDAY!”
So maybe I didn’t exactly charm her! It was more like frightened her, or so she told me at Trinity Pub down on Mockingbird Station tonight where I had invited her to bring some cop buddies tonight and let’s drink a toast to my son in the Marines (and she has a brother who’s one of those and had noticed the Marine sticker on my car when she pulled me over for speeding on the empty freeway a week prior.) I told her we’d also make some God talk and she said, “Uh, OK.” And we did.
I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking, “HEEEEEE Hawww! That’s a good one Paul! That’s a real knee slapper! You invited a woman officer (Handsome Female in Blue Div.) to the pub to talk about God. Right.”
Right. I did, and we did, her and two male officers of the law and a federal court clerk who is an avowed agonostic, she tells me, but she was very nice to me and as long as agnostics and atheists are nice to me, I won’t beat them up.
Not that I would do that, really. Especially since I consider myself an almost pacifist (Christian love div.) and because I wouldn’t beat anybody up with three cops hanging around because Goldie and Deanie McKay didn’t raise no fool.
People, this is what I do at my pub. I go in wearing the same sterling silver bling bling cross I wear at the hospital where I do ministry (For like my namesake Paul, “I am not ashamed of the gospel”).
Some pubbers stare at me like I’m from one of those new planets that haven’t been named yet, but mostly I find that people engage me (especially the bartenders and servers and older folks and believe me, this is pretty much an old folks pub on a lot of nights, although, we do get the beautiful SMU people on a Friday and Saturday as well. I’ve had perfect strangers come up to me at the bar and casually ask if I’m a priest.
Close, I tell them, but no cigar and no more Guiness for you.
God is like a rubber ball–God’s bouncing over here, God’s bouncing over there, God is bouncing EVERYWHERE. The Holy Trinity pub included.
I cut out early on my cop friends and law clerk buddy because they were going to go “clubbing.” Been there done that. told them I had to go home and read my Bible. Which I’m doing. And they thought that was pretty cool.
Really.
And they are thinking about God in a different way having engaged Paul at the pub, thinking that maybe God’s not so boring after all.
Because it’s like I told the agnostic young lady who said that she decided against Christian faith a long time ago because of “science” and because the Bible is so boring: I don’t know what Bible you’ve been reading, but there’s nothing boring about David dancing around the ark in his skivvies and going on to have his way with a woman on the rooftop across the way.
Boring?
goes to show once again: the Bible’s the book everybody talks about but nobody reads.
Especially agnositcs.