A Sunday Leftovers Story

The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word... (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, "The Poet, 1844")

Yesterday morning we visited a church we had never been to before. We've passed by it many times in the past year as we travel back and forth between Tallahassee and Havana and wondered what sort of place it might be. The church website doesn't give much indication of its nature. In fact, it doesn't make much sense. You would think that if some entity is trying to make itself known to the world, it would use some elegance of expression or at least clearly describe its mission or purpose for being. Maybe their Facebook page does a better job. I'm not sure because I don't use that particular social medium. A blog and a Twitter account already occupy too much of my time!

At any rate, upon our visit to the church that offers new hope--what's wrong with the old one, I'd like to know?--we discovered the members of the congregation to be friendly enough (and wonderfully diverse), the sermon enlightening (if a little too emphatically delivered), and the music uplifting. Though we may not be going back, I'm glad that we did make the effort. The whole experience was just what I needed to fine tune a story that I had written very early in the morning. It sharpened the knife, so to speak, that trimmed the fat and carved the roast, I mean the story, to be served up for your dining, I mean reading, pleasure. Please help yourself here in my other kitchen (Big Bend Over Easy in Florida) and enjoy our Sunday leftovers!