I recently wrote an article about “People Say the Damndest Things” and I promised more to come as their either transpired or I remembered other anecdotes. Well, today I offer one of each.
The man I mentioned earlier was always complaining years ago about how he was disgusted with all churches because they expected you to put money in the plate. His attitude and actually his stated conviction on the matter was, “Let God give them the money.” So he kept away from churches on that basis. Then one day he thought he found the answer. He had discovered a churched named, “Park Free Evangelical”. You and I and most rational and moderately intelligent people would know that that meant the church was unaffiliated and not attached to any greater denomination. But this guy thought it meant that the church was actually “free” in the financial sense in that they didn’t pass around the plate or expect any donations. So one Sunday he took his family there and was outraged when they passed around the offering. He became irate and made a scene with wild statements like, “Your sign says this is a free church now you ask me for money! That’s false advertising and I’ll sue you! I’ll report this to the government! I’ll shut you down!” For years he went around bad mouthing the church because they were liars and thieves. Again what can you say in that situation?
Then there’s the woman I spoke of before and her penchant for saying bizarre things. Just this week the neighbors were talking about one man in the neighborhood who had recently remarried, how he met his new wife. It turns out that her first husband landed in prison for seducing little boys. The neighbor was and is a very nice and helpful man so he tried to be helpful to this woman and her kids, then one thing led to another and they eventually got married. So the lady who loves to indulge in convoluted logic said about this, “Well, he got damaged goods by marrying her and it will come to no good end”. I had to ask how she figured that and she said, “She must have done something to make her first husband interested in little boys and now she’ll do something to make her new husband interested in it”.
How do you respond to that? Can anyone tell me?