So This Is Blogging...

I got my bachelor's at a pretty conservative Bible college, which probably explains a lot, including why there's a kind of secret bond among those of us who attended and are now (let's just say) in a different place. Several of these people read this blog -- or they used to, before I fell off the face of the earth.

I can't remember if chapel was mandatory or just regulated by peer pressure. It seems to me it was mandatory, at least in theory. Each semester we got half a credit of "Christian service," part of which was being involved in some sort of ministry, or at least helping little old ladies cross the street, and part of which was chapel attendance. Lord knows what kind of mischief we might have gotten into if we didn't get our assess to chapel twice a week.

Still, there are always people who played the system. For every rule in the student handbook, there were at least three people willing to help you break it. Depending on the rule, there might even be people willing to sell you the means -- or be the means. For other rules, there were loopholes to exploit.

At any rate, some people got reputations as chapel-skippersl. I was always too chicken, but there was a guy on my floor, an upperclassman, who never went to chapel. He was a fun guy, actually, who liked Rush (the band, not Limbaugh), was a decent guitarist, and seemed like he'd be a frat guy if he went to a state college. He was constantly joking with the younger guys on the dorm floor in a big-brother kind of way, or maybe in the your-best-friend's-big-brother-whom-your-mom-thought-was-a-bad-influence kind of way, or somewhere in between. I'm pretty sure he drank, and I'm pretty sure there were goings-on with some of the coeds. He preached on the weekends.

I don't know that his lack of attendance ever caught up with him in a meaningful way. It was widely known on campus that he never went, but we never got wind of any kind of repercussions for that. And then it came time for his senior sermon. Graduating preaching majors either had to give a senior sermon or they had the opportunity to do so, I'm not sure which. Either way, most of them did, and our chapel-skipping friend was no exception. He showed up dressed nicely in a suit most of us had never seen. In fact, I don't think I'd ever seen him in anything but shorts and an AC/DC t-shirt.

He stepped up to the pulpit, looked around the room with a grin that would have put Zaphod Beeblebrox to shame, and said:

"So this is chapel..."