Ribs

It’s hard to remember how many times I was asked, “Did you taste the ribs?” I was sorry to say I hadn’t. Because of the generosity of a dear friend, I was able to attend the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Assembly in Memphis this year. I spent the night in downtown Memphis, just yards from some of the most famous barbeque in the world. Sorry to say, I didn’t taste the ribs!

I could say I was too busy. That’d be a lie for sure. I could say I felt guilty for not being at the Assembly every waking moment. That’d be true. Not that I attended every meeting. But, I did feel guilty for it. I feel guilty for not doing a lot of things – always have – a skill I’ve learned well from my religious upbringing. You get so deep into religion that you learn that you may as well go ahead and go to church. Even if you’re miserable at church, if you skip, you’ll just spend the time feeling guilty for not being there.

At the Memphis airport I ran into a friend catching the same flight home. “Did you taste the ribs,” he asked. Turns out, one night when I thought it was most crucial to be at the “meeting,” he and another friend tasted the ribs instead and even caught a ball game, too.

Many of us spent so much time in church getting ready for the big eternal meeting, we never learned to enjoy the life we had now, to sample more of life’s wonderful buffet of simple joys. We’ve been trained well to believe that the only part of life that really counts is the eternal part, heaven and not earth. Eternity, we were taught, doesn’t begin until the moment we die. That’s why we Baptists are better at scaring the hell out of people and not so good at dealing with the hell they already live in, and injustices that created that hell and continue to fuel its fires.

Is this world just a waste of time, a dirty bus stop on the way to heaven? If so, why did God bother creating all of it and give us the ability to enjoy it? What if eternity has already begun and our lives now are an important chapter in the eternal story?

Surely, God didn’t create this earthly world just to throw it away. This is our Father’s world – and always will be. He gave us all that is in to enjoy it – while we have it. To revel in it. To celebrate it. To love and even protect it. There is something of Adam’s rib in all of us, is there not? Something that made God say of it all, “That’s incredible!”

Wouldn’t it be something if the first question we’re asked at the Pearly Gates is not, “How did you like church?” but instead, “Did you taste the ribs?”