Saturday, March 10, 2007

The greatest of these is love

Love never fails....And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. -- 1 Corinthians 13:13

I was watching the new Andy Richter sitcom Andy Barker P.I. online. Because I can - there's a real sense of power watching a network show before it airs, and I'm a sucker for private eye stories.

It was a touch of social commentary that really made me chuckle, though.

"Don't park in front of the Christian bookstore unless you want to get towed," warned Andy's strip-mall neighbor. Ah, the observation in that simple joke. Sometimes there's just a disconnect between tenet and practice, between grace and legalism.

Several memories of encounters with irate faithful flooded back to me.

I will post some other time about adventures with a newspaper's wire desk, those often sullen, passive agressive folk who put pages together and write headlines that contradict your copy.

Once upon a time, some wire desk type on the paper at which I worked swaped the quotes associated with the Dr. Billy Graham and Dr. Lawrence Lamb head shots on their columns. It was probably a wrong keystroke.

Instead of clarifying some New Testament nuance, Dr. Graham had a quote about uterine bleeding.

To Dr. Lamb was attributed perhaps a point about Simon of Cyrene.

In addition to their other talents, wire deskites usually wern't around when the complaints came in. They did their best damage at night.

I got the old lady politely pointing out the technical faux paux on the phone.

"You idiots put this quote about you-tree-un bleedin' next to Dr. Graham's quote!" she shouted. "I cain't believe this!"

"I'm sure we'll run a correction," I said.

"This is terrible. I hope Dr. Graham sues you all!"

There was not much more to say to that than: "Thank you for pointing out the mistake. Have a blessed day."

6 comments:

Danny Tagalog said...

Have you got the news clipping? I expect not, but that's the sort of thing which would make my reach to the newspaper worthwhile!

david santos said...

Hello, Sidney!
this post is very good, thank you
have nice wkend

Drizel said...

Whahahahaha......funny Sid:)

Sidney said...

Danny, Sorry didn't save the clipping, but yeah it would have been a nice curio.

Charles Gramlich said...

Hum, somehow I had a longish post here but it never came through. I was mentioning a Christian Lady who once gave me a "Get Out of Hell Free" card in the park when she thought I and a few friends were trying to "raise the dead," in her words. I'm keeping the card, though.

RK Sterling said...

Sorta reminds me of the time the car my ex and I were in stopped in front of a church's parking lot on a freezing winter day. All the good church-going Christians started screaming and cussing at us to get out of the way. We had to leave the car there and walk in subzero temperatures while they glared and yelled.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...