(O God, Where Are You Now?)

So, today I'm doing some computer work in the world's most home-like jail.

Seriously. Clinton County, Kentucky's jail is in a house, with cells built onto the back. The bedrooms have been converted to hold food, there's industrial tiling throughout the kitchen and living room where there's a couch with your standard 70's garish-colored quilt, and thousands of knick-knacks sitting around the place. The bathroom is avocado green, with a silver soap holder sticking out of the wall....right next to an ashtray. There's a Big Mouth Billy Bass on the wall, right next to some hooks holding a flannel shirt, a "Richie Farmer Agriculture" hat and what appears to be thermal underwear. There's pictures of the kids on the walls - old, poorly-colored portraits of small children is some of the ugliest matching outfits I've ever seen. My favorite is one of what looks like a 15-year old boy (If he's not named "Gomer", he should be.) dressed in a woodland cammo suit in front of an American flag, holding what looks like an M16. The expression on the kid's face is priceless - he looks like he just downed a bottle of cough syrup.

Hard. Core.

Right now, I should be installing a cable modem, but unfortunately it appears as if DSL has not been activated on the line that it was supposed to be activated on. So I'm sitting here waiting for my contact to get back from talking to the jail's ISP to find out why the thing isn't working. So it ain't gonna happen today.

Going to places that time has obviously neglected is always sort of funny. It's like a brief step back in time. All of a sudden, your surroundings resemble something from a time that your brain tells you has already passed. You see stuff like beehive hairdos and horn-rimmed glasses and old kitschy porcelain figurines and wonder why? hasn't this place been updated to reflect more conventional values of interior fashion.

I was at church Wednesday night for a "Night of worship" - apparently, some of the congregants have said that they feel like singing more on Sundays, so they put together a night of just singing for last Wednesday night. The church I'm going to is fairly large - I estimate their main auditorium seats at least two thousand. They have all the earmarks of your traditional megachurch - a coffee cafe outside the auditorium, moving lights and some wicked cool sound technology. (PM5D, Aviom system, all musicians on IEMs. I was there early for practice, because I wanted to learn more about how the PM5D they have works. So I sat there and watched their TD mix until after practice was over, then I sat behind the sound booth so I could participate in the evening. But a funny thing happened - I felt completely out of place. I felt a complete inability to bring a gift of worship...I had to force myself to even stand. The whole thing felt trite and meaningless. It wasn't the music, which was well-played and well-mixed. It wasn't the worship leaders, I felt they were sincere and truly had a desire to worship. But despite the fact that I knew all this, I couldn't shake a feeling of what was almost disgust. What was I doing here? Why was I even pretending to be able to participate in this pointless endeavor? "At this point I'm just putting on a show for the benefit of the people around me." I thought. "That's slightly hypocritical.".

Sadly, I've been getting this feeling more and more lately. Maybe it's because I picked the church that was the most POG-like in Nashville, because that's what I'm used to and I'm a techno-nerd. Maybe I'm the one to blame - perhaps my inability to feel like worshiping is because I'm taking myself to the wrong places. Perhaps it's indicative of a problem with my spiritual life. Relying entirely on your feelings to guide you through life isn't exactly a smart way of living. Regardless, the fact remains that the sense of disconnection is very real, and doesn't show signs of going away. Churches feel...dead...anymore. There's no urgency. No purpose to be served by going to a building and listening to the pastor tell his funny little stories while writing on his little whiteboard and watching the little bullet points on the screen and filling in the blanks in my little bulletin. The need to worship has been sapped. It's gone. Corporate worship feels like a show. Like stepping back into a 70's living room decorated with kitschy porcelain figures and avocado green shag carpeting and wood paneling on the walls. It's that sense of "What I am doing here?". I don't want to go to church merely to show my fellow Christians that "Hey! Look at me! I'm going to church!", because that's hypocrisy. At the same time, I know that worship isn't all about me - it's about what I can bring to the community of believers. Yet what's the point of going to church if the church feels lifeless?

Personally, I think I'm sabotaging myself - going to a very POG-like church is probably not what I need to be doing. I think I'll be taking my worship elsewhere for a while. I'm tired of the institution that many churches have become - sterile, showy, impersonal places of Biblical platitudes. There's a different sort of gathering at another church here in town that bills itself as a lot different than an average worship service. It might be a refreshing change from the normal church service that I'm used to.

I have to do something.

Exit, stage left. Sparks