From Connections: A Feast without stickers

The writer is a sophomore at Tyler Junior College. He drives a brown 1980 Cressida his friends have dubbed the TreyMobile.

By Trey Cartwright

BIG SANDY, Texas--You know what I miss? I miss those little green and red and orange bumper stickers with the Worldwide Church of God seal on them.

I miss the little seal too. I remember one year I got to go up to the front of the congregation and throw it a fish or two after it had finished tossing the beach ball around.

But, seriously, folks, back to the bumper stickers.

My family was always a green-bumper-sticker family. Like most of you, I'm sure, I always felt a little envious of the ministers and the handicapped, and in some cases the handicapped ministers.

Not that I didn't like the ministers or the handicapped, but in the immortal words of my then-7-year-old sister, "we're just as tired as they are."

How many of you fellow green stickers plotted to get a red or orange sticker through devious means? I know I did, but I was too timid ever to do anything more than plan it out, and at that young age I didn't have enough money to bribe anybody anyway.

Parking insurance

I can joke about it now, but the green bumper sticker always ensured us of a parking space--somewhere.

Those mile walks were good for you, though. They built character. As did the hard, backless, bleacher seating.

But I love going to the Feast. I doubt there's anybody alive who's been to one who hasn't loved it. The trip to the Feast site is a great part of the whole feasting experience.

I love the packing, the multiple external cargo carriers on the roof of the car, the in-depth conversations with my family:

"She's looking out my window!"

"Am not!"

"Are too!"

Good times.

Insert gratuitous plug here: You're reading the Connections section of The Journal: News of the Churches of God, and I do hope you're a subscriber. Remember, that's The Journal: News of the Churches of God. "If we don't print it, who will?"

This year I'll be going to the Feast with my family in San Antonio, Texas. It'll be a nice little drive down to the southern part of the state, with the multiple external cargo carriers and the frequent rest stops. When you gotta go, you gotta go (you'd bladder believe it).

I'm not sure what the theme of the congregation we'll be attending with is. I'm going down there hoping for something along the lines of "a Feast without chairs."

So who's ready for the Day of Atonement? I've been stuffing my cheeks for the past week or so. You never can start too early with the preparations for Atonement.

The Feast of Trumpets is a good day too. I've got some friends who are having a Rosh Hashanah party. There'll be singing and dancing and food and the blowing of the shofar. And, as we like to say around here, shofar shogood.

I've always loved the Feast of Trumpets. They always played the cool song with the "trumpets before each stanza." As a child I was always hypnotized/mystified by the trumpets and often wondered why they always got to cut in front of the "stanza," whatever that was.

Away with words

I've decided to tell all. I've become an antisemantic. I have decided to hate words. I have to write way too many of them to fill this space up.

I hope this news doesn't change anyone's views about me. It's a bit of a hardship being the member of this type of hate group and a journalism major at the same time. It takes a rather extraordinary type of person with lots of characters to do it. I think I'm up for the job.

Does anyone besides me remember coming back to school from the Feast and being two months ahead of the rest of the class in your schoolwork? And this is all work you did during church, mostly on the first day too. God bless the American public-education system.

That's part of the reason I home-schooled for the last three years of high school.

I love Feast gifts, especially since my parents started letting me pick out my own presents, and then they just pay for them. I'm not sure what I want this year. Maybe I'll ask for something extravagant, like a pony. You know, as a child I never could figure out how Mr. Tkach could fit down our chimney.

I think that maybe, as a final farewell to my youth (I'll be 20 years old at next year's Feast), I'll spend at least one sermon of this Feast on a fuzzy little blanket in between the aisles of chairs. In fact, I think we should all do that this Feast.

Who's with me? Anybody?

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