EIGHT - Beware the baked beans
"Beans, Beans, Good For Your Heart
The More You Eat Them, The More You Fart"
~ The Beans Song
The "covered dish" lunch fare almost always included brown rice, macaroni and cheese, green beans, sliced ham, the aforementioned fried chicken, and baked beans. A marshmallow salad and sliced tomatoes were usually there, too. Baked beans always make me think of these church meals.
I love baked beans. Just last Sunday night, on our 34th Wedding Anniversary, I hand-pressed hamburger patties for the grill and cooked up a casserole dish of baked beans - pork and beans, vinegar, BBQ sauce, bacon, brown sugar, onions, and bell pepper. I ate my two cheeseburgers (with coleslaw on them) and about three-fourths of those beans.
Vicki left the room.
You can laugh, but you know full well that baked beans will lead to your own version of laughing gas.
Here's why beans lead to flatulence (from somewhere on the internet): Oligosaccharides (simple sugars) in beans make it all the way to the large intestine undigested. Bacteria in the large intestine finally break down these sugars. That process causes fermentation and the production of gas that we release as - farting.
I'm telling you all this so I can share a story about a covered dish dinner and a summer revival service at the First Baptist Church of Cumming, GA.
Returning to my childhood, the First Baptist Church had a week-long revival there in the old white sanctuary where my parents were married and I was baptized as a boy. A guest preacher was invited to preach each evening from Sunday to Saturday. Each night before the worship service, different adult Sunday School classes had a covered dish meal with the guest pastor and perhaps his family. Some nights, a dessert social occurred after the revival service, and when it didn't most folk migrated to the Dairy Queen in the center of town. Baptists gulped down the food and the Holy Spirit at those revival meetings.
I loved the revival week each summer. It was an opportunity to see friends that I often didn't see very much between school sessions. If we could eat together, that was even better. I sometimes got to bring a friend for spend-the-night company or went home with a friend after church.
One particular year, mama's Sunday School class hosted one of those covered-dish dinners before worship. I remember eye-balling four different bowls of baked beans, and I decided to have big spoonfuls from each bowl, making sure to scoop some of the bacon from each one, too. Delicious. I wolfed down those beans and went back for more. On the second trip, one of the deacons, said, "Son, beware those beans." He winked at me and smiled. (I appreciated his warning - though honestly my respect for deacons - in general - waned over the years. I still carry a grudge over the deacons that chose a ping pong table over a pool table for the fellowship hall and for the deacon body that road-blocked my plans to have a dance in that same fellowship hall.)
Back to the story. After the covered-dish revival dinner, I settled into a pew alongside my friend Keith Stone. Keith's mama, Bonnie, sat to his left. His daddy, Johnny, sat to Bonnie's left. I sat at the end of the pew on Keith's right. My mama and daddy were sitting just a few pews ahead, but on the right side of the aisle. It's important that you know all that. My mama could clearly see me with a look over her left shoulder.
As we sat there, through old-fashioned hymns, prayers, collection of the offering, and the sermon, those beans started working - that sugar started turning to gas. My stomach started gurgling. You know what I mean, right? That gas was building up, and shifting around, and making its own internal music. Keith Stone was already chuckling beside me. I was in misery. The gurgling was starting and stopping with frequency when Preacher Troy Acree stood at the end of the service to pray over the souls that had come forward to express salvation. I was fidgeting bad and decided to shift my weight some, looking for relief, and when I found it.
Well, it was loud, bouncing off those unpadded, wooden pews.
I looked at mama, and she whipped her head around. She must have fell under the conviction that it was me. Her brow furrowed and her lips tightened in that all-too-familiar look: Wait til I get my hands on you. When I took my eyes off her, I noticed that most everyone was turned looking in my direction. Bonnie Stone, Keith's mama, was laughing to herself so hard I thought she might pass out. My brother Tim was on the floor, collapsing there and howling with laughter. I could tell my daddy was laughing, too, but not out loud for fear mama would slap his leg.
Preacher Acree, God bless his heart, said, “I was praying for a movement tonight, but Lord, that’s not what I had in mind.” Those who weren't already laughing, burst out loud. Someone later reported that the ladies cleaning up after the dinner could hear the laughter all the way downstairs in the fellowship hall. They credited the revival preacher as in "that's good; he must be funny."
Here's what I want you to know.
Church is about a lot of moving parts, but it's mostly about good-hearted, Jesus-loving people coming together as a community, worshipping together, eating together, praying together, serving together, and laughing together. If you aren't checking all those boxes, you aren't really in a church - not a good one, anyway. The church is people who know your name and you know their names, and everyone acts like family because they are family - the family of God.
The church became real to me that night I farted at the close of the revival service. There is nothing so sweet, I think, as the sound of laughter among who love you, whom you love, and who all love the Lord Jesus - even if they are laughing at you . . . even while holding their noses.
This story, and many more like it, appear in my Memories of a Home books. Buy them at amazon.com or direct from me at shopsvministry.com.
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