Part One, Attempting to save themselves

During one year of my life, as a young adult I attended church. I often went with my supervisor and his family to the Sunday morning service at the most Fundamentalist church in town. They also attended the Sunday evening service, the Wednesday evening service, and all the Bible studies. In addition, they held a family prayer service before breakfast, lunch, and supper.

I’ve never observed any group of people that tried harder to obey what they perceived as God’s requirements for churchgoing and associated behavior. Typically for such a couple, they had a plaque on their wall: “The family that prays together stays together.”

Despite all the fervent church participation, or possibly because of it, I realized after long acquaintance that theirs was one of the sickest marriages I’d ever observed. Intensive churchgoing never made any difference that I could see to their behavior, which traveled through endless cycles of “forgive and forget.”

Puzzling on all the “praying,” Bible-studying, and church attendance, I finally realized that these people were doing everything they could to try to save themselves. If they could have done more, they would have. A Herculean effort but sadly, all for nothing.