The Wanderer for Wonderwhat (14)

(Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17)
A road less traveled
The room was located in a long forgotten, upscale mall. At one time in it’s existence, it had functioned as a dress shop. Mirrors covered the walls and the floor was a mixture of black and white tiles and rattan thatch. It was small, and the ceilings were low.
This was the room that the Wanderer and the home group had inherited.

The Wanderer surveyed the place, scrutinizing its details. There weren’t, in fact, many details to examine, and that was the first problem he considered.
“When people were coming to my house, they were getting to know me.” He thought. “Decorations, family photos, objects of interest all adorn my house. It’s part of the process of how people get to know me. When we met in a home, it was appealing because it was personal, it was interesting, and it exuded the warmth of life.”
He let his eyes travel around the room where he stood. It was cold to him. It was clean and orderly and boring. Seventy-five black, stackable chairs, which had been donated by the Holiday Inn, were all lined up in neat rows toward the back of the room. Everything in the room was black and white. The only exception was the rattan floor, and thatch, which the former pastor had used to cover the mirrors on the walls to help with acoustics.

As he looked at the thatch, he squinted his eyes and panned across the room.
“Makes me think of Gilligan’s Island,” he said out loud. “Which fits, since we’re a bunch of castaways from church.” He smiled at his own remark, but slowly, what he had just said began to dawn on him. His eyes widened, and he looked around the room once again. As he looked, his mind imagined a whole spectrum of ways in which the room could be decorated, to indicate the personality of the group who met here. Images from his childhood of clubhouses, the Mickey Mouse Club, the Honeycomb Hideout, and the Little Rascal’s meeting room filled his mind.

“The church is a club! It’s a hang-out for people who love Jesus!” he said, almost shouting. “Why shouldn’t the place where it meets look like a clubhouse? Why shouldn’t it be a place where you can be yourself, and feel relaxed?” In his mind, he began making contrasts. He compared his emotional reaction to a typical church setting, the way their room looked now but on a small scale, with a restaurant like Applebee’s. Applebee’s décor and style created an atmosphere that drew you into a sense of casual comfort. A typical church setting, including their present room, did the opposite.
He scrounged around the room to find a piece of paper and a pen, and began scratching down his thoughts.
When we come to Jesus, we’re coming home. Where we meet should reflect the comfort of home.
Church=family. We meet like a family…a FAMILY room.
It was then that the Wanderer’s eyes fell on the rows of chairs, all facing the front of the room. He walked around to the front of them to face them.
“When I call my family together to talk with them, I don’t line them up in rows.” He said to one of the empty chairs.
“They flop around on any seat around me, or stretch out on the…” the Wanderer’s face spread into a broad smile. He moved through the place like a madman, pushing chairs around and rearranging the room.
He stood in one empty spot to the side and looked around. “This would be a perfect place for a couch.” He thought. He looked at a splash of dried coffee, which stained the tile floor. “People need a place to rest their coffee cups. We need tables.”

Just before the Wanderer left the room, he ran out to his car and retrieved the surfboard he had been using earlier that morning. He brought it into the room, and leaned it against the front wall. Stepping back, he squinted his eyes again to survey this decoration.
“I think we’ve got something here.” He whispered.