From Doug

There's this feel to a Sunday morning I can't describe. It's the smell of church basements, old coffee, the best perfume and cologne, shoe-shine, hairspray, all of that and more. It's the sound of high heels on the wood floor, a mother scolding her flock towards the door of the house, a father getting the car warmed up. All around, things and people are waking up early, with some sort of extra spring in their step. The air is usually calmer on a Sunday morning. I can count on my hands the days I remember throughout my life where in rained on a the first day of the week, and most of them were the ones we were driving on vacation, like God was punishing us for skipping church to have a little fun. I never skip church anymore, it's almost like I can't, it just wouldn't be right.

My house is quiet, but it still echoes with the sounds of my childhood. Usually, breakfast is cereal, but I still smell pancakes sometimes when I zone out halfway through my morning Scripture reading. Coffee is always fresh here, I wash my dishes when I'm done. I have to make myself late sometimes, just so that it seems I have other things to do, like I am as busy as everyone else. But going is always worth it. God still speaks to me sometimes at church, but Connie is what makes putting my feet on that cold floor worth it. Connie inspires me to worship.

There's not a Sunday since I've been at that church that she wasn't sitting on the front pew, listening to every word, taking it in. Her long hair and long legs both tied up like presents. Never slouching, never slumping, Connie sits with her Bible in her lap, worrying the letters engraved on the front the way your tongue keeps finding the sore in your mouth. Once, they read "Jennie Brown," now it says "...ie Br...n." Everyone who knows Connie thinks it used to spell her name. Jennie was her mother.

When the time comes for communion, she places the wafer on her tongue like a prayer, like it is coming home, like it tastes like honey instead of cardboard. Her thin eyelids cover up her brown eyes as she loses herself in communing. I'm lost too, somewhere around the ridge of her lips; somewhere around her cheeks.

Connie is no great beauty, don't get me wrong. I've heard the woman in the church joke behind her back that she is a descendant of the donkey Jesus rode on. True, her front teeth are rather prominent and her limbs a bit too long and thin, those bangs are arrow straight, and the long rope of hair tied in a knot in the middle do nothing for her looks. But what draws me to Connie is her devotion. She loves Jesus like I used to.