Karma

There’s a rather large church not far from my house, on the way to my boyfriend’s. It also happens to be right across from where I spent a horrid year of sixth grade, but that’s not important. The only reason this church is memorable to begin with is because it has one of those large billboards, the kind that other businesses in the area use to post things like "DO YOUR DOORS NEED FIXED? WE HAVE FAST SERVICE" in big, blocky, black plastic letters. Their board has sayings. I think they are supposed to be advice, but sometimes I wonder. Through these, I would suppose, their aim is to advertise themselves to the prospective congregation driving by. So imagine you’re cruising along, and you see something like this: "BE KIND TO YOUR ENEMIES. IT MESSES WITH THEIR HEADS." Kind of ha-ha, right? I liked that one, personally. It’s true, and it’s kinda funny. Good bunch, good sense of humor. So now, imagine you drive past them again the next week and you see this: "CHANGE IS INCONVENIENT, EVEN FOR THE BETTER." ..What? It is? Maybe some people believe this, I don’t know. But it caught me off guard. It wasn’t witty, really, and it didn’t seem like a joke. Was it? It seemed, in fact, outright depressing. What are they trying to tell us? Sometimes change sure does suck. But when it’s for the better, how is that inconvenient? So the change from being "lost" to "seeing the light of God" becomes, by their statement, also inconvenient. And it seems to me that’s more undermining to them than anything else. It occured to me that perhaps they were trying to use reverse psychology to get us to think… in which case, well, it seems to have worked. So now that you know some of the history behind this place (there have been dozens of others, and if I remember other old ones I’ll mention them), let me get on to what I saw yesterday as I cruised down the road and glanced, out of habit, at their sign. It read: "EVEN A DULL PENCIL IS SHARPER THAN THE BRIGHTEST MIND." What is the first thing you think of when you see that? It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, because a pencil is still technically sharper than you. You could be a genius, and it won’t stop anyone stabbing you in the face with a pencil. Lovely. It’s kind of insulting. But in a way that doesn’t even make sense, because who cares if a pencil is physically sharper than you? It doesn’t mean you’re any dumber. It seems to say, in fact, that no matter how smart you are, the brute force of something is still able to penetrate the physical form around that knowledge. Matter over mind? It has been my experience that this is the sore opposite of what most bastions of spirituality will tell you if you seem to be losing your faith. Is this at all in character coming from a church leaderboard? Is this reverse psychology again? Are they making some kind of tongue-in-cheek statement about the new security laws regarding airplane carry-on, and do they mean it as a joke or do they actually think pencils and other stabbity office supplies should generally banned? The only bit of advice I can surely draw from the thing is this: Don’t be a smart-ass, or someone’ll stab you in the brain with a pencil. Possibly God.