funny how God works

I got an email from our pastor at Kittiwake Baptist a few days ago, and I started thinking about how we ended up at that church not long after we moved into our apartment in Pass Christian. We spent most of the first week adding me to all of the paperwork and moving in (not a hard feat as the apartment was 750 square feet at most and we had enough to fill about half of it). Since we were in a new town, we planned on getting a list of area churches that looked promising and visiting them until we found one to call home. We were hoping to find a good one within the first few months.

Well, we decided to go for a walk down our street one afternoon, to get used to the neighborhood. About 10 minutes into our walk, we came across a tiny Southern Baptist church, and I remarked that it would be pretty funny if that was the first church we visited. Dan's from a Full Gospel church (on the charismatic side of evangelical) and I grew up Wesleyan (on the staid side of protestantism), so although we decided to visit there that coming Sunday, I for one doubted that we would end up there.

The service was supposed to start at 10:30 that Sunday. We got there about ten minutes early, and were slightly surprised to find that apart from a man fiddling with the sound equipment, we were the only ones there. So much for blending in. That man turned out to be Pastor Donald Ray Silkwood. The rest of the congregation (about a third of whom was related to Pastor Don) filed in sometime after 10:30. We sang along with the pastor's wife and a few praise cd's, and were treated to a great sermon. Turns out the pastor has his Masters of Divinity. What surprised me even more was that although this congregation was S. Baptist in name, they were "spirit filled" in practice (yay!). In true southern fashion, we started late and ended later, and then were invited to stay for a potluck lunch.

No more than two weeks later, Dan was playing his guitar at the front of the church and I was running the overhead machine. After Erin and Johnny came down and helped us lead worship one Sunday, a mike was put in front of dan's face and he was reprimanded by the pastor's wife, Mary, for not admitting he had a good voice sooner. I stayed with Pastor Don's parents when hurricane Ivan blew through (another great story), and pretty soon we had a better attendance record that some of the members themselves.
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iro·ny: Latin ironia, from Greek eirOnia, from eirOn dissembler
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity (Merriam-Webster Online)