Episode 6: Spending The Night At Church

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Text version of the episode:

I spent a lot of my childhood going to church.  My parents were really into it, and at the time (I’ve asked them about this) they thought that they were doing the best thing, keeping us safe, teaching us good values – you know. It happens to a lot of people.

The church that we went to was a little bit over the top.  One of the ways that they were over the top was that on Friday night, after already going to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Monday night bible study, Tuesday night was praise and worship practice, Wednesday night was church, Thursday night was men’s bible study sometimes, and on Friday night we would spend the night at church.  Me and my parents and my little brother and a handful of other families would spend the night and pray until the sun came up, at church.  And now that I’m an adult and I look back, this seems really ridiculous to me. But as a kid, I really looked forward to Friday nights because it was the one time in my life where I didn’t have to go to bed at 8:30.  

All the kids would get together while the parents were praying, and we would build all these elaborate tunnels underneath the church seats and crawl up and down every row like a huge maze.  We would go make ourselves terrible coffee or black tea and chug it all down, and then crawl back and forth under the chairs again and again and again until about 4am we would pass out and our parents would get done praying at sunrise and take us home.  

So, yeah. That church was really over the top.