Earthen red dust swirled around Anna Mae’s white, patent leather Mary Janes as she skipped down the old dirt road.  The well-worn path looked as though the rains had stayed away for a month of Sundays.  Every step Anna Mae took created a whirlwind of dust- the red powder continually darkening her tiny, bright, white shoes.  Anna Mae’s every step was carefully placed to fall into the footsteps of her grandmother, Katie, as she held her hand and skipped just a little ways behind her, singing to herself as children do in moments of quiet when boredom makes way for imagination. 

            “One and two and three and four…how many steps till we get to the church door,” Anna Mae whispered again and again.   Just how many steps were between her aunt’s house up on the ridge and the church they were going to was anyone’s guess, since the size of the stride certainly changes the number of steps a body has to take to get from here to there.  Katie wasn’t exactly sure how much further the distance either, seeing as how she had yet to make the journey to the particular house of worship herself.  Katie reckoned that the little church was about three or four miles from home.  As best she could tell the congregation of the present was now calling home the tiny stone church that had once, and not so long ago been home to the hard-shell Baptist ministry. 

            Katie understood why the Baptist ministry hadn’t faired so well, with the pastor eventually giving up the post to seek a faithful congregation elsewhere.  Those hard shell Baptists, or so the folks liked to say, only held services on Christmas and Easter Sunday, because the sermons were so long that by the time the faithful returned home from the Christmas services the time had come to start preparing Easter baskets and bonnets.  Funeral services were three hours for the beginning hymnal devotion alone, and when the time arrived for baptisms the services were twice as long as funeral meetings, because there’s always more to say about being born or born again than about dying.

            The ministry there in the stone church had begun with the best of intentions, but things just didn’t work out betwixt the ministry and the rest of the community, as the length of the sermons resulted in, through a case of necessity as opposed to the distinct desire to do so, some very unsociable Baptists.  By the time the sermons were over on the day of rest, the time had already come for most of the congregation to resume their works.  The Baptists all but disappeared from the Sunday dinners of their friends and neighbors, and the rest of the community soon realized that while the faithful professing their faith was a wondrous thing to behold, those marathon sermons of the preacher were resulting in a lack of socialization between the Baptists and the community at large. Everyone knew that the best way to avoid making religious differences an issue betwixt friends was to simply put them aside over a fine fried chicken on a Sunday afternoon.  The Lord’s Prayer and Grace united the Baptists and the Methodists like nothing else in the wide world possibly could.  Moreover, if there were cherry or apple pie for afterwards, there was double the prayer and grace with laughter and smiles thrown in for good measure.