Seemingly to follow up on yesterday’s religious theme, I got my first pair of Mormon missionaries for the first time in nearly a year. For a while I was getting evangelists all the time one time I had a three denominations in one week. It was probably because a lot of them assumed that since they kept catching me during working hours I had free time to listen to them as opposed to say… working in my home office. It was like I had a some sort of spiritual hobo mark on my door. There were a few who were so regular that they became an incentive to treat my weekends as weekends and go out to get some exercise on Saturdays. Sometimes I could recognize them out the window and not bother answer the door. (Is it racist to assume a black man in a cheap suit at your door is a Jehovah’s Witness?)
Anyway thankfully they went down to a slow trickle when I put a no solicitors sign on my door. But there were still a fair share who would still come and rationalize at me how evangelism is not soliciting. But for the most part they got the message and I’ve been mostly free from unsolicited words of god.
So when a pair of earnest and scrubbed elders (I always wonder about the elder schtick. My immediate reaction whenever some 18 year old introduces them as such my immediate response is “Yeah. Sure you are.” I’ve heard a few that has something to do with out of the mouths of babes or something like that but for the most part it sounds so stupid I can’t help wondering if it’s just part of the hazing ritual that is these poor kids two year ministry.) They took me so much by surprise that I completely forgot to point out the “No solicitors” sign.
I’ll give them credit they were a little better than the last batch I had… (THAT kid was a dogmatic tool.) They offered me a song and a prayer. I politely begged off the song , but got the prayer anyway…. It shows at least one of the downsides of being a Quaker. The possibility that they might pray out loud didn’t even occur to me until it was too late.
Afterwords came the usual spiel. God is good, God finally brought us his true church (it was amusing to get them to clarify that they did in deed mean the Church of Latter Day Saints when they said that) and God looks out for you and God answers all of their prayers (The kid didn’t look amused when I pointed out that is not what the Book of Job says) I finally managed to politely end the conversation. They tried to give me a copy of the book of Mormon but I told them I already had one (well… I have a religious shelf in my library) When they asked me what I thought of it I told them I liked Robert E. Howard better.
