A couple of Highland stories

The news from the Highland Church (I was there the day they took the "of Christ" portion of the sign off the building) is that they are undergoing a major renovation of the auditorium, a facility that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly 60 years.

While the building is being gutted, the congregation is moving to the Civic Center downtown for Sunday services. Shades of AMC.

Here's a link to a nice time-lapse photo of the chairs being removed this past Sunday that Rob sent me. If you have any history with the building, you might want to check it out.

 http://vimeo.com/93148364

It's interesting that Rob sent the link; he does have a history, from the Sunday after he was born until we moved to Austin in 1970 (and other times when he was living in Abilene as a student).

Story one: I'm off behind the scenes somewhere, recording the sermons (we ran a tape duplicating service for Highland at the time). Barb, pregnant out to here with Julie, is alone, herding two-year old Rob during services, and for some reason (she swears she does not know what possessed her to do so) she was sitting in a section waaay down front. 

She's sitting on one aisle in an otherwise empty row (wisely people are avoiding this area) and after only a mere moment's distraction, she looks up to see Rob at the far end of the row, one foot into the aisle, looking at her with what any mother would recognize as the "Let's play a game. You make a move toward me and I'll run down the aisle screaming while you chase me" expression on his face. Every mother has seen this look.

Lesser women would have failed this challenge, but Barb calmly reached into the church bag and took out a toy and placed it in the seat next to her. And waited. Rob, ever one to be easily distracted, came trotting back down the row, and into his mother's loving, iron-clad embrace.

Story two: The opera-style chairs at highland folded up if there was no one sitting in them. I daresay every child that has ever attended that church has been partially swallowed when his or her chair folded up at some point during a wiggly sermon. In fact, the term at Highland for that event is "the whale swallowing Jonah." 

Yes, it happened to our children, even though we, like most parents, jammed a songbook between the cushion and the armrest. After so many songbooks were destroyed in this manner, they begged folks not to use them in that fashion, so Barb covered a short, songbook-sized piece of wood with fabric and stuck it in the church bag. Problem solved. Usually.

When word got out on Facebook that the chairs were coming out, people began saying, "Hey, can we buy a chair? That church was significant in my journey, and it would be great to have a chair." Evidently, one can buy chairs, so my recommendation to Rob is that he ought to get one. It would go nicely with the pew he already has. He could claim (and probably rightly) that it was one of the ones he got stuck in.