Okay, so that was weird…

Far too often, I find myself not really knowing what’s going on around me.

For instance, today, I was sitting in church and beginning to wonder where the pastor was. I mean, he wasn’t scheduled to preach or anything, but it was still a little weird for him to just not be there at all. I had seen him before the service, but then he just disappeared. After church, he walked in again, obviously having come from outside. I had stepped out of the meeting room for a minute; and, when I walked in again, he was making some kind of announcement to those who were still there. It was something about a “bus,” and a “bus stop,” and a “picture.” I didn’t gather much beyond that.

I was helping put some of the sound equipment away, when the praise team leader asked me, “Are you going?” I said, “Going where? I don’t know anything about it.” She just smiled and walked away. ??????

We were packing up to go home, and a guy named Bek was holding Joel. Tiff finished getting Elijah bundled and we headed downstairs. Tiff said, “Where’s Bek?” I glance at our small group room, but the lights are off.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s still upstairs.” Back upstairs. Checked the church office. Checked the meeting room. No Bek, no Joel. Back downstairs.

“Don’t know. I can’t find him.”

Tiff starts to enter panic mode. Pastor is in the church microbus now. I holler at him, “Where’s Bek? Do you know? He’s got Joel.”

“He’s probably already in the bus.”

????????

“It’s parked around the corner.”

We rush to the corner. The bus doors open as we approach, and we see Joel on Bek’s lap. The bus is full of people from our church and from one of the church plants. Someone brings Joel to us, but there seems to be an expectation for us to board the bus. Gunbaa says, “If you have work, you don’t have to come.”

“I don’t have work, but what are we doing?”

“We’re going to take a picture.”

Tiff looks at me questioningly. “I didn’t bring a hat, and the boys are tired.”

“Maybe we should go.”

We board the bus and it zooms away. There’s lots of ice on the windows but we can sort of make out where we’re going, but it’s nowhere we’ve been before. We stop some place and wait for a while. People start getting on board with mono-pods, camera equipment, etc. At this point, I’m still thinking we’re heading somewhere to get a church photo taken, and I’m wondering how we afforded to charter a bus.

We pull down the street and turn around. Tiffany is sitting on the other side of the bus, a few seats away, so she texts me, “Are we extras?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I text back.

Slowly, it begins to dawn on me. We’re being filmed for a movie. The conductor isn’t a real conductor; she’s an actress. They act out a scene several times of her throwing a guy off the bus. The camera zooms in for a close-up of Joel for a while. Most of the church people get off the bus and board it several times.

I don’t know anything about the movie, or about whether we’ll make the final cut, but it was an adventure.