Since July 2020, when Honey was ordered to let me see David, even though the time given was ridiculously limited, I have been driving from my home – our home – in Indiana to West Virginia every other Sunday, and home Saturday.
I like to fellowship with believers Sunday morning – “go to church”. When I started going to Harvest Bible Chapel (now Harvest Church) in Indiana in 2018, there were two services, the first at 9:00 a.m., and it also took me about seven hours to make the drive (my GPS was set to avoid all tolls, even though I had an EZ-Pass for the WV tolls, and it knew it). Even if I went to the first service I would miss seeing David at my allotted time of 4:00 p.m.
So instead I got up or stayed up until midnight Sunday morning and left then, scheduling in sleeping a couple hours at a rest area in Ohio for safety, and went to the 9:30 a.m. Breaking of Bread meeting at Otsego Bible Chapel in Mullens (making four of us, or sometimes five). But that’s rough on a person. I would sleep a few hours in the early afternoon when I could get into my accommodations there, but sometimes that wasn’t until an hour or so after the second service at Otsego, meaning sitting/trying to sleep in my car for that time.
But when Harvest added a third service, the first moved to 8:30 a.m., and fixing my GPS brought the trip closer to six hours (the new road to Mullens also contributed, taking off about five minutes). I had been meeting a friend an hour before the service, too. So now it seemed to work to have coffee with my friend in the foyer, stay in the service for the singing, and duck out when the preacher started, continuing listening to the sermon on my phone in the car (piped through the car speaker via Bluetooth). And that’s exactly what I did today.
I’m not sure I’ll do this every week, but it’s certainly less of a strain, although I was a little tired when David was here, but not so much it slowed me down, and he still got to be “sack of potatoes” all he wanted! I do like the consistency of going to the same church each week.
