Snow Wimps

It’s snowing in Atlanta today. It snowed on Wednesday night–well, I take that back. It started snowing around 5 pm-ish as I was on my way to my 6 pm Producing & Directing class. It snowed for about an hour and then it all turned to rain, but they still decided to shut the school down an hour into my class. So there I was lecturing about designing a scene and they came in and told us that the school was closing. As I was driving home in the RAIN I though "what a waste." I just lost 3 valuable hours of class time because the city of Atlanta doesn’t know how to act with a little bit of snow.

See I’m from Jersey. We’ve had snow storms where we couldn’t even open the front door of our house. It takes a lot of snow for them to close schools in New Jersey. And sometimes they plow the roads and sometimes they don’t. We were just expected to be tough and drive through it anyway. Just keep fishtailing until you get your car back under control. So it tickled me when I first moved to Georgia 3 years ago and the whole city shut down over a couple of inches.

My church has already decided to close tomorrow. Even though I think this town is full of wimps when it comes to snow, I’m going to contradict myself right now and say that I actually admire Buckhead Church for closing down. I’ll tell you why. As I just mentioned, I’m used to being in snow storms where there would be like several FEET of snow, not inches. And even when things did get bad enough for businesses to close down, I’m used to going to churches that would NEVER close even when the majority of its members couldn’t even get out of their driveway. The mentality was that if you really love Jesus you’ll press your way out and come to church. And I remember pressing my way out, feeling like I was a Christian superstar because I made the ultimate sacrifice and drove through the snow to get to church. And then I would get there and see families out with their children, struggling to walk through the cold, the snow and the ice. And I remember thinking that it almost seemed kind of unreasonable that someone in leadership made a decision that a person’s relationship with God would be affected by whether or not they decide to put them and their families’ lives at risk by driving long distances in unsafe conditions. I mean I guess you could go to the extreme and talk about all the martyrs who died for the faith. So would that mean if a family were to lose their life while trying to press their way through a snowstorm for a Sunday morning service that they’d be classified as saints? What about looking after your brothers and sisters and trying to protect them from harm? After all, church is not about a building anyway, right?

Anywho, thanks Buckhead Church for thinking of the families and even the staff and volunteers who would have to drive through black ice at 5:30 am on a Sunday morning. Good looking out. I’m sure we’ll all still love Jesus on Monday.

But on the other hand, the snow seems to be slacking up so I don’t think it’ll be as bad as we thought. Cancelling service tomorrow will probably end up being a waste, just like it was cancelling class on Wednesday. But who knows what will happen tomorrow at 5 am when all of this is frozen over. So I’ll just shut up now…