Sunday
When I woke up on Sunday, I was already feeling a bit better after having a good night’s sleep. I got up and got dressed for church. The only problem was that I didn’t know where I was going to find one. Lacking the Internet, I opened the phonebook that greeted me on the doorstep when I got here, and saw what I thought were the only 5 Southern Baptist churches in Gainesville (It turns out that for some odd reason Southern Baptist and Southern Baptist Convention are listed differently). Only two had numbered streets and, lacking a map, I figured they were my best bet. They were both NW and I’m in the SW quadrant, so I got in my car and headed north. I never found either one, but while I was getting lost, I came upon Westside Baptist Church. It looked like a nice place, and it seemed big enough for me to be comfortable (Small churches make me kind of nervous) so I pulled in the parking lot. I even noticed the girl who parked next to me getting out wearing jeans so I knew that this church was at least a bit contemporary. I walked down the sidewalk and passed an older gentleman, who turned out to be a staff member, and asked him if he knew where grad students should go.
It turns out that I came just in time for the 10 minute mingling time of college and grad students prior to Sunday school. I met the grad class teacher and his wife (a very sweet couple) as well as the other grad students. They were all very welcoming. They were also all medical people. The teacher was a dentist, one student was going into dentistry (just had her white coat ceremony), one student was going into audiology (is about to have her white coat ceremony in DisneyWorld), and one student is either going into anesthesiology or dermatology. No Mom and Dad, I’m still not going into any medical field—I just thought it was an interesting coincidence. We had a good class time, and it reminded me a lot of family group with Furman BCM.
After class, we all sat together in service. The church’s pastor of 27 years had just come back from a month-long vacation, and he gave a good sermon. The music was also good—a mix of traditional hymns and contemporary praise songs—more like SMSBC than Newspring, but I’m okay with both styles. Overall, I felt very at home at this church. Unfortunately, they don’t really do any drama, and that’s somewhat of a problem for me. I’ll probably still look at some other places to be sure, but maybe not until I have good access to the Internet. It’s at least nice to know that there is a church in town where I can feel somewhat at home.