I’m not sure if satan makes furniture, but if he does, I’ve met one of his couches. I found it when I was living in Birmingham. I was fresh out of college, working at a Christian advertising agency and I had roughly $40 to my name. Fortunately that is about what the couch I found in the paper cost.
Back before Craigslist and Ebay, you didn’t get to see 22 photos online for the couch you were going to buy. You read two sentences in the paper and then showed up an an old lady’s house that may or may not have had a full size grocery cart in the kitchen.
I can’t prove this, but I think her perfectly fine house was built around the couch. I just don’t see any other way that it could have been placed in that small room. But there it was, brown and orange, weighing roughly as much as a small car. It kind of looked like a couch that a serial killer would own, I’m not sure what color that is, maybe just “scary.”
After 20 minutes of figuring out the algebra required to angle that beast out of the house, we got it in my friend’s pickup truck and immediately drove it to Goodwill. That thing would have brought a pox on my apartment and I didn’t want it. So I essentially paid her $40 to deliver the couch to a donation center. Based on the emails I get these days, I should have just given it to a church.
I’ve had a lot of funny confessions from people that admit they bring their old junk to the church. If you’ve ever gone to youth group, chances are you’ve sat on someone’s old couch. That poor piece of furniture was probably looking forward to a nice peaceful retirement. Instead, it got to bear the weight of 37 sweaty teens and 98 different True Love Waits messages.
And let’s not forget the food pantry. I know people that will donate old food. Not dangerously old food, like the time Homer on the Simpsons kept eating that sub sandwich even though it was gray, but expired things that are still safe. Got a box of old Cheerios? Maybe a bag of chips you didn’t ever open for a few months? These are some of the items that I know end up at church food pantries.
All of which will make for a weird conversation with God in heaven when you die. “Soooo, it says here you donated old Oreos to VBS. What was that about?” God will say. “Ohh, yeah, the oreo incident. I was kind of hoping that wouldn’t come up.”
