Smokies v.s. Steeples

Last week Marsh & I were in Tennessee.  He was going for a conference... I tagged along.  We went a couple of days early, and drove out to the Smokies.  Gorgeous mountains!  Beautiful nature!  It was a wonderful two day drive.

Then we headed into Nashville.  It's quite a nice little city.  Even though I'm not a country music fan, there was still plenty to do.

One thing we saw in Nashville is still bugging me, however.  As we were driving along in the city we came to this church that was SO bizarre looking.  The building was squat and sprawled over a large lot.  But the steeple was enormously tall and skinny.  It looked like a rocket that had been paused mid-blast.  The whole effect made the church look ugly and wrongly put together.  I said out loud to Marsh:  "WHY would a church ever put that tall skinny steeple on top of a flat sprawled out building?"
No sooner were the words out of my mouth, than I think I had my answer.  I looked down the street and saw church after church after church.  We were evidently on church row.  It seemed clear to me now why this church had this bizarre looking steeple... it was taller than all the other steeples on the street.  And the result of competing with the other churches on the street (almost all of them were even in the baptist family, for heaven sake) was ridiculous and ugly.

I'm really, really, really glad that God wasn't competing with anyone when He created the Great Smokies...