Somewhere up in heaven, Aunt Ruth is probably hooting. I know she would be if she were still around here.
Aunt Ruth (who was neither my aunt, nor was she named “Ruth”) used to love to catch preachers with their foot in their mouth; it was something of a hobby to her. Nothing could penetrate her sometimes-sharp exterior and produce uncontrollable laughter like hearing that a prim and proper “man of God” had just said something stupid. And she was cruel with it! One little snafu from you-know-who, and I’d hear about it for weeks. And between guffaws, as she would gasp for air, she’d always sound the same warning. If I spelled it the way she said it, it would read like this:
“You gotta watch them woids!”
Rather than get offended, I played along. We often entertained each other with stories we’d heard of other preachers. Like the time a preacher friend of mine said three times in a sermon, “I’m praying that God would make our church a cesspool of His love! A cesspool of His grace! A cesspool of his power!”
He was thinking artesian well. But that’s not what his folks were smelling at the moment.
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