once in how many thousand tries can you walk through a wall?

I hate the cafeteria. I surprise myself by the vehemence of this thought, jumping out at me as I walk through Lottie and spot an empty table by the windows. Somehow, without all of you waiting at a table on the far left end, the affectionately nicknamed "Lottie" diminishes into just another institutional cafeteria.

It's even weirder now that the cafeteria is full of Messianic Jews. Now, I figure, probably anybody that chills with Jesus is a relative of mine. That includes this entire conference. So, in theory, I should totally like all of them. But I don't. There are too many of them, and I'm surprised at how many similarities there are between a Messianic Jewish conference and a Bible-thumping evangelical conference (which, come to think of it, I'm not too fond of either).

For instance, the totally insincere man at the coffee pot this morning, who asked me how I was. Nice, sort of, except that then he didn't even wait for me to reply before he went off into how blessed he was on this particularly fine morning.

I'm not a morning person in any case. So perhaps it's unfair of me to judge an entire conference on that one early-morning experience.

Take, instead, the people at the end of my table at lunch. Yes, my nice empty table by the window soon developed other inhabitants (like a kind of disease). The group was comprised of two women, a man, and a ten-year-old boy. The woman to my immediate right was wearing a skullcap, which confused me. It confused me further when Woman-With-Skullcap began chatting excitedly about how tomorrow is 7-7-07 and we'd better be ready for what's coming, we better be in waiting, we better prepare ourselves.

Oh brother.

As I watched and listened longer, another woman approached the table. Immediately the original four set up a clamor. This woman with badly-dyed red hair was from Israel!

Predictably enough, Woman-Wearing-A-Skullcap expressed the most excitement. So much so, in fact, that she grabbed Badly-Dyed-Red-Hair by the shoulder, looked deep into her eyes and said in a voice half an octave below her normal one and throbbing with emotion, "Do you think we have a Connection?"

I'm reminded of a certain woman from Alabama who raised her hands in worship during the singing of the national anthem.

It makes me squirm when Christianity of any kind is tied up in any kind of nationalist sentiment, I'll admit. I feel like maybe Jews have an excuse, seeing as they're God's chosen people and all (and this was, originally at least, a nationalistic proposition), but seriously. I still think God is a smidge bigger than any country, and that just because someone is from a particular country doesn't give them awesome spiritual powers or privilege in the kingdom of God.

Maybe that's just me spitting up democratic claptrap imbibed from too many years in America.

But it does, in fact, seem like the minute religion gets tied up with government, bad things start to happen. This could, in fact, be why I didn't give a sigh of appreciation along with everyone else in my Sunday school class when I learned that some town in Alabama had passed a town-wide government-level edict that the town humble itself before God and pray for rain. And then it rained.

Because seriously, too many people are sticking their noses into my business already. Do I need the government sticking its nose into my religion? No. So I don't stick my nose into its religion, or preferably lack thereof.

Then again, I'm also at the stage where I kind of doubt God answers prayers about the weather.

Where did I start? I hate the cafeteria. And I kind of hate mystical claptrap. When the cafeteria includes mystical claptrap, well, we definitely got trouble.