If you’ve ever lived near a country church parking lot, then you know there’s a lot of odd stuff that goes on there. And I don’t mean the church-related traffic.
For two different seasons while stateside, we lived in parsonages next to churches in rural Kentucky. And thus it was that I began to learn about the many and varied ways in which a community makes use of that wide-open asphalt space.
Strangers meet up at these parking lots to exchange items purchased on Facebook Marketplace. Some take their kids there to practice driving. Others pull over to change tires or to look under their hood when their car starts smoking or making suspicious noises, even leaving vehicles overnight if need be. Police cars will pull in to camp out for a while and keep an eye on the road. I don’t know if Pokémon Go is still a thing or not, but that was one reason during a certain season for many of the suspicious-looking cars that would randomly pull in for a few minutes, hover, then suddenly take off.
Mosques in our area of Central Asia have 24-7 bathroom facilities available to the public. Anyone, Muslim or not, can pull over and make use of this infrastructure if needed. In a similar way, rural church parking lots function as a kind of community resource, a private piece of property that is available for anyone to use for certain reasonable needs. I don’t know that anyone ever consciously agreed to this arrangement, but it has developed nonetheless.
However, others seem to make use of these parking lots in ways that, if the church knew about it, would clearly violate this unwritten contract. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some drug deals going down next to the old Baptist church late at night. Another time, I was startled to stumble on a random wandering man just sitting in the darkness behind the church when I was taking out the trash. Then there are the vehicles that would pull in after dark and just sit, lights on, pointed at the parsonage, for hours on end – almost as if they were watching us. Sometimes I would go out and straighten up some stuff outside in case the sight of a person keeping an eye on the place would make them conscious of their creepiness and cause them to drive off.
But none of these activities caused my heart to leap into my throat like what happened one Sunday at 2 am.
After a late night of treating diabetic lows, my wife and I were finally asleep when we were shocked awake by a horrific screeching sound. We bolted upright in bed and noticed that strange lights were flashing through the blinds and into the room. Disoriented and bleary-eyed, I peered out through the blinds. But all I could see was that the air was choked with a strange, flowing smoke or mist, oddly lit up in a way that didn’t make any sense for 2 am. The loud screeching and roaring wasn’t stopping.
Was our city under attack? Had the neighboring regimes finally had enough and decided to invade? Wait, no, we weren’t in Central Asia. We were in rural Kentucky. What then? Had some demon-UFO come to harass us like something straight out of the Haunted Cosmos podcast?
Then, all at once, I realized what was happening. The church secretary had foretold that such a time would come. And she had solemnly deputized me, for such a time as this, to be the guardian of the church parking lot.
I girded up my loins, threw on a gray bathrobe, grabbed a bright flashlight, and rushed out to the porch. In my bare feet, I ran into the smoke to confront the foes with all the bleary-eyed middle-aged righteous indignation I could muster.
The teenagers had come. Yes, they had come to do donuts and spin-outs with their little souped-up sports cars.
Now, there’s nothing in particular that I would normally have against teenagers doing donuts and spin-outs in an empty lot. After all, I used to enjoy doing them with my ATV back in high school in Melanesia. But Miss Peggy, the secretary, had told me they had just paid an arm and a leg to redo the parking lot surface and that this kind of activity would seriously damage it again.
Plus, it was 2 am. And they had nearly given my family a heart attack.
Through the clouds of smoke and screeches caused by spinning rubber, I staggered, shining my light in as menacing a manner as I could and yelling something terrifying like, “HEY… YOU KIDS!” My hair was wild, and my eyes were wide. All that was missing were some slippers on my feet and a shotgun in my hand to channel the timeless image of the old grumpy man out to ‘teach them kids a lesson.’
I must have spooked them nonetheless. Perhaps the lights cast a giant shadow of my figure onto the grey clouds of rubber smoke. Or, perhaps it was just the unexpected sight of a jumped-up, hollering dad in a bathrobe at 2 am that did it. But the faces my flashlight caught looked spooked and pale, and the three cars quickly sped off into the darkness. Leaving me standing there barefoot in the growing quiet and stinky haze, unkempt yet victorious, wishing I’d had the wits to holler something more intimidating like “ALLAHU AKBAAAAR!!!“
Oh well, next time.
Not surprisingly, we were late to church the next morning. I scowled as we crossed the parking lot and saw all the black marks the kids had made during their nighttime antics.
However, I was glad to inform Miss Peggy that I had indeed scared the intruders off. And that I’d be glad to do so again should the need arise. And that, yes, we would love some more coffee to help us stay awake during Sunday school.
The teenagers tried to come back to do donuts and spin-outs a few times after that, but I recognized their cars and was on to them at that point. I even got to talk with one of them during one of these follow-up attempts, to tell him that I had his license plate number and would have to do something with that information if they came back to do donuts again.
To his credit, he responded with a very respectful “Yessir… we won’t do it again, sir.”
I realized that in that season I had become the guardian of the church parking lot. A modest, yet worthy role. After all, rural church parking lots are weird places. Somebody’s got to keep an eye on them.
And having compared notes with others over the years, I know that I am not the only one to notice the strange things that happen in these locales. If you’ve seen some weird stuff in church parking lots yourself, be sure to let us know in the comments.
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Photo from Wikimedia Commons
