Big Green Jesus?

It has come to my attention that some of my readers enjoy when I write stories about either the crazy things that happen to me, or the idiotic things I occasionally say and do.  So, since there seem to be so many of these situations, I decided to start a weekly series of Friday Funnies.  Please Lord, let me run out of material quickly.  Amen.

 

Let me begin this story by explaining that, despite living in the Bible Belt, I wasn’t brought up in the church.  I attended from time to time with this friend or that, but I usually just followed what they did without really understanding what was going on.  I’ve since been saved by grace, but I’ll admit that the early days of regular church attendance were sometimes confusing to me.

Once, just before Eric and I got married, we went down to his family’s farm in LA (that’s Lower Alabama, of course!) for a weekend to celebrate the 75th wedding anniversary of his great-grandparents.  It was a lovely weekend complete with a trip to church on Sunday morning.

Now, I’m from Georgia.  I have a southern accent.  I’m used to southern accents, down here it’s just the normal way we talk.  The accents in LA, however aren’t just southern.  They’re southern.  So imagine my confusion when the preacher said that they were going to sing “Big Green Jesus.”

Huh?  Say what?

With the whole family packed into the pews, we probably quadrupled the usual attendance of this tiny Methodist church, so there weren’t enough hymnals to go around.  No worries.  They all seemed to know the words to Big Green Jesus.  So I dutifully stood there mouthing “watermelon” over and over to look like I knew the song.  Do y’all know that trick?  Anyway, my mind wandered over the unlikelihood of the hymnal containing a song about those brightly colored plastic dashboard Jesus figurines.  I mean, hymnals are filled with ancient songs, right?  Maybe dashboard Jesuses (what’s the plural of Jesus?  Jesi?) date back earlier than I thought?  Maybe early Roman Christians kept a little green pottery Jesus on the dash of their chariots.  It could happen, right?

Once the service was over, and we were heading to a big family lunch, I remarked to Eric that church was nice, but that I was confused about the plastic Jesus song.  Crickets.  Odd look.  “What in the world are you talking about?  Have you been drinking?”  he asked me.  (I think he was joking with that last question, but who knows?)

“You know,” I prodded, “the one about the big green Jesus.”

A moment of confusion passed over his face before he dissolved into maniacal laughter.  Snorting laughter.  Tears streaming down his face at my idiocy laughter.  When he finally stopped laughing, he calmly explained that we had just sung one of his family’s favorite hymns, called “Victory in Jesus.”

I know, I know, it doesn’t sound much alike.  Take a second and say them both out loud.

I felt like a moron, although, I’ll admit that I was kind of relieved that they hadn’t been singing a song about plastic Jesus figurines!  I promptly swore Eric to secrecy.  He agreed and we pulled up to the dinner at Ezell’s Fish Camp in west nowhere Alabama.

“Hey, you’ll never believe what Heather thought we were singing in church this morning!!” were the first words out of his mouth.  Never trust a man who is still trying to hold back snorting laughter.  Of course he told everyone, and they got a good laugh at my expense, but the story doesn’t stop there.

Fast forward a few years to the passing of Eric’s sweet grandmother from the other side of the family.  The dear lady left behind instructions of what songs she wanted to be played at her funeral.  Yep.  You guessed it, her very favorite, Victory in Jesus.  Now I know it isn’t polite to giggle at a funeral, so I’ll spare you the gory details, but let’s just say that it has since become a favorite in our household, and we love to sing it when they play it at church, but I do seem to have a bit of a lingering giggling problem now and then, and Eric refuses to make eye contact with me until it is over.  I can only hope that someday (hopefully WAY in the future) someone thinks to play this at my funeral, and then everyone laughs like a bunch of hyenas!  That will be a life well-played.

All in all, I suppose it could have been worse.  At least they didn’t sing “Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear!”

Now confess.  I know I’m not the only one to mess up song lyrics.  What songs have you misunderstood?