Uncle Meech and the Ministry of Adequate Snacks

Brother Zeke often said that God had a funny habit of putting churches exactly where people who already had churches thought churches shouldn't be. 

Ours maybe used to meet under a pool table at Buffalo William's Wings & Things, moved to Zeke’s former coworker's living room until the fire marshal developed concerns that could best be summarized as "all of them," and eventually rented a storefront between Cloudz N' Puffz Vape & Hookah Emporium and the Velvet Peach Gentlemen's Club. This turned out to be surprisingly practical. Both establishments had a steady stream of people who needed Jesus (the way all people need Jesus) and were mostly as yet underserved in that regard. Particularly, the strip club employees had children in need.

Brother Zeke noticed the children waiting for their moms to finish their shifts first. Specifically, he noticed one sitting on the curb eating crackers that had achieved a level of staleness typically associated with fossils, one who had obviously been there until two in the morning on several consecutive nights, one with a fever that was alarming even by the generous standards of the neighborhood, and one who had, at some point in the recent past while hanging out unsupervised before the club opened for the night, licked a brass pole and was now experiencing consequences consistent with that decision. You see, all those times you thought people were mispronouncing “strep throat”, they may have been describing something else.

"Strip throat."

"Is that a thing?"

"It is now."

The ministry meeting three days later went approximately as well as ministry meetings go, which is to say it lasted forty-five minutes and covered roughly nine topics, six of which were not on the agenda.

Associate Pastor Peaches wanted to make flyers. Sister Velma wanted commercial-grade disinfectant, a hazmat budget, and possibly a decontamination tent. Deacon Fitz wanted to be really sure about what the church’s insurance would cover. Someone suggested a new committee. Brother Earl immediately suggested a committee to determine whether the committee needed a committee. Velma pinched the bridge of her nose so hard everyone worried she might accidentally remove it. The meeting continued deteriorating. Someone asked about the curriculum. Someone else wanted background checks. Someone suggested laminated name tags. Someone asked whether laminate was in the budget. Brother Earl asked whether they could laminate the budget.

Nobody knew what that meant.

By now there were four separate conversations happening. Brother Zeke waited until the meeting achieved what he privately called "peak chaos," which he defined as the moment when two separate people were talking about two separate things and both believed they were winning, and then he said, "We're overthinking this."

Everyone stopped.

"They need somebody to watch the kids. Can we do that?"

Silence.

“Google Maps still isn't entirely convinced we're a church. Half the time it lists us under ‘religious organization’, but the other half it suggests us when people search for ‘miscellaneous.’”

"We have adults," he continued. "We have snacks. We have insurance."

"Barely," said Velma.

"Barely is a coverage level," said Zeke. "I checked."

Nobody had a procedural objection to this, which in a church meeting is the closest thing to unanimous consent you're going to get, so the childcare ministry of That Church By The Vape Shop was officially founded on a Tuesday afternoon, subject to review pending clarification on the decontamination tent question, which was tabled until further notice.

The sign went up Monday morning.

FREE CHILDCARE.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED.

Someone had written underneath it in Sharpie:

YES, WE MEAN FREE.

Someone else had added:

NO, SERIOUSLY.

Velma added another sign.

PLEASE DO NOT LICK THE WINDOWS.

She believed in proactive leadership.

Nobody asked Big Meech.

He just showed up.

This was, in retrospect, entirely consistent with Big Meech's new general John-13-in-action approach to life, which was to identify a situation that needed handling and then handle it without generating any paperwork about it. He was a vape shop employee who had come to Christ after overhearing the Vacation Bible School lessons, and the zeal of a new convert is a powerful force. He had been hesitant to volunteer in the childcare ministry; he assumed people wouldn’t trust or like him, the way that they hadn’t his whole life. He didn’t have work experience in the field. Before the vape shop, he had spent a few years working maintenance while trying to get his life together, but he didn’t really talk about that time. However, after talking about it with Sister Velma, he had discovered a knack for working with the kids at the following year’s VBS. 

He arrived for his first shift with the childcare ministry carrying two tote bags that appeared to have been packed by someone expecting a medium-length natural disaster, which upon inspection contained juice boxes, fruit snacks, peanut butter crackers, a first aid kit, coloring books, wet wipes, four boxes of animal crackers, extra hoodies in assorted child sizes, a Ziploc bag of tiny dinosaurs, a bottle of bubbles, and what appeared to be an entire box of granola bars.

Pastor Peaches stared at the bags for a moment.

"Brother."

Big Meech considered his response with the gravity it apparently deserved.

"Kids get hungry," he said.

This explanation seemed, to Big Meech, to fully account for the granola bars, the juice boxes, the fruit snacks, the crackers, and the four additional granola bars that Pastor Peaches had somehow missed on his first count. Pastor Peaches had additional questions, but before he could ask them, a small girl materialized at Big Meech's elbow and looked up at him with the absolute confidence of someone who has correctly identified the right person to talk to.

"You got animal crackers?"

Big Meech reached into a pocket that should not, by any reasonable assessment of the jacket's exterior dimensions, have been large enough to contain anything. He produced animal crackers.

"Yep."

Sister Velma, who had been watching this exchange, said, "How many pockets you got?"

Big Meech thought about it.

"Enough," he said.

Brother Zeke watched the little girl happily skip away with her crackers.

Then he looked at Big Meech.

"You planned for hungry kids."

Big Meech shrugged.

"I remember being one."

Brother Earl leaned toward Brother Zeke.

"I think he may secretly be a marsupial."

Peaches overheard.

"Like a kangaroo?"

"No."

"Then what?"

"I don't know. But how do you explain all them pockets?"

When Desiree dropped her son off, she looked around the room with the practiced efficiency of someone who has been let down by institutions before and has gotten very fast at spotting the warning signs, because there was always a catch. Somebody would eventually explain that God's love was free...but their approval costs extra. Somebody would eventually mention her job. Somebody would eventually ask whether she'd considered making "better choices." Church people always seemed fascinated by choices they'd never had to make. 

She looked at Brother Zeke and said, "So what's the catch?"

"No catch," said Zeke.

"The sermon?"

"Nope."

"The donation speech?"

"No."

"You gonna tell me to quit dancing?"

Brother Zeke looked at her the way a man looks when he's been asked a question that doesn't quite parse.

"Why would we do that?"

She waited. That was clearly not the whole answer.

It turned out to be the whole answer.

This unsettled her considerably, which was, though she didn't know it yet, the beginning of something.

"Most of what you've been yelled at about by ‘religious folk’ wasn't biblical," he said. "It was passed down from somebody's grandmother who'd been yelled at by her granddaddy or something, going all the way back to a bunch of celibate guys who thought Plato was basically Moses."

He closed the Greek New Testament.

"Anyway. You want some coffee?"

By Thursday, Big Meech knew every child's name.

Nobody had introduced him to most of them. Several of them had been introduced to him only in the chaos at dropoff, in the offhand way that adults introduce children to other adults when they are simultaneously signing forms and locating missing shoes. And yet, somehow, he knew them. He knew that Jaylen liked the orange cheesy crackers and would eat the peanut butter ones only under duress. He knew that Amara had a thing about loud noises and needed about thirty seconds of quiet warning before the vacuum cleaner started. He knew that the twins, D'Andre and D'Anthony, had a complex and highly developed system for determining whose turn it was at the coloring books that he had correctly decoded by Wednesday and now administered with the fairness of a senior arbitrator. He remembered that Marcus Junior insisted he was allergic to green vegetables, arithmetic, naps, and bedtime.

Nobody could explain how he knew any of this.

Hospitality and helping are spiritual gifts that don’t get anywhere near the airplay of speaking in tongues. Or, Meech just paid attention. Three preschoolers had attached themselves to Big Meech sometime around Wednesday and now simply followed him everywhere like particularly sticky ducklings. 

Velma said, "I think I figured it out."

"What?"

"He don't treat children like interruptions."

Everybody got quiet.

"So many grown folks act like children are obstacles between them and whatever they wanted to do."

She watched Big Meech crouch down to hear a story that absolutely could have waited, but to the child telling it, it couldn't.

"But he acts like talking to 'em is what he wanted to do."

Brother Zeke smiled.

"There it is."

About then, Marcus Junior came running.

"MISTER MEECH!"

Big Meech looked up.

Marcus Junior held out both hands. Something tiny sat inside them.

"I found him!"

Big Meech leaned closer.

It was a June bug; a very irritated June bug.

"Well hey there."

Marcus Junior grinned.

"I named him Kevin."

"You ask him first?"

Marcus Junior considered this.

"No."

"You probably ought to."

Marcus Junior looked at the bug.

"...you Kevin?"

The bug attempted to escape.

Marcus Junior nodded.

"He said yes."

"Good enough."

At some point that afternoon, Marcus Junior fell asleep on a beanbag in the corner, which he would later deny categorically. A different child was discovered licking the window and, when asked why, said "I wanted to see if it tasted different on the outside." Brother Earl, who had been thinking about the pocket situation, announced he had figured it out. Everyone waited. "Cargo pants," he said. "But like, spiritual cargo pants." Nobody felt this explained anything. Brother Earl felt it explained everything. The matter was tabled. 

On a Thursday, a boy of about seven named Caleb sat down next to Big Meech while he was building a Lego situation that had started as a house and evolved, through committee, into what the assembled children described as a "dinosaur parking garage." There was also what Marcus Junior insisted was "an emergency moon." Nobody questioned the emergency moon. While they were building all of this, they all casually talked about what having God for a father means. 

At some point Caleb asked Big Meech if he had a dad.

"Had one somewhere," said Big Meech. "Didn't know him much."

"Did that make you sad?"

Big Meech thought about it the way he thought about things that deserved honest answers.

"Made me hungry a lot," he said. "Sad too, I guess. But mostly hungry."

Caleb considered this. Then he handed over a red brick.

"Good thing you got snacks now," he said.

"Good thing," said Big Meech.

Caleb watched for a while, handed over a yellow brick when it seemed like the right moment, and then said, conversationally, "My daddy ain't around."

Big Meech accepted the brick, placed it carefully on the structure, and said, "You know something?"

"What?"

"You got a Father that ain't never missed one birthday."

Caleb considered this with the seriousness that seven-year-olds bring to theological questions when they're not sure yet if this is something they're supposed to believe.

"...Really?"

"Really."

There was a long pause. The dinosaur parking garage acquired another floor.

"Does He know I like dinosaurs?"

"He made 'em," said Big Meech. "He knows."

Imani recently transferred from another church's children's program after her mother decided the commute was too much, and was currently wearing a Jurassic Express t-shirt that Big Meech had noticed on Monday and immediately respected. 

"Jungle Boy and Luchasaurus?" he'd asked.

She'd looked at him with the evaluating expression of someone deciding whether an adult was worth talking to. "Best tag team in AEW," she said. "Obviously."

"Good answer," said Big Meech, and that had been that.

By the following Thursday they had a system. She helped him distribute crackers. He let her pick the coloring book theme. Neither of them had formally agreed to any of this. It just existed.

Once, she sat down next to him and opened a Bible to Lamentations and read it with the focused intentionality of someone using Scripture as a tool for feeling as bad as possible.

Big Meech said nothing for a while.

"My grandma died," said Imani.

"I'm sorry."

"It was a while ago, but I’m still sad about it. My grandma used to watch wrestling with me."

"I bet she did."

"She always rooted for the good guys."

"Mine too."

She looked surprised.

"Really?"

"Mhm."

"What happened when she died?"

Big Meech looked toward the windows.

For a moment, he wasn't in the fellowship hall anymore. He was somewhere years earlier. Hungry. Forgotten. Trying to understand loss himself. Then he came back.

"I cried."

“Me too.” She turned a page. 

Big Meech said nothing for a while.

Imani said, “My old church said you have to pray people out of Purgatory. So I've been doing that. I don't know how long it's supposed to take. I'm scared I'm doing it wrong. The praying. Like if I stop, she'll be stuck."

She said this matter-of-factly, the way children relay instructions they don't fully understand but are following anyway because an adult told them to, and adults are generally right about logistics.

Big Meech was quiet for a moment.

"Did she believe in Jesus?" 

“Yep.”

"Thing about prayer," said Big Meech, after a while, "is it's like making the tag."

She looked up.

He nodded at her shirt. "You know how Jungle Boy gets beat on for a while — bad guys ganging up, ref not seeing it — and then he finally gets to the corner and tags Luchasaurus in?"

"Yeah."

"And then what is Jungle Boy supposed to do?"

Imani thought about this. "Go to the apron."

"Does he stay in?"

"No. Luchasaurus has got it."

"Luchasaurus has got it," Big Meech repeated. "He doesn't need help. Jungle Boy isn’t supposed to climb back in and try to fight too. He just—"

"Rests," said Imani. Then, more slowly: "Oh."

Meech continued, "See, people get this idea that Christianity is about balancing scales. You do enough good stuff, avoid enough bad stuff, and maybe God lets you squeak through the gate. But that's not the gospel."

He pointed upward with one thick finger.

"The gospel is that Jesus did what none of us could do. He took care of our sins once and for all. Not ninety percent. Not most of it, with us praying for forgiveness again and again like a bar of soap. He took care of all of it."

Meech paused.

"Your grandma wasn't saved because she was a good grandmother. She wasn't saved because she went to church, or prayed enough prayers, or managed to have more good days than bad ones. She was saved because she put her trust in Jesus."

His voice softened.

"And if Jesus is enough to save somebody, then He's enough to keep them too."

Imani stared at the floor.

Meech kept going.

"That's the part people miss. They think God starts with grace and then switches over to performance. Like Jesus opens the door, and then spends the rest of eternity grading your homework. No. He works on us, and we get better at living, but the cross worked. That's the whole point. That's why Christians call it good news. If it depended on us, it'd just be stressful news. You already made the tag," said Big Meech. "God's got your grandma. She's not in some waiting room you have to pray her out of. She’s with Him. He's got you. You can step out of the ring. He’s not gonna tag you back in, either."

Imani blinked.

Meech continued, “I had questions about that stuff, too, but Brother Zeke says that Jesus told the thief on the cross next to Him that he would join Jesus in Paradise that day, and that Paul said to be absent from a body is to be present with the Lord. Purgatory ain’t in the Bible.”

"You mean," she whispered, "it's okay to stop worrying?"

"I think He'd like that. That’s what faith can look like. "

"What if I start again?"

"You'll probably make the tag again."

"And again?"

"Yep."

"And again?"

"As many times as you need."

Imani looked at Lamentations for a long moment, with the specific expression children have when they are deciding whether something is true enough to act on.

Then she closed it.

"Can I have more animal crackers and go play?"

"Yeah," said Big Meech.

There were always more animal crackers. 

Desiree kept watching.

She watched Big Meech fix a folding chair that had developed a lean using a method that involved a screwdriver he produced from somewhere on his person and about four minutes of focused attention. She watched him read Green Eggs and Ham to a semicircle of children who were theoretically old enough to read it themselves, but had correctly identified that having someone read to you is better. She watched him change a diaper with the calm efficiency of someone who is simply doing the next thing that needs doing, without editorial comment. She watched him carry a sleeping toddler on one shoulder while another child explained, in exhaustive detail, the reasons why velociraptors would have made excellent church ushers — something to do with crowd control and the enforcement of pledge commitments, the logic of which was not entirely without merit.

Nobody ever told Big Meech to do any of it.

He just noticed what needed doing and did it.

“We ought to start a committee to appreciate Big Meech,” Earl said.

Velma looked up from a clipboard.

“Or…”

She paused.

“…hear me out…”

Another pause.

“…we could just appreciate Big Meech.”

“That does sound simpler,” Peaches admitted.

“Much less paperwork,” said Zeke.

Earl considered this carefully.

“All right,” he said. “But I still think the committee would’ve done excellent work.”

“Nobody doubts that,” said Velma.

On a Friday afternoon, Desiree finally said, "I thought church people were supposed to judge me."

Big Meech laughed, which was a large and genuine sound.

"We ain't got time," he said.

"For what?"

"Judging." He handed a juice box to a passing child without breaking eye contact. "We're busy."

She waited for the pitch, for the tract, for the gentle but firm suggestion about vocational alternatives, for the moment when the niceness curdled into an agenda…

It didn't come.

She said, "How do you remember all their names?"

Big Meech was quiet for a moment.

"I remember what it felt like," he said, "when nobody remembered mine."

She didn't say anything. Neither did he. Somewhere across the room, Imani was explaining the wrestling metaphor to Jaylen, who was skeptical, but listening.

She decided to keep coming. For the first week, people like Meech quietly expressing the life of Christ was enough, even if she didn’t have the words for that yet. She decided to stay for Brother Zeke's Bible study.

With charts, citations, and the air of a man who suspected he might be a few centuries early, Zeke marched through his case: that much of modern Christian sexual morality rested less on Scripture than on layers of accumulated philosophy, cultural prejudice, and theological baggage. He traced mistranslations, challenged popular readings of key passages, pointed to inconvenient biblical examples, and argued that Christianity still had hundreds of years of inherited assumptions left to disentangle. Jesus leads us away from sin, but not everything church folk call sinful is. The whole performance carried the unmistakable energy of a self-appointed Martin Luther, convinced that the Reformation had stopped far too soon. Jesus had argued with religious people about rules God had never actually made. Jesus chastised the Pharisees for neglecting justice, mercy, and loyalty. The greed, self-indulgence, hypocrisy, and wickedness He scolded the religious people of that time and place for was about how they had treated people they considered to be inferior (with a side of collaborating with pagan Roman occupiers and the wife-stealing plutocrat, Herod). The Pharisees had built fences around fences around fences, then confused the fences for the Law itself. In Zeke's view, Christians had been doing roughly the same thing for two thousand years. He regarded himself less as an innovator than as a man pointing at a very old pattern and asking why nobody else seemed to notice it. 

Desiree sat in the parking lot in her car for a few minutes before driving home. She had grown up being told, in various registers ranging from the gentle to the volcanic, that she was unworthy. That didn’t happen here. She wasn't sure what to do with all of it yet.

The strange part wasn't just that the weird little church accepted her. Plenty of churches claimed to accept people. The strange part was that they seemed genuinely unconcerned by the fact that she was a stripper. They weren’t just “tolerant”, or politely overlooking it. They didn’t seem to think of it as something she was expected to outgrow. She had been fearing the seemingly inevitable conversation about her being welcome, of course, but perhaps not that welcome.

Instead she'd just listened to a man explain that if Eve had been considered to be fully dressed while wearing only a belt made of animal skin, then modern Americans had somehow managed to invent several additional square yards of mandatory righteousness.

Desiree laughed despite herself.

Then, she realized that if Zeke ever got enough people to agree with him, he might accidentally put her out of business. Strip clubs depended rather heavily on the proposition that seeing less clothing was naughty. If half the town accepted that it wasn’t, then patronage might suffer. It was like when her son tried to steal cookies before dinner, only to lose interest the instant she told him he could have one. Apparently a surprising amount of human desire ran on the fuel of being told no.

She shook her head. What lingered was the unfamiliar possibility that God actually loved her.

She sat with that thought for a while, turning it over carefully, as if it might break.

It didn't.

She drove home. She tipped the Domino's guy an extra ten dollars, because it had been a weird night and he probably had kids to feed.

Brother Zeke was locking up while Peaches finished stacking chairs. 

"You know why this works?" said Zeke.

Peaches thought about it. "The snacks?"

"No."

"Velma sterilizing everything within an inch of its life?"

"No."

"Big Meech knowing everybody's name?"

"Closer," said Zeke. "But no."

Peaches waited.

Brother Zeke looked through the window. Big Meech was in the parking lot, still carrying the toddler, while Caleb walked beside him and explained something urgent about whether a T-Rex could beat a triceratops in a fair fight, which Caleb defined as a fight where the T-Rex agreed in advance not to use its size advantage, which did not seem like something a T-Rex would agree to, but Big Meech was hearing him out.

"The ministry works," said Zeke, "because kids can smell whether you're trying to fix them."

Peaches watched Big Meech nod seriously at the T-Rex question.

"And Big Meech already knows they're not projects," said Zeke.

"What are they?"

Brother Zeke picked up his keys.

"Family," he said. "He already knows they're family. Every kid in this church feels like Big Meech is their uncle."

Nobody ever assigned Big Meech to childcare.

It just sort of happened.

And on the following Monday, when Desiree dropped off her son, she stayed an extra twenty minutes. She didn’t know why. She saw how Meech knew which kids were scared when their moms were late.

By Wednesday she was staying an hour.

Nobody said anything about it.

Nobody made it a thing.

They just handed her a box of animal crackers and made room.

Nobody ever assigned Desiree to childcare.

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