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THE WOMAN IN THE PANTSUIT AT CHURCH

One Sunday when I was probably about 6-8 years old, my parents decided to go try out a different church than the one they normally went to. I was relatively young, but I'll never forget this.

Now, in the 70s you always dressed for church down here. I was a tomboy and hated getting into those darned dresses, but my mom and I wore our pretty dresses with itchy slips underneath, and Dad and the boys wore suit pants and dress shirts with ties.

I remember standing in a line of people waiting to get in to this old, white clapboard church. We stood on the wooden steps behind a well-dressed lady in a beautiful white pantsuit. I studied the cracks in the wood and the crazing in the green paint on the steps while we waited. The pretty lady talked for a little while with the men at the door, and then suddenly turned and walked away.

I tugged on my dad's arm and asked "Daddy, why did she go?"

"They wouldn't let her in because she was wearing pants," whispered my dad.

"What?" I asked, astonished. "Don't they think she needs Jesus too?" We never went back to that church.

We discussed it later on, and my parents explained that she was rejected based on a misinterpreted passage of scripture. When I was growing up, most people still used the King James Version (KJV), so I'll quote from the KJV, Deut. 22:5:

"The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God."

Of course the woman was wearing a pantsuit, off the rack, purchased in the women's department. Regardless of that, this church apparently thought it to be menswear.

I've often wondered what happened to The Woman in the Pantsuit at Church. Was she driven away from Christianity due to a legalistic, hypocritical misinterpretation? What was she looking for that day: Help? Friendship? Guidance?

Whatever she was looking for, she never found it in that church.

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